Each year a significant number of aspiring elementary teachers, having successfully completed their formal preparation, are still unable to become licensed professionals. That's because an alarming number of candidates fail their licensing tests, far surpassing the failure rate for other professions' entry tests, bar exams, and boards. The fact that more candidates fail than pass on their first attempt, and a quarter are never able to earn a passing score, raises serious concerns--especially regarding the effect this failure has on diversity goals. While many factors going back to candidates' earliest years of education may explain this phenomenon, higher education institutions are in the best position to alter this untenable outcome. Historically, these tests have posed a greater challenge for candidates of color. Even allowing for costly and demoralizing retakes, a higher proportion of black and Hispanic candidates fail the most widely used content test (the focus of this report) than white candidates. These results are at the forefront of policy discussions because of the renewed imperative to increase diversity in the teaching profession. This report probes sky-high failure rates on teacher licensing tests and asks what must change so that more new teachers can enter classrooms with the knowledge they need to do their jobs well. To identify the most effective levers for change, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) conducted analyses on undergraduate preparation programs at more than 800 institutions as well as 250 graduate programs and a small sample of alternative route programs. One likely cause of licensing exam failure is the profound lack of alignment between preparation program coursework and the content knowledge that states have determined an aspiring teacher needs to be an effective elementary teacher. This report will also highlight several examples of programs that have strong requirements and also report high pass rates on their licensing tests. [Additional contributions to "A Fair Chance: Simple Steps to Strengthen and Diversify the Teacher Workforce" were made by Danielle Wilcox and Dan Brown.]