This week's trip Cast is brought to you by Raise Your Hand Texas, the Commit partnership the Charles Budd Foundation in Texas AFT. Hello and welcome to the Texas Tribune Trip Cast for April fifteenth, twenty twenty five. My name is Matthew Watkins, editor in chief of the Texas Tribune. Eleanor has unlocked my office door and allowed me back onto the podcast after a few hiatuses.
If you won't let me talk about abortion, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Yes, welcome back, Thank you.
I have a little bit of a cold today, so I have.
The allergies, is what I have.
So I'm gonna try really hard.
Gross episode.
Yes, if you hear any gross sniffle and just assume it's.
Elinor yeah, yeah, safe, safe to assume.
How was it without me?
You know we were missing a little something. You know.
I have some notes on your April Fool's joke that you played on Jasper.
It was not a success.
This is not good.
It is not a good joke. It did not land. It was not well received. I like to I enjoy hearing from listeners of the trip Cast. I don't enjoy it when They mostly are like, why did you do so poorly at an April Fools Jroke? What are your names?
So you actually got a listener feedback.
I got listener feedback that was lamb.
Okay, Well, well, largely we'll try to do We have a whole year to prepare for next time, so I look forward to see what we can pull off there. Yeah, yeah, all right, So today we are going to talk about Texas teachers, how they're doing, how they're being trained, and what could change for them this legislative session. It's been a pretty tough few years for teachers. You know, you had COVID and twenty twenty greatly disrupting their classrooms and
loading them up with new challenges. The political climate in schools has of course intensified in recent years, and you know, the last legislative session, a teacher pay raise bill failed after it got cut up in negotiations over school vouchers. During that time, we've seen a six significant shift in the workforce. The Charles Butt Foundation's twenty twenty four teacher poll found that more than three quarters of teachers considered
leaving the profession in twenty twenty four. That's a twenty percentage point increase from twenty twenty and of the new teachers who have come in, more than half fifty two percent were uncertified. And that's a big topic that we're going to talk about today. We have the perfect guests to discuss this. His name is Ryan Franklin. He's managing director of Philanthropy Advocates. He's a former Associate Commissioner for
Education Leadership and Quality at the TEA. He was a policy advisor to two prior education commissioners and worked on the staff of former Republican State Senator Florence Shapiro, who was a legendary leader in public education in the state. And before all that, he was a classroom teacher. So welcome Ryan, thank you for joining.
Us, Thanks so much for having me this super important topic, and glad.
To be with y'all. Yeah, excited to talk about it. It's coming on a week where you know, we expect a vote in the House on the vouch your bill. But I think you could arguably make the case that this is just as important, if not more important to kind of the future of education in Texas, this turnover issue,
the certification issue, and everything like that. So I want to start with that turnover, the unhappiness that was reflected in that poll that I mentioned, a poll that, by the way, I saw that number on a PowerPoint presentation that you gave a few months ago, which which maybe want you to come in here. What do you think is driving this is what has changed for teachers that is creating this situation in the state.
Yeah, the teaching job has always been a demanding job with lots of competing priorities and pulling lots of different directions. I think coming out of the pandemic in particular, just the strain on the classrooms, students being out of the classroom for so long and then coming back and trying to get back in the flow of school. So we've heard a lot about classroom management challenges have really ramped up.
We are in this tense political moment and it feels like education is frequently at the center of politicized debates. The demands are more, the pay has not kept up with inflation. They are surrounded increasingly by underprepared colleagues that they're having to kind of pull the weight for. And so it's just really created a pressure cooker for teachers.
Right, and what that has created then as a situation where as I mentioned before, schools have been sort of desperate to fill teacher vacancies, right, and that's one of the things leading to the push of uncertified teachers. Before we talk about kind of what has allowed that to happen, tell us a little bit about just like what folks call sort of the traditional route to becoming a teacher, Like, what is what happens? What is the kind of traditional way of preparing teachers for that classroom.
Yeah, the traditional way, the way that most of us think about how teachers were prepared, and most of us had teachers prepared this way was completing undergraduate degree at a university and then the last semester of your senior year you go in and complete a student teaching assignment, so you're in the classroom getting hands on practice with kids. Before you're turned loose. You have to complete certification exams, you complete years of training hands on experience while while
in college. That has been the rarity for going on twenty years now, that has not been the predominant way we've prepared teachers for twenty or so years, that's been a declining portion of the population with the rise of alternative certification programs and now more recently with completely uncertified teachers.
