Texas schools have leaned on uncertified teachers to fill vacancies. Lawmakers want to put a stop to it.

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Lawmakers want to turn the tide on the growing number of unprepared and uncertified teachers by restricting who can lead Texas classrooms. But school leaders worry those limits will leave them with fewer options to refill their teacher ranks.

Tucked inside the Texas House’s $7.6 billion school finance package is a provision that would ban uncertified teachers from instructing core classes in public schools. House Bill 2 gives districts until fall 2026 to certify their K-5 math and reading teachers and until fall 2027 to certify teachers in other academic classes.

Texas would help uncertified teachers pay for the cost of getting credentialed. Under HB 2, those who participate in an in-school training and mentoring program would receive a one-time $10,000 payment and those who go through a traditional university or alternative certification program would get $3,000. Special education and emergent bilingual teachers would get their certification fees waived. Educator training experts say it could be the biggest financial investment Texas made in teacher preparation. Rep. Brad Buckley, the Salado Republican who authored the bill, has signaled the House Public Education Committee will vote on HB 2 on Tuesday.

District leaders, once reluctant to hire uncertified teachers, now rely on them often to respond to the state’s growing teacher shortage. And while they agree with the spirit of the legislation, some worry the bill would ask too much too soon of districts and doesn’t offer a meaningful solution to replace uncertified teachers who leave the profession.

“What's going to happen when we're no longer able to hire uncertified teachers? Class sizes have to go up, programs have to disappear…. We won’t have a choice,” said David Vroonland, the former superintendent of the Mesquite school district near Dallas and the Frenship school district near Lubbock. “There will be negative consequences if we don't put in place serious recruitment efforts.”

A floodgate of uncertified teachers

Nowadays, superintendents often go to job fairs to recruit teachers and come out empty-handed. There are not as many Texans who want to be teachers as there used to be.

The salary in Texas is about $9,000 less than the national average, so people choose better-paying careers. Teachers say they are overworked, sometimes navigating unwieldy class sizes and using weekends to catch up on grading.

Heath Morrison started to see the pool of teacher applicants shrink years ago when he was at the helm of Montgomery ISD. Many teachers left the job during the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated the problem.

“This teacher shortage is getting more and more pronounced,” said Morrison, who is now the CEO of Teachers of Tomorrow, a popular alternative teacher certification program. “The reality of most school districts across the country is you're not making a whole lot more money 10 years into your job than you were when you first entered … And so that becomes a deterrent.”

As the pool of certified teachers shrunk, districts found a stopgap solution: bringing on uncertified teachers. Uncertified teachers accounted for roughly 38% of newly hired instructors last year, with many concentrated in rural districts.

The Texas Legislature facilitated the flood of uncertified teachers. A 2015 law lets public schools get exemptions from requirements like teacher certification, school start dates and class sizes — the same exemptions allowed for open enrollment charter schools.

Usually, to teach in Texas classrooms, candidates must obtain a certification by earning a bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university, completing an educator preparation program and passing teacher certification exams.

Teacher preparation experts say certifications give teachers the tools to lead a high quality classroom. To pass certification tests, teaching candidates learn how to plan for lessons and manage discipline in a classroom.

But the 2015 law allowed districts to hire uncertified teachers by presenting a so-called “district of innovation plan” to show they were struggling to meet credential requirements because of a teacher shortage. By 2018, more than 600 rural and urban districts had gotten teacher certification exemptions.

“Now, what we've seen is everyone can demonstrate a shortage,” said Jacob Kirksey, a researcher at Texas Tech University. “Almost every district in Texas is a district of innovation. That is what has allowed for the influx of uncertified teachers. Everybody is getting that waiver for certification requirements.”

This session, House lawmakers are steadfast on undoing the loophole they created after new research from Kirksey sounded the alarm on the impacts of unprepared teachers on student learning. Students with new uncertified teachers lost about four months of learning in reading and three months in math, his analysis found. They missed class more than students with certified teachers, a signal of disengagement.

Uncertified teachers are also less likely to stick with the job long-term, disrupting school stability.

“The state should act urgently on how to address the number of uncertified teachers in classrooms,” said Kate Greer, a policy director at Commit Partnership. The bill “rights a wrong that we've had in the state for a long time.”

