How can Texas keep more teachers in classrooms? Here’s what a state committee found.

A panel of teachers and school administrators from across Texas is recommending that state lawmakers raise minimum teacher pay, offer better support for teachers and expand and improve training programs that prepare future teachers to go into the classroom.

Those recommendations are among several issued by the Governor’s Teacher Vacancy Task Force, which released its final report Friday morning.

The task force was created last year when Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Education Agency to convene a committee to study the factors driving a shortage of teachers across the state. In a statement issued Friday morning, Abbott thanked the teachers who served on the commission and pledged to work with lawmakers to find ways to attract and keep more teachers in Texas classrooms.

“Their recommendations will help ensure that best practices and resources are available for teacher recruitment and retention,” he said. “Working with the Texas legislature, we will develop and implement strategies that attract, retain, and support highly-qualified educators to provide students across the state with even greater opportunities to learn and grow.”

Compensation, support and use of teacher time are key

The task force broke its recommendations out into three categories: compensation, working conditions, and training and support. Among other things, the committee recommended increasing the state’s minimum salary schedule for teachers. Currently, the state requires that districts pay new teachers no less than $33,660 a year. The task force notes that many districts pay starting teachers well above the state minimum, but points out that smaller rural districts often do not.

The committee also recommended that lawmakers find ways to expand pathways into a career in education, including scaling up so-called grow your own programs, which districts use to support high school students and non-certified paraprofessionals who are interested in becoming teachers. Members also recommended that the state expand teacher residency programs, which allow aspiring teachers to spend a year working in a classroom under the guidance of an experienced partner teacher. The committee pointed to research suggesting that such programs can increase teacher retention, help districts place teachers in hard-to-fill positions and improve student achievement.

The task force also recommended that state leaders study how districts can make more effective use of teachers’ time. The report notes that teachers have a number of duties other than providing direct instruction to their students, including finding materials for use in classrooms, planning lessons and grading papers. The committee recommended that the state offer technical assistance to school districts that are looking to revamp their master schedules to allow more time for teachers to handle those other responsibilities during the school day.

Fort Worth ISD sees sharp uptick in teacher resignations

The Fort Worth Independent School District saw a sharp uptick in the number of teacher resignations it received last summer. By July 1, which marked the district’s deadline for teachers to resign, it had received 1,084 resignations from teachers — a 50% increase over the 722 resignations the district received by the previous year’s deadline.

District officials say they’re trying a variety of strategies to attract new teachers to replace the ones who have left. Ahead of the current school year, the district offered a series of signing bonuses for educators who were new to the district, including a $1,000 bonus for all new teachers who began work in August, a $2,000 early signing bonus for those who signed a letter of intent by May 1 and a $500 “welcome home” incentive for new teachers who are graduates of a Fort Worth ISD high school.

The district has also launched a so-called grow your own program, in which it works with current employees who have college degrees but no teaching certificate. The district pays to get those employees certified through the Region 11 Education Service Center. In exchange, those employees agree to remain in the district and teach for three years.

Last year, district officials also began recruiting international teachers for hard-to-fill positions like bilingual education and secondary math and science. The district only hired about a half dozen international teachers for the current school year, but officials are recruiting more to come to work in the district next year.

‘The more the state can do, the better’

Steven Poole, executive director of the United Educators Association, said he thought the report touched on all the major reasons teachers are leaving the profession. He especially thought the teacher residency suggestion was an important one. He knows of cases in which brand-new teachers have been thrown into the classroom in their first year and felt overwhelmed and unable to succeed, he said.

That’s a particular concern for teachers who got their teaching certificates through alternative certification programs, Poole said, because they often don’t go through a student teaching experience like their peers who were certified through a university-based program. Giving new educators a chance to spend their first year developing their skills while working alongside a more experienced teacher could go a long way toward solving that problem, he said.

Poole said he’d like to see more districts across the state take a harder look at revamping their master schedules to allow more time for teachers to prepare lessons and collaborate with colleagues. Doing so would allow teachers to get more of those responsibilities done during the school day, meaning they don’t have to take as much of their jobs home with them. He acknowledged that it would be an expensive process, since giving classroom teachers more time away from their students most likely means offering more special programs.

Poole said he would have liked to see more emphasis placed on the question of teacher pay raises. While the report recommends increasing the minimum salary schedule, it doesn’t say how much lawmakers should raise it. In the past, when lawmakers have adjusted the state’s minimum salary schedule for teachers and other school support staff, they’ve usually raised it by about $3,000, he said. Although there have been proposals for much larger amounts, Poole said he thought a $3,000 raise would be appropriate.

“The more the state can do, the better,” he said.