Okay, so now give me the alternative certified process. Yeah.
The alternative certified is somebody who already has a degree, maybe their career changer. They're working in another field, and decide they want to change careers and come into education, and they really may or may not do some coursework in training, but for the most part, they are given the keys to a classroom and they are training on the job, but they are the teacher of record. They've got the full response disabilities of a teacher, and they're kind of dropped in and learning it on the fly.
So I assume you went through the traditional I did. Okay, yes, and so then but then if I was like I'm done with journalism, I want to go somehow make even less money. I'm going to go be a public school teacher. And it's a district that needs, you know, teachers, What would I have to do to I'm putting aside the uncertified piece of this way, But like that, what's the alternative? I would go do some degree of course work.
Yeah, you would, You would enroll, you might or might not take an entrance exam, pretty basic admission requirements. Prove up that you've got a degree, and you enter that program and they match you or you match yourself with a job, and they are training you while you're in that program. So you may or may not have any coursework or training before you enter the classroom the first day of school. Here are the keys, here the grade book.
Good luck. I would just like deposits head and like the way you looked at me when you said that about making less money.
If I decided to leave journalism. Remember it's always a possibility. Uh No, I could not be a teacher.
This.
My sister is a teacher. And when I think about how I spend my days versus how she spends her days, it's it's a it's such a difficult, such an important job. I think, you know, like many teachers, she finds it very fulfilling, but it's really intense.
I've done a lot of job since I left the classroom, but there's nothing more mentally, physically, emotionally draining every single day.
The challenges. This is like such a minor thing. And I understand this is not like the main barrier teachers are facing. But I'm like, she can't just like go to the bathroom when she wants. And I'm like, we should be talking about that far more often we talked about teachers.
Yeah, they're isolated, they're in the classroom, they you know, just it's a very can be a very isolating, lonely profession.
And then the uncertified. Let's say, so he's traditional, I'm alternative. You can be uncertified in this example.
Yeah, so how does an uncertified teacher end up in the classroom these days?
A district you pass a criminal background check and you have a pulse in a district is willing to hire you.
That's it, all right, I have two for two. I can do it. Yeah, they too. Well, tell me then, what we should think about this, I mean, what is is there a preference between those three paths in your mind? Is there something that is better for the students and for the state to have a teacher that fits into you know, category A, B or C.
Yeah. I think there was a time when we didn't
necessarily have the data to know for sure. I think we had hunches that hey, if you practice something, you're going to be better at it, but we didn't have the data over the last I would say five to seven years, we've gotten clear data that preparation matters, and teachers that are prepared in a traditional university based program, they get months worth of extra learning than an alternatively certified teacher, and they get even more than an uncertified teacher.
So in terms of student learning, there's no question that the practice makes a difference. So it's not just the certification. It's really about there and having the hands on practice to do the job, and so it makes a real different in student learning. It also makes a real difference in how long those teachers stay in the classroom. As we've seen with uncertified teachers, it becomes a revolving door.
And so districts that have relied increasingly on this population are then having to fill that vacancy almost every year because they have extremely high turnover rates, which not surprising. If it's a hard job, you're not prepared for it, they're just feeding you to the wolves.
I'm reading from your PowerPoint presentation here and it says here students with good teachers are more likely to attend college and earn higher salaries. Replacing a teacher in the bottom five percent with an average teacher would increase the present value of students' lifetime income by approximately two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per classroom.
Yeah, it's substantial, and that's old research. It's old national research. Recently, Jacob Kirksey at Texas Tech has done a Texas look at this and had similar findings. The outcomes. It's not just a right now, are you learning math? Are you learning to read? It's a long term life outcome from having a well prepared teacher.
But I imagine, like the other part is like watch it. I guess I'll ask this is like if you can't, if you don't have those well trained, certified teachers, is having any teacher better than no teacher?
I think that's actually a question we should be talking about more, and nobody's talking about that. But I actually think it's a really good question because I think we could be staffing our schools in our classrooms differently with how we're assigning the teachers, and so if you've got you could have a bigger classroom with a really good teacher paired with an underprepared teacher, uncertified teacher maybe to
manage it. So I think there's some innovation out there and there's some examples of this starting.
