The largest teacher preparation program in Texas — enrolling nearly 70,000 would-be educators last year — is not making the grade, according to state regulators.
Texas Teachers of Tomorrow misled potential teachers with its advertising, didn’t support candidates with mentors as is required and failed to demonstrate that its training was based in research, officials found. Some new teachers left the profession in frustration after receiving poor advice that led to financial troubles, they told the state.
At a time when the nation is grappling with a teacher shortage and students desperately need help after the pandemic disrupted learning, the state oversight board that regulates educators will soon determine if Texas Teachers of Tomorrow is too big to fail.
The Houston-based company recruits those in search of a second career. It trains candidates mostly through online coursework, which is not uncommon in Texas’ alternative teacher preparation landscape.
The state’s greatest sources of new classroom educators are alternative programs like Texas Teachers of Tomorrow, which are mostly online, routinely require less training than traditional university-based programs and prepare teachers who end up turning over at greater rates.
Of the state’s nearly 132,000 candidates enrolled in teacher prep programs last year, roughly 52% were learning through Texas Teachers of Tomorrow.
But an audit conducted last year by the Texas Education Agency found the company (also known as A+ Texas Teachers) out of compliance in key state standards including admission, curriculum and governance.
Candidates and school systems have flooded Texas Education Agency officials with complaints, finding Texas Teachers of Tomorrow unresponsive to their customer service issues.
This wasn’t the first poor report card for the company. In a 2016 audit, TEA regulators found Texas Teachers of Tomorrow out of compliance in five of eight broad categories. The agency released a lengthy compliance plan then, and Texas Teachers of Tomorrow was allowed to continue operating.
For some, the company has grown to exemplify many of the issues — including low rigor and high turnover — found throughout Texas’ for-profit alternative programs, part of a sprawling system that experts describe as the “wild west of teacher certification.”
A Texas Teachers of Tomorrow official wrote in a brief statement to The Dallas Morning News that the company has resolved several issues outlined in the audit but did not elaborate or provide specifics.
Company officials said it wouldn’t be appropriate to speak about ongoing discussions with the state in advance of the regulator making its determinations public.
Texas Teachers of Tomorrow has rectified “or substantially resolved” a number of the issues identified in the audit, said Linley Dieringer, the company’s vice president of certification and compliance.
The company welcomes the oversight, she noted in a written statement.
“We remain steadfastly committed to constant improvement and quality,” Dieringer continued. “We are committed to addressing any outstanding questions along TEA’s timeline while continuing to do our part to alleviate the teacher shortage in Texas with award-winning teachers.”
The behemoth prep program — which runs similar programs in several states, including Florida — is expected to go before the State Board for Educator Certification, or SBEC, later this month. Programs out of compliance with state law must correct identified problems to continue receiving state approval, TEA spokesman Frank Ward said.
The SBEC members — who oversee Texas’ fractured landscape of more than 120 preparation programs — have a range of consequences they can assign. They can accept or reject a negotiated agreement between the state and Texas Teachers of Tomorrow. They also can appoint a monitor, issue a formal reprimand or go as far as revoking a program’s right to operate.
In the past two years, four programs closed before they could get revoked and two others agreed to changes. The SBEC revoked another program’s ability to operate for its poor performance over three consecutive years. These companies were a fraction of the size of Texas Teachers of Tomorrow.
TEA staff have been negotiating with Texas Teachers of Tomorrow officials in an attempt to bring the company into compliance.
Teacher complaints
Derek Hardy and his wife thought they were on track to be fully qualified teachers.
By fall 2019, Hardy had gone through hours of online Texas Teachers of Tomorrow coursework and had preliminary approval to teach pre-algebra in Joshua ISD while his wife worked in the Johnson County district’s theater arts program.
After one year with probationary certifications, the two were ready to apply for general certifications. They believed everything was set, Hardy said in an interview and in a complaint to TEA.
But soon after, he said, “I get a call from the district saying, ‘Hey, you don’t have a certification. … We’re going to have to dock you a whole semester of pay.’”
