MORGAN SMITH: Welcome to the Intersect Ed Podcast, where the stories of public education policy and practice meet. I’m your host, Morgan Smith, and I am back with you just in time for the 89th Legislative Session. And heading in, it’s fair to say lawmakers have a lot of unfinished business when it comes to education policy. Let’s do a brief review of how we got here. If one word defined the Legislature’s approach to education policy in 2023, it was gridlock. Bill after bill — including crucial proposals for school funding and teacher pay raises — fell victim to lawmakers’ battle over vouchers. This only intensified the pressure on Texas public schools, leaving them to deal with teacher shortages, budget shortfalls, and rising inflation as they continued to serve the state’s 5.5 million public school students. Today, we’ll discuss how our state’s leaders can start this session ready to act on essential education policy items and focus on one area you’re likely to hear a lot about as the session gets underway — how teacher workforce issues, including a shortage of certified teachers, are affecting Texas students. BOB POPINKSI: It's not like Texas doesn't know what to do when it comes to our teacher workforce issues. Prior to the last legislative session, they came out with a couple of dozen recommendations under the Teacher Vacancy Taskforce Report. These recommendations included enhancing teachers' total compensation packages to incentives for hard-to-staff areas. MORGAN SMITH: This is Bob Popinski, the Senior Director of Policy for Raise Your Hand Texas. BOB POPINKSI: But the problem is only one of those recommendations was actually implemented last legislative session. The State Board of Education has been going through the rulemaking processes over the last year, and that's the high-quality instructional materials. The other 23 recommendations were left untouched. Part of that has to do with a lot of those policies were in the legislative package that failed during our regular session and four subsequent special sessions. MORGAN SMITH: There are multiple ways to become a public school teacher in Texas, but traditionally, all of them have required someone who wants to teach to become certified. The goal of preparing teachers through high-quality programs with a clinical teaching component is to combine learning about the practice of good pedagogy and classroom management with practical hands-on experience, says Jacob Kirskey, an assistant professor at Texas Tech’s College of Education whose areas of research include the education labor market and teacher pipeline. JACOB KIRKSEY: That means they're watching an experienced veteran teacher model classroom management. So what happens when a student is disengaged in a moment, and you don't want to detract from other students' learning, but you also want to make sure that that student becomes engaged if they're not already. What do you do when you have varying sets of abilities in the classroom based on prior learning or what students are just simply coming in based on demographic differences in the household? How do you as a teacher manage those differences and make sure that, again, kids are staying on track who are already there, but also that kids are a little behind those kids catch up to where they need to be. These are all things that you can read about, but they're not always things that it is easy to translate what you're reading into practice. And so a high-quality teacher preparation experience is one, again, that brings that tangible experience to what candidates are learning in the process of becoming a teacher. MORGAN SMITH: But as Texas school districts struggle to fill vacancies amid budget cuts and teacher shortages with a very limited pool of candidates, educators are increasingly entering classrooms via another route — with no certification at all. In the 2022-23 school year, uncertified teachers accounted for 1 in 3 of newly hired public school educators in the state, with 43% of them being at the elementary and early education level. They also made up over 80% of new hires in 40 Texas counties. And, according to Jacob Kirksey’s research, almost three out of four uncertified teachers have had no prior experience working in Texas public schools, and nearly one in five do not hold a bachelor’s degree. JACOB KIRKSEY: So an uncertified teacher is one that has no record of being in a teacher preparation program. They have no record of completing any coursework. There's literally no record of them in the state Board of Educator Certification, which is our state body that issues the teaching certifications. MORGAN SMITH: The consequences of relying on uncertified teachers show up in student outcomes. Studies show that students with new uncertified teachers lose about four months of learning in reading and three months in math unless the teacher has previous experience working in a public school. They are also significantly underdiagnosed for dyslexia and miss more days of school. None of this is surprising, as we know teachers are the single most important in-school factor when it comes to student success. LORI POWELL: The day-in and day-out struggle is that the pedagogy that's missing that teaches them how children acquire knowledge. And I think every teacher who comes in the building loves kids and wants to work with kids and wants to help kids, but I see how some of these new teachers who are hired straight out of college who have gone through a traditional path hit the ground running as teachers. There's so much that they know about classroom management and how to be prepared, how the kids need to learn something, and a teacher who hasn't gone through that process, there's just so much of that that you don't know. And you don't know that you don't know it. MORGAN SMITH: This is Lori Powell, a public school teacher of 17 years who is currently a gifted and talented specialist at Northside Independent School District’s Carnahan Elementary School in San Antonio. LORI POWELL: A certified teacher has such a bigger box of tools to use, to help the students and to understand the process of the learning. And that just takes time, and exposure and truly understanding. You can't really put a lesson plan in a teacher's hand and say, "Read this word for word and the kids are going to learn." It takes an understanding. So, the process of certification and experience is how you get that understanding… That time with students in the classroom and watching the flow with a teacher who's a master teacher, it's not something to miss. And I understand we're in times that many of these pieces are unavoidable, but you can't replace it, the learning that happens from that teacher who has refined the art. It's an art and it's a science. And it just takes some time to get there. MORGAN SMITH: Lori Powell says that having an uncertified teacher in the classroom also places an increased burden on certified staff to help fill in the gaps in student learning and to provide the skills and knowledge uncertified teachers are missing. LORI POWELL: Nobody's willing to let go of a student and just say, "Oh, they're with a long-term sub, that child doesn't matter. I can't help that child." We really look at the groups of students as all ours, that they're all our students. Every weak link, any group is only as strong as its weakest link, and so where you have a weak link... And I wouldn't say that all of our uncertified teachers are weak links, but when there's a weakness in the background, then there is going to be a weakness there, even if that is a strong advocate for the kid in the person. MORGAN SMITH: Uncertified teachers are also more likely to leave the profession sooner than certified teachers. A study that looked at teacher retention rates in rural Texas communities found that only 45% of uncertified new teachers stay in teaching beyond three years, while almost 80% of fully qualified new teachers continued in the profession. So, given all we know about the challenges that uncertified teachers face — and the benefits of having a well-prepared teacher in the classroom with our students —why are school districts turning to them in the first place? MYRNA BLANCHARD: When you have such a high teacher vacancy - we don't have a lot of people going through traditional certification programs - then that vacancy is going to create some pressure points on districts. It creates pressure points on principals, on the district administration, on teachers. MORGAN SMITH: This is Myrna Blanchard, who is the Director of Talent and Acquisition at Castleberry Independent School District, where she has worked for four years overseeing the human resources department. She is describing the bind school districts across the state find themselves in as they struggle to find qualified teachers. MYRNA BLANCHARD: And the biggest thing we don't want to do is allow those pressure points to bleed into being pressure to our other teachers. So if we just don't hire certified teachers and we increase the class sizes of our teachers, well, now our current teachers that are certified are going to start feeling that pressure point. And then now we have a bigger problem. MORGAN SMITH: At a legislative hearing over the summer, some lawmakers on the House Public Education Committee suggested that schools may be turning to uncertified teachers because they are cheaper. That, Myrna Blanchard says, is simply not true. MYRNA BLANCHARD: We still hire them at the same rate of pay as first-year teachers. And the reason why we do that is because competitively, for some of those positions, they could go make those same people who are coming to teach with us could make $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 or more in the industry, and not in teaching. We don't have the option of paying them less. It's not cheaper for us. If we hire uncertified teachers, let's
