Most states require prospective teachers to pass basic skills and subject-matter tests to become licensed. The COVID-19 pandemic created an unexpected opportunity to explore whether licensure exams uphold standards that improve teaching quality, or risk limiting prospective teacher supply and excluding capable candidates. This brief describes how emergency licenses helped shape the teacher workforce during the pandemic. Using administrative data from five states--Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, and Washington state--the authors track who received emergency teaching licenses as a first teaching license during the pandemic and where they taught. Key findings show new teachers with pandemic-era emergency licenses were generally more racially diverse, more likely to work in schools serving Black, Hispanic, and low-income students than recently licensed teachers from other pathways, and performed comparably to them early in the pandemic. On balance, the states' experiences with pandemic-era waivers suggest that loosening licensure can help maintain teacher supply in times of crisis. But on its own, lowering barriers to entry is, at best, an incomplete strategy for diversifying and improving the quality of the teacher workforce.