This summer, Smith [only last name was used] left the Houston Independent School District (HISD), where she taught at a school with a majority of Black and Latinx students, and joined Katy ISD the day before teachers could submit their resignations without penalty. She says the stress from all the changes that were being implemented in HISD schools were enough to convince her to switch school districts.
“We’ve already been through enough during COVID. We’ve been stressed out for a very long time. And then this takeover… it was going to be even more stressful,” she said. “I don’t think a lot of these teachers can make it. That’s why so many have left already, and that’s why we have a teacher shortage.”
The Houston Education Agency took to X to shed light on a recent trend at HISD – teacher and student retention. Using an anonymous post from a teacher on social media, the teachers’ union wrote the school district has lost 32,000 students and that “the amount of teachers that have left will never be known due to Mike Miles’ attempt [to] silence people by using fear tactics.”
(What a teacher anonymously wrote on social media)
Smith tried to “hang in there” because of her care for her students.
“But after a while, you have to just say, ‘I gotta go take care of myself,’” she said.
“I noticed over the summer, the superintendent [Miles] would say one thing and then he would turn around and contradict himself,” Smith said. “He was making a lot of changes and a lot of questions couldn’t be answered. To me, those are like red flag after red flag, which showed this man either doesn’t have a plan, this person is not a very truthful person who doesn’t stick by his word, and I can’t believe anything that comes outta [his] mouth.”
The teacher shortage in Texas is not new and the crisis is worsening, one that is detrimental to the framework of education in any school as the vacancies are either left unfulfilled or filled with uncertified candidates or those lacking the necessary qualifications.
Last year, a Kansas State University education professor Tuan Nguyen and two other colleagues collected data on the teacher shortage in the country. They found 36,500 vacancies in 37 states and D.C. for the 2021-2022 school year. The published data suggested teacher shortages increased by 35% in these states, to more than 49,000 vacancies.
Texas, which employs more than 370,000 teachers, is now seeing a larger turnover than the decade before the pandemic began. Before 2020, only a little more than 10% of the state’s teachers quit teaching each year. In 2023, that number jumped to 13.4%, or 50,000 teachers – the highest since the last year on record, 2007.
Houston Teacher Shortage: By the Numbers (July 2022)
- Houston ISD reported 950, Cy-Fair ISD reported 678 and Katy ISD reported about 200 teacher vacancies, and
- HISD’s posts on social media suggested its alternative certification program and an incentive of a new starting teacher salary and stipends of up to $5,000.
Why don’t we hear about teachers leaving?
Michelle Williams, the president of the Houston Education Association, saw a wave of resignations in the summer. Teachers called and messaged her, asking for help with their resignations.
More recently, she has observed that teacher unions are not hearing about HISD sending educators to the State Board for Educator Certification (SBEC) to get their certification sanctioned.
“The reason why we haven’t heard it is because they don’t want the public to know that the teachers are actually leaving,” Williams said.
The reasons for teachers leaving are varied, per Williams’ observations: salaries they were promised were incorrect, confusion about contracts and long work hours without pay. In 2022, when she was teaching math to eighth graders at Forest Brook Middle School, the school had two vacant teacher positions until the end of the school year.
In September, HISD teachers’ unions demanded pay for extra hours and to “restore language that guarantees a defined work day and extra pay for educators.” The petition, started by the Houston Federation of Teachers, says Miles and the board of managers eliminated educators’ “defined workday,” when the former policy paid them for duties performed beyond their 7.75 hour workday. Now, teachers can be assigned additional duties and activities with no guarantee that they will receive compensation.
“This is my 24th year in education and this is by far the worst [teacher shortage] that I’ve ever seen,” she added. “The district [HISD] is in the worst shape I’ve ever seen.”
Earlier in October, teachers in HISD received emails stating they will not receive overtime pay and that it is not required by federal law or local policy to pay overtime. The payment is decided upon by the campus authority.
“Teachers in HISD are professional and exempt employees,” the email read. “For exempt staff, completion of work assignment is a primary emphasis. Since there is no overtime pay for exempt staff, the number of hours is of secondary importance.”
Owing to a severe physical and mental deterioration, another veteran HISD teacher started a GoFundMe page, seeking financial help to support herself while being on an unpaid medical leave from HISD. On Oct. 6, she tried to seek a transfer from an NES-A school but was instead, assigned a different grade. She is yet to receive paperwork from HISD to her insurance company and ultimately, be compensated while on leave and is also seeking legal counsel.
“This TEA takeover of my employer is not only affecting my workplace, it’s affecting my home space,” she wrote.
Tara Jones, a former HISD teacher who retired in 2022 after more than 30 years in the profession, is now substituting at the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District. “There is pedagogy in the schools. The schools have PE teachers, nurses, librarians,” she said of the district.
Jones has heard of teachers going in and checking themselves into various hospitals for psychiatric care,” since the TEA takeover in summer. “It’s not about school reform, as the superintendent is saying, it’s about dismantling public education as we know it,” she said.
How the state reacted to a teacher shortage
Texas governor Greg Abbott established the Teacher Vacancy Task Force in March 2022 to analyze teacher vacancies, retention and recruitment challenges across the state. This body, comprising teachers and school system leaders, met to formulate solutions for regulatory policy changes for the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the legislature and also aimed to implement support for teachers through teacher compensation, training and support, and working conditions.