To pop up.
So I think on the baseline, most people say, no, of course not we need to put a person in the classroom to supervise the classroom. But I actually think it's a really good question and one we should be asking more interesting.
How much of this is a Texas problem and how much of this is happening everywhere across the country.
Yeah, so I think coming out of the pandemic, everyone was facing challenges. I think what's DIFFERENTECH in Texas is just we had the statutory framework that allowed it to really be the wild wild West. So other places reduced their certification requirements are sort of backed off things. Texas just already had the law in place that said, you know, if you're in a district of innovation, which most districts are, they can hire you without any preparation or certification.
And tell us a little bit about that district of innovation process.
Yeah, so if you are meeting very baseline academic threshold, you can opt out as a district of certain statutory provisions.
And two of the most common things that they've opted out of is requiring certification and requiring parental notification for uncertified teachers, because that's the other thing that's happened is this statute, in the absence of District of Innovation would presume that, hey, parents are being notified if you're if your kid doesn't have a certified teacher, that's also being waived. And so parents are kind of being you know, left uninformed and wondering, what's going on in my classroom? Why
is this now? I happen to know ten layers deep on tea website where to go look to see if my kids teacher a certified. But I am not normal.
And what you're sort of describing here is that the teacher the District of Innovation allows you to kind of go around that certification requirement. And so what we're seeing here is actually not necessarily half of all students, I mean, half of all teachers are being hired kind of evenly
across the state is uncertified. What we were actually seeing is a lot of districts hiring very large numbers uncertified and others doing smaller I mean, once I that you mentioned seventy five percent of rural teachers actually are being hired as uncertified.
Yeah, it's really I was a rural teacher, and the challenges are just different on finding people to work in rural schools, and it's so much more impact there in rural districts. And I think the other thing about this is by allowing the uncertified, unprepared individual in the classroom, it's removed the incentive from anyone to go get certified. So we've really seen our numbers drop off across the board of people pursuing any preparation route.
Why was this sort of workaround created in the first place? What was the goal?
So I can't really speak to what the intent there was. I think it was really built around creating more flexibility for traditional districts and giving them some of the flexibilities that charter schools had at the time, because charters have long been able to be sort of exempt from the preparation requirements. But in charters, parents go in knowing that the schools are prepared and set up to provide that
structured curriculum and support there. So it's a little bit different environment from a charter and traditional district.
So are there states, I mean you talk about the statutory framework in Texas. Are there states where like you are required to have you cannot have uncertified teachers.
I think that's way more common than what we're dealing with. We've seen some states shortcut their certification or do temporary things to kind of get through the COVID crunch, But I am not aware of a site that is as lacks on the preparation and certification requirements as Texas.
Interesting. All right, let's pause for a moment here from our sponsors, and then we'll talk about what might be done about this. Raise your hand, Texas. When we invest in our teachers, we invest in the future workforce of Texas. We believe teachers make the difference. Commit Partnership. Visit commit data dot org slash teachers to learn more about the teacher experience, turnovers, salaries, and more for your Texas county
or school district. The Charles Butt Foundation enhancing education for all Texas children by ensuring every classroom has a high performing teacher, especially where needed. Most Texas AFT Texas public schools, colleges, and universities can thrive if we work together. Join Texas AFT in the fight at TEXASAFT dot org. Slash Together dash we dash thrive. Okay, So here's my question for you. What does the legislature think about this. What are is?
Do lawmakers consider this a problem or a solution?
Yeah, So I think we've sort of been on this arc of how they've talked about this has changed. So in the midst of the pandemic, we were talking about teacher vacancies, and so we had the governor really step out there in twenty twenty two and create this teacher Vacancy task Force. They people from all around the state came together really focused on the vacancy issue. Twenty twenty three,
legislature comes to town. They consider the teacher pay raise bill you mentioned, They consider really comprehensive supports, preparation incentives for candidates. Those things get to the five yard line and they don't get across. But bipartisan leadership on both sides and so interest in doing something about this problem. The narrative then sort of shifts to being about this
uncertified teacher issue. And I think at first glance, people are like, well, it makes sense to give districts some flexibility.