Hardy said he struggled to get in touch with company officials to sort it out. After being told to just give it time, Hardy said, they eventually alerted the couple about missing course material that they weren’t aware of.
Ultimately, he and his wife left the profession after having to pay back thousands of their salaries.
Joshua district officials wrote in a statement to The News that the district encourages its candidates working with Texas Teachers of Tomorrow to regularly check their online portal to ensure they’re on track.
As of February, they noted, the company also created a portal for human resources departments to track employees’ progress and help those with interim certifications.
TEA received an “excessive number of complaints” from candidates, officials wrote in their most recent state report from last school year. The News reviewed hundreds of such emails through a public information request. The letters described long delays in hearing from the company, receiving inaccurate information and financial troubles.
One North Texas school official working in human resources wrote to TEA over the summer to express her concerns and frustration.
“As a school district we are experiencing great difficulty with this program and we always have,” she wrote. “It’s much worse now, and I need a place to start with regard to just how horrible a company they are.”
On the company’s website, Texas Teachers of Tomorrow has claimed to be the No. 1 teacher prep company preferred by school districts.
Elliot Ahr, a newly certified teacher in a district west of Killeen, said he was rarely able to get an adviser from Texas Teachers of Tomorrow on the phone and emails to company officials often went unanswered.
His training felt rudimentary, he said. Ahr found assessments disconnected from the material he was working on at the time.
The lack of responsiveness from program officials can drive people away, he said.
“I actually like teaching. I’m glad I jumped through the hoops,” he said. “I am disappointed that we are, once again, enriching middlemen who offer next to nothing of value; instead, they are often actually impeding a prospective teacher’s progress.
“If I didn’t have time to commit to hours of phone calls and emails, I’d likely not be certified, and the alt-cert program would still have their money.”
The company, which declined interview requests beyond brief written statements, was acquired by private equity giant TPG in September, through its impact investing arm, TPG Rise. Partners from TPG have pledged increased resources for Texas Teachers of Tomorrow, touting recent hires to oversee improvements in customer service and marketing.
“Having invested in Teachers of Tomorrow after the SBEC audit was conducted, we were able to quickly implement changes that have already significantly strengthened the company’s processes,” TPG partner and interim Teachers of Tomorrow CEO Ignacio Giraldo said in a statement.
Though they did not specifically address complaints, Texas Teachers of Tomorrow officials did note in a statement to The News that three of the state’s recent educators of the year went through their program.
Texas Teachers of Tomorrow’s new marketing plan, which launched in early April, features the Texas Association of School Administrators’ 2022 Teacher of the Year. The company also boasts other award-winning educators in its marketing, including Eric Hale, a Dallas ISD educator who was named TASA’s 2021 Elementary Teacher of the Year. He was the first Black man to win the award.
Hale, who previously worked in health care management, saw benefit in training through the Texas Teachers of Tomorrow program because it was an affordable and time-sensitive path to the classroom.
He credits alternative programs — which tend to be more affordable and serve more diverse candidates than traditional routes — with opening up the profession to a wider range of people.
“It gave me an entry point,” Hale said. “Do I feel like the work was super rigorous? No, I feel like it was adequate. But it’s designed to give people a foundation in education to get them going. So much of education is based off of learned experiences while you’re actually in the classroom with students.”
The company’s marketing features a new, more high-minded tagline: “Choose work that’s worth it. Choose teaching.”
‘Want to teach?’
A well-known Texas Teachers of Tomorrow billboard that long dotted state highways over the years asks: “Want to teach? When can you start?”
People can get certified to teach in Texas through a variety of paths that include everything from university-based programs to alternative ones like Texas Teachers of Tomorrow.
In recent years, there’s been a growing trend of online-only prep programs where candidates rarely spend time in a physical classroom, Texas Tech education professor Jacob Kirksey said. This shift was happening even before the pandemic forced learning online.