According to a survey by the Learning Policy Institute, which reviewed teacher workforce reports and state agency documents covering the 2020–21 or 2021–22 school years, one in 10 of all teaching positions (ie. 314,134 positions at a minimum) were either unfilled or filled by teachers not fully certified.
“The Texas legislature, the [Texas Education Agency], and school systems should prioritize enacting and fully funding these recommendations to ensure that every Texas school is staffed with effective, supportive, and committed teachers,” the task force had said earlier.
Initiatives in Houston
In a bid to address the shortage of teachers in Houston, HISD awarded three teacher prep program grants to Texas Woman’s University, Prairie View A&M University, and Tarleton State University. The aim of these Grow Your Own grants is to encourage more people to become teachers for free, where participants will earn a bachelor’s degree and Texas teaching license while being paid as a full-time teaching assistant in HISD. Moreover, the program promises to place 133 educators in HISD by the 2025-2026 school year in high-need subject areas like SPED, ESL and bilingual education.
The College of Professional Education (COPE) at Texas Woman’s University is also teaming up with Houston ISD. It aims to guide around 100 teaching assistants toward bachelor’s degrees and Texas teaching certificates through $500,000 in grants from HISD to produce educators from the district.
These grants are called Grow Your Own awards, and will be paired with TWU’s Zero Tuition Guarantee. These will cover all tuition and other costs for 95 Houston ISD teaching assistants to help them earn degrees and certifications in early childhood education, elementary education, special education and bilingual education. HISD will pay these teaching assistants as full-time employees while they attend online classes at TWU and also will provide support like advising field supervision, and professional development.
HISD awarded 10 grants worth $1 million to three institutions, out of which TWU received half the amount.
Moreover, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) awarded around $62,000 to the College of Public Service (CPS) and their Alternative Certification Program (ACP) to address the dearth of skilled teachers in Houston. Estimates indicate the city needs approximately 4,000 new teachers annually.
Professor and chair of Urban Education at the University of Houston-Downtown, Dr. Ronald Beebe, is the principal investigator of the grant, and Dr. Eve Zehavi, assistant professor of Urban Education, is a co-PI, along with Dr. Diane Miller, associate professor and assistant chair for Graduate Studies.
The proposal handed in by the university to the THECB outlined the need for alternative certification programs that are going to provide preparation and support for people who are transitioning into the teaching profession. The alternative certification students already have a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in a different field. The program provides them with the pedagogical tools, such as modules developed by the university faculty, to be effective teachers and support them in preparing for teacher certification exams.
The grant is used to advertise the program and maintain the high teacher retention rate of more than 80% in Houston’s classrooms five years after graduation.
“Our message is not, ‘Do you want to teach? When can you start?’ Our message is, ‘We want to make sure that you’re going to be successful in that classroom when you start,’” Dr. Beebe said.
The TEA allows school districts to uncertified teachers by submitting a request to waive the requirements for a limited number of years. Recently, HISD elected to use the certification waiver option to hire and employ uncertified teachers for the 2023-24 school year.
“The idea is that you get people who think they might wanna be teachers and so you put them in a classroom and hopefully they find out they do wanna be teachers. But there’s also the expectation that at a certain point in time, you will take the certification exams and become certified,” Dr. Beebe explained.
The number of uncertified teachers is underreported in Texas
Texas does not publish statewide data on unfilled teacher positions and has reported in the Out-of-Field Teaching report that 29,426 teachers were teaching a subject that fell outside their certified subject area in the 2021–22 school year.
Moreover, 10,691 special education teachers did not have special education and content certification for their assignments.
In a separate report, the TEA hired 8,435 teachers without certification or permit, and 794 teachers with emergency permits for the 2021–22 school year. Since these numbers represent only special hires that school year, the estimated number of teachers who are not fully certified for their teaching assignments may be underreported.
Why HISD needs more teachers of color
HISD has a minority enrollment of 90%, with more than half (59.4%) coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
According to myriad studies, students of color, especially Black students, benefit more from teachers from the Black community.
However, the share of students and teachers of color is disproportionate. The diversity gap can be explained by the teacher pipeline, or simply – students of color don’t attend or graduate from college at nearly the same rate as white students and those who do, are less likely to become teachers.
A study in 2015 showed 4.4% of white adults were teachers, but only 1.8% of black adults and 1.5% of Hispanic adults were teachers. Even in the best-case scenario, where all Black college graduates choose to become teachers, the number of Black teachers would minimally exceed the number of white teachers.
Moreover, teachers of color have higher turnover rates because they are more likely to work in high-need schools.
How school districts can deal with a teacher shortage
- Lower qualification standards,
- Encouraging support staff to get certified as teachers,
- Make hiring decisions as soon as possible through an efficient process, where candidates can meet other teachers and staff,
- Collaborate with local teacher preparation programs that give access to a candidate pool,
- Offer commensurate salaries to veteran teachers who are moving from other school districts,
- Invest in training for principals,
- Assigning teachers to students more strategically, with fewer changes between grades and subjects and a strong curriculum,
- Take feedback through surveys from teachers to implement improvements, and
- Adequately compensating teachers, especially in shortage areas, including payment for extra hours.
