Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: If you won't let me talk about abortion, I don't
know what I'm supposed to do. Yes, welcome back, Thank you.
Speaker 1: I have a little bit of a cold today, so
I have.
Speaker 2: The allergies, is what I have.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna try really hard.
Speaker 2: Gross episode.
Speaker 1: Yes, if you hear any gross sniffle and just assume it's.
Speaker 2: Elinor yeah, yeah, safe, safe to assume.
Speaker 1: How was it without me?
Speaker 2: You know we were missing a little something. You know.
Speaker 1: I have some notes on your April Fool's joke that
you played on Jasper.
Speaker 2: It was not a success.
Speaker 1: This is not good.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 1: So you actually got a listener feedback.
Speaker 2: I got listener feedback that was lamb.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: Us, Thanks so much for having me this super important topic,
and glad.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: Okay, so now give me the alternative certified process. Yeah.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: Good luck. I would just like deposits head and like
the way you looked at me when you said that
about making less money.
Speaker 2: If I decided to leave journalism. Remember it's always a possibility.
Uh No, I could not be a teacher.
Speaker 1: This.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: I've done a lot of job since I left the classroom,
but there's nothing more mentally, physically, emotionally draining every single day.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're isolated, they're in the classroom, they you know,
just it's a very can be a very isolating, lonely profession.
Speaker 2: And then the uncertified. Let's say, so he's traditional, I'm alternative.
You can be uncertified in this example.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so how does an uncertified teacher end up in
the classroom these days?
Speaker 3: A district you pass a criminal background check and you
have a pulse in a district is willing to hire you.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: To pop up.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: How much of this is a Texas problem and how
much of this is happening everywhere across the country.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: And tell us a little bit about that district of
innovation process.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: Why was this sort of workaround created in the first place?
What was the goal?
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: Interesting. All right, let's pause for a moment here from
our sponsors, and then we'll talk about what might be
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We believe teachers make the difference. Commit Partnership. Visit commit
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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?
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: I mean you can't just say, like snap your fingers,
we need more providers, or we need more teachers in
this case.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's why we have to build the supply.
Speaker 1: We've got to.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: It has come back, It came back in twenty nineteen,
but it's you know, it had really changed in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's a very recent Yes, Yes, I feel like
where the issue is coming from. Yeah, I'm on expert.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: 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.