But as we've studied this issue and as we've seen the data come out, folks have really become clear our student achievement is sort of plateauing in the state, maybe losing ground a little bit, and I think folks see the connection between, Hey, if we're putting a substantial portion of our teachers having no preparation and no teaching experience in the classroom, it's going to have an impact on
student learning. So I would say we've got a broad base of understanding from policymakers and an interest in doing something about it. Chairman Buckley in House Book Education, they had an interim charge. They had hearings on this, so they've studied that the Senate had worked on at the
prior session and prior interim. So there is a kind of broad based awareness that this is a challenge in general consensus that we need to do something to close the loophole and build the supply of well prepared teachers.
And it feels like there's there's sort of two options here. There's the carrot, you know, try to incentivize more people to become teachers, and the stick, which is, you know, sort of requiring schools to hire certified teachers and things like that. It seems like maybe both options are being sort of considered in the legislature right now and might have a pretty good chance of getting through. But let's
talk about the carrot at first, right. So the Senate has passed a teacher pay raise bill this legislative session. It is something, as I mentioned at the start of the show, that was blocked last legislative session. There was commitment to do it, there was funding in the budget, but it got sort of tied up with other kind of funding increases and was blocked by the governor essentially saying if you don't pass school voucher's school choice, then
you can't have these other extra funds as well. We're back this session. As I mentioned earlier, they're going to vote tomorrow Wednesday on the school voucher bill. I think most people believe this time around is going to get through, and so maybe a teacher raise will get through. I'm going to read to you quickly the money that's at stake here. Districts in smaller schools, mostly rural schools, would
receive bigger raises. Those with three to four experience would receive a three to four years of experience would receive a five thousand dollars raise. Five or more experience would receive a ten thousand dollars raise. That would be about half as much for the bigger districts, twenty five hundred for the less experienced, five thousand for the more experience. How much do you think that changes the equation in terms of teacher recruitment challenges that already exist.
Well, I think it helps both with the recruitment but even more importantly with retention. So I think we've got to do something to try to catch our teachers who are in the classroom doing the work. We've got to stop the bleeding a little bit on attrition there, and so I think some sort of teacher pay raise makes a lot of sense. Governor Abbott named that as one of his emergency items, and so I think, you know,
there's a lot of momentum behind that. The structure of it looks a little different between what the house is thinking and what the sentence thinking, but there's definitely momentum there. So I think that's both to make it more viable for people to consider coming into the classroom, but even more important to help stem the attrition and keep people people in the classroom.
The average national salary for teachers seventy one, six hundred and ninety nine dollars. In Texas, that number is sixty two four hundred and seventy for so we are considerably under the national average for teachers.
Yeah, because I imagine you can't just say, right, like, no more uncertified teachers, right, like you have to fix the structural problems that brought us here, right, right, sort of?
I presume your model for this, yes, right, I mean what around this needs to be fixed to make this not like, uh, you know, I cover healthcare, and so I think about like the corollary of like rural healthcare where it's like, obviously we don't have uncertified doctors, but like the result is that rural hospitals close.
Right.
I mean you can't just say, like snap your fingers, we need more providers, or we need more teachers in this case.
Yeah, So that's why we have to build the supply.
We've got to.
If you close the loophole, you phase that out, then you instantly from day one, create an incentive for people to go back into preparation. Something like seventy percent of the uncertified teachers now have been an educator preparation program. They just left when they said, look what what am I paying you for? I can do the job and get this without so day one, those people can go back and they can get a temper a certification to
get prepared while they're in there. What we've also got to do is we've got to bring traditional preparation back and so both the semester long student teaching like we've kind of thought about teaching in the past, but also kind of the newer model, which is a residency base, which is more to the medical point. It's a year long hands on you experienced the first day of school, the last day of school, and really getting those hands
on experience. And we've got a number of programs in Texas and a number of schools that have done work in this, and so if we can create the incentives for the candidates to get certified, for the districts to hire and differentiate the compensation, then I think we can start to move people back in there in the preparation programs to offer these sort of high quality routes.
What happened to the traditional route? Like why is it such a I mean, I used to cover a higher education. I would hear about like, you know, colleges of education just having declining student enrollment. But what's going on there that people aren't choosing that route anymore.