The committee recommended that lawmakers fund a pay raise by increasing the state’s basic allotment to school districts. Poole said those funding increases would need to come with strict safeguards to make sure that districts actually use that money to raise teachers’ pay rather than devoting it to other priorities.

Teachers of color could be key factor in educator shortage

A study released in January suggests that the state could make strides toward reducing teacher turnover by doing a better job of recruiting and retaining teachers of color, who are less likely to leave the profession than their white counterparts, no matter how they came into it.

Compared with nearly a third of their white colleagues, just 15% of Black teachers and 18% of Latino teachers who got their teaching certificates through a university-based program left the classroom within the next nine years. And while teachers of all races who went through an alternative certification program were more likely to leave the profession in that span of time, teachers of color were still more likely to stay: While 46% of white teachers from alternative certification programs left the profession within nine years, only 36% of Black teachers and 32% of Latino teachers did so.

The paper, which was co-authored by the education advocacy groups Teach Plus Texas and the Education Trust in Texas, makes a number of policy recommendations, including investing in opportunities for teachers of color to develop their abilities and qualifications for leadership roles and creating mentorship programs that provide targeted support to teachers of color, especially early in their careers.

Yvonne Morgan, one of the study’s contributors, said teachers of color told researchers that they often felt as though they were asked to take on extra duties like serving as unofficial campus disciplinarians or translators for other faculty members, without any recognition or compensation to go along with those responsibilities. Morgan, a teacher at the Dallas Independent School District’s School of Health Professions, said those same teachers also felt as though they were overlooked for leadership positions and other opportunities for advancement.

“I think just overall, the overarching theme we heard was that teachers of color really just want to be affirmed in their spaces and given opportunities to lead,” Morgan said.

Texas panel’s report is result of work by teachers and administrators

Natalie Brown, Texas policy program manager for Teach Plus, said Friday’s report was unique in that it represented the work of teachers sitting down with school administrators to find solutions to problems facing the education sector. It’s also helpful that the report includes recommendations not only for state lawmakers, but also for the Texas Education Agency and for local school districts, she said.

Finding ways of allowing teachers to get more of their work done during school hours will be a challenge, Brown said, but it’s an important goal for districts looking to retain more teachers. Duties like looking through student achievement data and making phone calls to parents are nearly as critical to student success as the time teachers spend giving direct instruction, she said. But there are other tasks that districts could find ways to take off of teachers’ plates, she said. Districts could look into streamlining paperwork or designating certain school staff members to grade assignments or handle lunch duty and bus duty, allowing teachers to focus on working with their classes, she said.

Brown said she’s confident that state lawmakers will take the task of retaining more teachers seriously. Teachers play a key role in determining how much students learn, which is a big factor in the state’s economic livelihood, she said.

‘Major changes are on the horizon’

Tiffany Kilcoyne, an English teacher at Hurst Junior High School in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford Independent School District, served on the task force. For much of the year the task force has existed, its members met in smaller work groups to tackle specific issues relating to teacher retention, she said.

Kilcoyne’s work group looked at the issue of teacher time. While it’s true that better pay might attract more teachers and keep experienced educators in the classroom, she said, districts also need to rethink how they structure their days so that teachers have enough time for planning, grading papers and collaborating with their colleagues. As it is, much of that work happens at night and on weekends, she said.

Her work group looked at school staffing models from New York and a few districts in Texas to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t, she said. Some districts built collaborative planning periods into their school days, giving all teachers in each subject area a time to sit down together and plan lessons, she said. Others shifted to a four-day school week, leaving the fifth day for the responsibilities teachers can’t take care of while they’re teaching their classes. Still others revamped their school calendars to build in longer breaks when students are out, giving teachers a chance to catch up on those duties, she said. Like many recommendations in the report, the question of scheduling is one that will likely need to be handled by school districts individually, and not at the state level, she said.

Like many teachers, Kilcoyne has often felt overwhelmed over the past three years, struggling to keep up as the pandemic evolved. She likens the situation to learning to juggle: In 2019, she didn’t know how to juggle at all. Then, in 2020, she gradually began learning, but each time she felt as though she had things under control, someone added another ball. Once she had mastered juggling balls, someone came along, took away one of her balls and gave her a bowling pin.

Many teachers feel the same way, she said, and if the state wants to keep more of them in the classroom, it will need to find ways to support them. Many of the recommendations in the report can be adopted quickly, she said, but some will need legislative action. Lawmakers only have another two weeks to file bills, so many of those changes may not take place until the next legislative session, she said. But she’s confident that they will happen eventually.

“Our current situation is not sustainable,” she said. “We can’t teach children without teachers. And so I do think major changes are on the horizon.”