The price of getting certified

Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican who sits on the House Public Education Committee, said his wife has worked as an uncertified art teacher at Allen ISD. She started a program to get certified this winter and had to pay $5,000 out of pocket.

That cost may be “not only a hurdle but an impediment for someone who wants to teach and is called and equipped to teach,” Leach said earlier this month during a committee hearing on HB 2.

House lawmakers are proposing to lower the financial barriers that keep Texans who want to become teachers from getting certified.

“Quality preparation takes longer, is harder and it's more expensive. In the past, we've given [uncertified candidates] an opportunity just to walk into the classroom,” said Jean Streepey, the chair of the State Board for Educator Certification. “How do we help teachers at the beginning of their journey to choose something that's longer, harder and more expensive?”

Streepey sat on the teacher vacancy task force that Gov. Greg Abbott established in 2022 to recommend fixes to retention and recruitment challenges at Texas schools. The task force’s recommendations, such as prioritizing raises and improving training, have fingerprints all over the Texas House’s school finance package.

Under HB 2, districts would see money flow in when they put uncertified teachers on the path to certification. And those financial rewards would be higher depending on the quality of the certification program.

Schools with instructors who complete yearlong teacher residencies — which include classroom training and are widely seen as the gold standard for preparing teacher candidates — would receive bigger financial rewards than those with teachers who finish traditional university or alternative certification programs.

Even with the financial help, lawmakers are making a tall order. In two years, the more than 35,000 uncertified teachers in the state would have to get their credential or be replaced with new, certified teachers.

“The shortages have grown to be so great that I think none of us have a really firm handle on the measures that it's going to take to turn things around.” said Michael Marder, the executive director of UTeach, a UT-Austin teacher preparatory program. “There is financial support in HB 2 to try to move us back towards the previous situation. However, I just don't know whether the amounts that are laid out there are sufficient.”

Restrictions like “handcuffs”

Only one in five uncertified teachers from 2017 to 2020 went on to get a credential within their first three years of teaching. Texas can expect a jump in uncertified teachers going through teacher preparatory programs because of the financial resources and pressure on schools through HB 2, Marder said.

But for every teacher who does not get credentialed, school leaders will have to go out and find new teachers. And they will have to look from a smaller pool.

The restrictions on uncertified teachers “handcuffs us,”said Gilbert Trevino, the superintendent at Floydada Collegiate ISD, which sits in a rural farming town in West Texas. In recent years, recruiters with his district have gone out to job fairs and hired uncertified teachers with a college degree and field experience in the subjects they want to teach in.

Rural schools across the state have acutely experienced the challenges of the teacher shortage — and have leaned on uncertified teachers more heavily than their urban peers.

“We have to recruit locally and grow our own or hire people who have connections or roots in the community,” Trevino said. “If we hire a teacher straight out of Texas Tech University, we may have them for a year. … And then they may get on at Lubbock ISD or Plainview ISD, where there's more of a social life.”

Floydada Collegiate ISD recruits local high school students who are working toward their associate’s degree through what is known as a Grown Your Own Teacher program. But Trevino says HB 2 does not give him the time to use this program to replace uncertified teachers. From recruitment to graduation, it takes at least three years before students can lead a classroom on their own, he said.

School leaders fear if they can’t fill all their vacancies, they'll be pushed to increase class sizes or ask their teachers to prepare lessons for multiple subjects.

“Our smaller districts are already doing that, where teachers have multiple preps,” Trevino said. “Things are already hard on our teachers. So if you add more to their plate, how likely are they to remain in the profession or remain in this district?”

At Wylie ISD in Taylor County, it’s been difficult to find teachers to keep up with student growth. Uncertified teachers in recent years have made up a large number of teacher applicants, according to Cameron Wiley, a school board trustee.

Wiley said restrictions on uncertified teachers is a “good end goal” but would compound the district’s struggles.

“It limits the pot of people that's already small to a smaller pot. That's just going to make it more difficult to recruit,” Wiley said. “And if we have a hard time finding people to come in, or we're not allowed to hire certain people to take some of that pressure off, those class sizes are just going to get bigger.”

Learning suffers when class sizes get too big because students are not able to get the attention they need.

“This bill, it's just another obstacle that we as districts are having to maneuver around and hurl over,” Wiley said. “We're not addressing the root cause [recruitment]. We're just putting a Band-Aid on it right now.”

Disclosure: Commit Partnership and Texas Tech University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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