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Abstract
Indiana is facing a teacher shortage and has responded by issuing emergency teaching permits. Meanwhile, many school corporations' ILEARN performance rates of students meeting the grade-level expectations are low. Therefore, this dissertation included a quantitative study using secondary data sources from the Indiana Department of Education from 2020 to 2022 to answer the following research question: What is the relationship between teachers’ licensure status in Indiana and students’ academic performance on the ILEARN? The analyses included descriptive statistics to inform the researcher about how students at the corporation level were performing by state, grade-level, and demographics. Bivariate analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between the corporation-level students’ performance rates on the ILEARN and the corporation-level percentages of teachers identified as emergency permit holders. The researcher hypothesized that there would be significant negative relationships between the corporation-level performance rates and the percentage of teachers with emergency permits. The correlations in the
study’s findings were strong and negative, suggesting that the use of emergency permits is associated with lower student performance rates on the ILEARN at the school corporation level. The association of emergency permits with ILEARN performance rates was stronger for high-SES individuals compared to those from low-SES backgrounds, and for general education compared to special education populations. The researcher conducted statistical tests, including the bootstrapping method, to validate the correlations, indicating that the relationship between performance and emergency permits should be consistent even outside of the sample period of 2020 – 2022. The researcher explores the implications of these findings and makes recommendations for addressing the problem of high emergency permit rates and low corporation performance rates on ILEARN.