The Lege creates problems for the Lege to try to fix.
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.
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.”
The story goes into the reasons for the shortage of certified teachers: Teacher pay in Texas is below the national average, teachers complain of high workloads (the Lege does like imposing mandates), small rural districts have trouble attracting new teachers while fast-growing suburban districts can’t hire them fast enough. The pool of certified teachers is small, and the problem was greatly exacerbated by COVID, when teachers left the profession in droves. Uncertified teachers, who are in theory supposed to get certified with resources from the state and their district, became the de facto solution after their hiring was enabled by the 2015 “district of innovation” law. But now, ten years after that law was passed, the Lege wants to tighten it up.
And I get it, that was supposed to be a means of giving districts some flexibility, not a permanent workaround to a labor shortage. Plenty of research shows that students perform better overall with certified teachers. But in typical legislative fashion, the bill being put forward doesn’t really solve the problem and will likely cause even more disruption in the short term. It’s a long story and I’d have had to excerpt a ton of it to get all of that across, so go read the rest. And follow the action, because this is going to be a fight and the final form of HB2 is likely to change quite a bit between now and when it passes.
My big question would be whether the requirement that teachers be certified will be applied to private schools and charter schools to whom the lege is so eager to send our tax dollars.
Cost of living in general in Texas is below US average. I said the same in 2022 when R.F. O’Rourke was blathering about teacher pay in Muleshoe.
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/texas-usa/united-states