Advertisement

newsEducation

Texas lawmakers want to fix teacher shortages, workforce ‘once and for all’

Education issues — including workforce challenges — likely to be in focus during the legislative session.

Texas must fix its leaky teacher pipeline that’s leaving many students without enough high-quality educators in the classroom, lawmakers and advocates said.

Thousands of teachers are quitting the profession as many report mounting stress amid the ongoing pandemic, political pressures and a burgeoning workload.

“I don’t know of anything that could be more serious in terms of how Texas is going to look in the future than solving the problems that teachers are facing,” Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, said before kicking off a legislative hearing on Tuesday. “We will, hopefully, develop legislation that will get at this problem once and for all.”

Advertisement

Solutions could include expanding teacher mentorship programs, boosting yearlong paid educator residencies and restructuring school schedules to allow for more planning time, speakers told lawmakers in Austin during the hearing. Teachers also called for more mental health supports and a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.

The Education Lab

Receive our in-depth coverage of education issues and stories that affect North Texans.

Or with:

“We know that teachers are the single most important in-school factor impacting students’ outcomes,” said Dallas ISD teacher Josue Tamarez Torres. “It is imperative that we don’t have one single student … in Texas sitting in a classroom without a teacher of record, without a well-prepared teacher.”

Torres chairs the state’s Teacher Vacancy Task Force, which expects to have its recommendations finalized by February.

Advertisement

Texas employed 376,086 classroom teachers in the 2021-22 school year, according to the Texas Education Agency. Nearly 12% of them left the profession that same year, up from about 10% in recent years.

The state had more than 8,600 teachers retire in 2021 — about 1,000 more than the year before.

This trend comes on top of worrying survey data that found roughly three-quarters of Texas teachers say they’ve seriously considered leaving the profession because of a lack of respect and support. Many of them had taken at least some concrete steps toward finding other jobs.

Advertisement

“This is not simply an education issue,” said Stephen Pruitt, president of the Southern Regional Education Board. “It is actually a workforce issue.”

Pruitt said lawmakers must attack teacher recruitment and retention using multi-faceted approaches. Teachers leave because they don’t feel prepared for the job, because they want a fulfilling career ladder and for a myriad other reasons, he said.

“This has to be a comprehensive approach,” he said. “Raising teacher salaries alone won’t fix the problem.”

Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, said legislators must not only think in terms of national teacher workforce challenges but about more Texas-specific issues. He hears from educators worried about an overemphasis on standardized tests, the state’s approach to the pandemic and ways transgender students are treated.

And since May, school safety fears have renewed in the wake of the Robb Elementary massacre in Uvalde.

“If we don’t address the things that we’ve done, or haven’t done, to contribute to these problems — on top of the age-old, every-state-is-experiencing-these situations — then we’re going to come up with a solution that ignores some of the largest contributing factors,” Bernal said.

Texas is also unique in its sprawling teacher preparation landscape, which some experts refer to as the “wild west.”

Advertisement

The majority of the state’s new teachers aren’t going into classrooms directly after graduating from college. Most come through alternative certification programs that aren’t always rigorous.

Prospective Texas educators can follow a wide array of paths that include universities, nonprofit preparation programs and companies which operate with minimal state requirements and feeble oversight.

The for-profit online route is booming, pumping out the largest number of teacher candidates.

Teachers getting their certification from for-profit preparation programs don’t stay in the classroom at the same rate as university-prepared candidates, a recent University of Houston study found.

Advertisement

If teachers prepared in alternative certification programs were retained at the same rate as those prepared in traditional programs, schools would not have needed more than 3,700 new teachers last year, according to a TEA presentation.

Novice teachers, on average, see their students make less academic growth than more experienced teachers, according to a state analysis. These educators are also more likely to serve low-income schools and children of color.

Texas Education Agency deputy commissioner Kelvey Oeser said that because so many teachers enter classrooms without traditional training, they must receive additional support.

Advertisement

“This means it is critical that we focus on improving the preparation of new teachers so that they’re entering at higher levels of effectiveness and so that we can focus on policies encouraging more of our experienced teachers to stay,” Oester said.

Proponents of alternative certification programs pushed back, saying they help fill the gaps and provide a more affordable pathway for non-traditional, more diverse candidates.

“There is a great variation among alternative programs and often a broad brush is used that is not reflective of the effectiveness of individual programs,” said Diann Huber, founder of iteachTEXAS.

Dutton questioned whether the Legislature should improve the alternative certification sector in some way.

Advertisement

Legislators also probed the tensions between needing more teachers to fill vacancies and not wanting to lower standards for entering the profession.

State education officials are in the middle of a debate over whether Texas’ multiple-choice teacher certification exam should be replaced with a more rigorous assessment.

The board overseeing educator certification will consider future steps next week.

Dallas Morning News reporter Valeria Olivares contributed to this article.

Advertisement

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, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, 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.