Legislation has been reintroduced in the state Legislature to decrease the required grade-point average for those who want to enter graduate-level teacher and educational leadership programs.

The requirement is currently a 3.0 GPA. The state Assembly and Senate each passed legislation lowering the GPA to enter graduate courses and leadership programs last year, but it was vetoed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, D-New York City, reintroduced the legislation, A.9750.

“So we don’t ask them to set it a specific number because that could change over time, and it does change with the marketplace,” Glick said. “I think after the crash in 2008, a — a lot of the — our public colleges saw a shift in the number of applications they were getting. And so what had once been an acceptable GPA at Cortland or at Oneonta changed. And they do change with the market. And so we would like to return that flexibility to the institutions, particularly as we face a teacher shortage in the coming years.”

In addition to the 3.0 GPA, state law requires that no more than 15% of incoming applicants for graduate courses and leadership programs be exempt from minimum scores. In New York state, a Master’s degree is required in order to obtain a professional certificate, so graduate school is often a necessary step for individuals who hope to become a teacher.

Last year, Glick said there are often extenuating circumstances that may explain why students can’t attain the 3.0 GPA, particularly individuals who pursue teaching later in life or for under-represented teachers who may not have had essential classroom guidance. Glick’s legislation would allow each institution to choose its own academic criteria when evaluating candidates for graduate-level teacher and educational leadership programs.

“This simply adjusts an ill-conceived change in, I think, 2015 that required all graduate education programs for a masters in education to require an accumulative 3.0 as a baseline for admission to a masters of education program,” Glick said last year. “And clearly, there are reasons why someone’s cumulative GPA would be below that. It could be that they took courses that they decided they were not interested in. It might have been a — a science course, it might have been a music course and they were tone deaf and that particular course dragged down their cumulative GPA. It’s not indicative of one’s ability to be a fine teacher, and we believe that this is micromanaging programs and not allowing them to make determinations on a range of criteria for which they may determine someone is an excellent teacher.”