It's a long time journey. But a couple of things happened in the eighties. One, they eliminated the education major in statute and so in Texas, yeah, so everybody had to get an academic major. And so that happened close in time to when we created alternative certification programs, and so over time, the alternative certification route was more flexible. You could get paid while receiving your training, and so more people moved to that as our student population has changed.
Most students have to work while they're in college, and to take a semester off and not being able to draw an income while you're doing your student teaching. That's
really hard sacrificed for most people to make. So we had a lot of people that go all the way through four years and then they would say, oh, I'm just not going to do my student teaching because I need to work, and then they would have paid for their teacher training and then paid for it again by entering in all alert program And so that's one of the things we're decided about some of this legislation to help compensate the candidates for their time in both traditional programs.
And the year long residency and with additional waiting and funding for rural districts. We think, so that's some really smart rural proposals out there.
I used to work in Pennsylvania, where like they had historically like this big network of teacher colleges that then became four year colleges but really emphasized continue to emphasize, you know, teaching degrees and education degrees. So it's so interesting to hear Texas, you know, around that time that they sort of were turning those two year teacher colleges into four year universities but continuing to really emphasize education.
Like I knew a lot of people who just went to those universities because it was like the university they got into and ended up in a teaching program because it was so emphasized by the school versus sort of eliminating the education.
It has come back, It came back in twenty nineteen, but it's you know, it had really changed in twenty nineteen.
Yes, that's a very recent Yes, Yes, I feel like where the issue is coming from. Yeah, I'm on expert.
Yeah interesting, Yeah, so you talked about this already a little bit, but you know, there are there are provisions in the House bill that would essentially prevent districts from hiring teachers without certifications you talk to. There's a Senate bill that I think would do a similar thing. There's also, as you mentioned, some funding to you know, help those
help people get certified and things like that. But I mean, I kind of want to go back to what Eleanor was asking, which is, if there's not enough teachers and there's not enough certified teachers, are we not just creating a situation where it's going to make it harder for districts to hire teachers while we're already facing a shortage.
I mean, how how do we? It seems to me like this could be a recipe for, just as you maybe mentioned, increasing classroom sizes, because we just don't have enough certified teachers to go around.
If we don't both pieces, that's really the risk this session. I think we've got a great opportunity to do national leading, innovative kind of stuff in this space. But if we just closed the door without creating the incentives for quality, we will have really missed an opportunity and sort of set people up for failure. That's why I really think It is the carrot and the stick. Because districts are
hiring people. They are hired forty four thousand people last year something like that, So they are hiring somebody in those classrooms. If we can create incentives to get those people prepared while building the pipeline long term, I think we can do that, but we can't. We really need to do both.
So my sister also a teacher, actually a former teacher. She was a special education teacher among the teachers that are you know, most badly needed. She taught for multiple years and made the decision, this is her first school year to be outside of the profession. And you know, frankly, it wasn't a decision of you know, I need to go make more money. It was, you know, I don't feel respected in this job. There are so many kind of things coming at us from the state government, from parents,
from everything else. You know, we are not being treated the way with the respect, you know, and the value that we provide to society. I get. One of my questions here is like this bill, these bills that we talked about don't necessarily address those issues. How much do you think that is factoring into this challenge. Additionally, and is there anything that you know the state or schools can be doing about that.
Yeah, I think it's going to take everybody pull in the right direction. I've heard Chairman Creighton talk a lot about professionalizing teaching, and so I think preparation is a part of that, the paying compensation, but I also think the classroom supports and the workload demands that we put on teachers, and classroom management, discipline issues. All of these things add up. And I think Charman Creighton's got kind of a series of three bills that work together on this,
and that's really how he's talked about the legislation. We really appreciate him trying to take a comprehensive approach to it, not trying to just do one part of the continuum, but really trying to address it holistically.
All Right, Well, we will see what happens. It's going to be an interesting week and an interesting month and a half in education in this legislative session. So thank you Ryan for joining us on this podcast. Thank you to eleanor Into, our producers, Rob and Chris, and particularly Rob the composer of our theme music. Thank you to our sponsors Texas AFT, the Charles Butt Foundation, raise your hand Texas in the Commit Partnership. We will talk to you all next week.