Vernon Reaser, a founder of Texas Teachers of Tomorrow, has bragged that the model opens the profession up to a wide range of ages and diverse backgrounds. Several other states have replicated the model.
“We really, essentially, invented this modern, streamlined certification process,” he said in a 2019 video.
While tens of thousands are enrolled with Texas Teachers of Tomorrow — and paid an upfront fee of $295 — far fewer end up in the classroom with a certification.
The same year enrollment neared 70,000, fewer than 6,000 people completed the program and fewer than 5,500 gained their full teaching certification, according to self-reported data.
It’s unclear how Texas Teachers of Tomorrow amassed such a large enrollment. State auditors found there was no clear process in place to remove inactive candidates from the enrollment roster, meaning people could remain on the rolls even if they had long abandoned their pursuit.
Meanwhile, university-based programs aren’t pumping out enough candidates to keep up with the demand.
Audit issues
TEA checks in on alternative certification programs at least once every five years, reviewing about 25 annually on a rotating cycle to see if they are following state law.
When the agency reviewed Texas Teachers of Tomorrow last year, it found the state’s largest program out of compliance in seven of nine key areas. For example, on the company’s website, the program previously told potential candidates — and customers — that they can become a teacher in just 14 weeks.
“This is not accurate,” TEA regulators wrote in a compliance plan, raising issues with the claim before instructing the company to change its messaging.
The website now boasts that Texas Teachers of Tomorrow is the “quickest route to the classroom” and that candidates can become certified in “weeks.”
In its previous five-year audit, TEA regulators found the program incorrectly advertised those requirements.
Last year, state regulators found issues with Texas Teachers of Tomorrow’s curriculum, which is primarily online, writing that they could find no evidence that it was based on research of how children learn best.
But officials with the company have disputed TEA’s finding in notes responding to the agency’s compliance plan.
Texas requires teacher prep programs to match educator candidates with mentors who can help them refine their teaching style in their first months in the classroom.
TEA found no evidence that Texas Teachers of Tomorrow assigned all candidates mentors or that such mentors collaborated with field supervisors. Hale, the Dallas teacher, told The News that he was assigned a mentor and benefited greatly from that relationship.
Plus, TEA couldn’t find sufficient evidence that applicants were screened consistently to determine if their knowledge and experience was appropriate for the certification they sought. The state found that a “significant percentage” of candidates were being admitted by the company under one certification area aligned with their previous education but then were switched to another track based on what the candidate actually wanted to teach.
This practice “oftentimes happens without the candidate’s full awareness,” TEA spokesman Ward said.
State law allows candidates to switch tracks after they enroll with a prep program. The intent is to allow flexibility.
“But, as observed, this can also be used as a loophole to circumvent admissions requirements,” Ward continued. This means candidates can end up getting admitted when they shouldn’t have been based on their college credits.
Despite these issues, should the state revoke the program’s ability to operate, it would only exacerbate the teacher shortage at a critical juncture, potentially contributing to swelling class sizes and a carousel of substitutes.
The tension between having enough teachers to staff schools and producing quality educators puts Texas in the middle of a tug-of-war.
Even if the SBEC shepherds Texas Teachers of Tomorrow into full compliance with state law, problems remain where the state has no control, chiefly in the area of customer service.
Current law prevents the SBEC from holding programs accountable for their business practices, including contractual issues between a program and its candidates, Ward noted.
Teacher prep issues may come up when lawmakers return to Austin for the 2023 legislative session. Both House Speaker Dade Phelan and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick zeroed in on the teacher workforce by asking lawmakers to explore the educator prep program regulatory landscape.
But past efforts to tighten rules on teacher prep programs have not always been successful, and Texas Teachers of Tomorrow officials have previously lobbied against them. Plus, legislators must balance quality with quantity.
“We are losing teachers. We need to figure out how to keep teachers and address the pipeline issue,” said Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, who sits on the House Public Education Committee. “There’s room for both.”
Want to read more about Texas’ teacher preparation landscape? Learn more about why some experts have dubbed it the “wild west.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Todd A. Williams Family Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
