The 2023 Texas Education Poll conducted by the Charles Butt Foundation found that 75% of teachers said they had seriously considered leaving in the past year, up 17 points from the same poll in 2020.
Teacher turnover in Texas school districts increased by 7 percentage points from 2020 to 2023, according to data from the Texas Education Agency.
“Teachers across the state and country feel overworked, in some cases under-appreciated and often ignored and uncared for by those in power,” said Tricia Cave, a lobbyist for the Texas Association of Professional Educators and a former Houston-area teacher.
School districts, including Clear Creek Independent School District, are seeing an increase in uncertified teachers seeking work.
overview
Local and statewide experts and officials said there are a number of factors that are causing teachers to leave the profession.
Cave says low pay, heavy workloads and paperwork, and time spent working from home can all lead to burnout.
Digging deeper
Brittani Moses, CCISD’s human resources director, said that despite rising turnover, the district has been able to maintain its student-teacher ratios despite being part of the Innovation District Program, meaning it’s not bound by state-mandated ratios.
Moses said CCISD aims to have about 23 students per teacher in kindergarten through fourth grade.
Moses said at the secondary level (grades 5-12), the district is aiming for a ratio of 27 students per teacher.
To maintain the ratio, Moses said district officials will be communicating with principals at each campus starting in February to discuss student enrollment projections for the upcoming school year.
Moses said the February discussion also included anticipating the addition of new housing near the district’s schools, which could bring in new students.
What they said
“(CCISD) is a place that employees want to work. Teachers want to work (in the district) because they hear great things happening. And the administration is really hard working,” Moses said.
“We still have a long way to go just to catch up with the national average (for teacher salaries), and Texas is struggling not just to retain teachers but to attract them to the profession,” said Bob Popinski, senior policy director at Raise Your Hand Texas, an education policy nonprofit.
what else?
Popinski said finding qualified teachers has been a challenge for the state, but he believes the main cause of the teacher shortage right now is low wages.
He said the “driving force” behind teachers’ low pay is inflation, which has risen by about 22% since 2019.
Texas has not received its student allocation funding ($6,160 per student) for school districts since 2019. This has contributed to budget shortfalls in several Texas school districts, including FISD, which is projecting a $1.4 million shortfall for the 2024-25 school year.
Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding that Texas public schools received in 2020 and 2021 to address learning losses related to the pandemic also expires in September.
“Teacher salaries in our schools are $400 (per year) lower than the national average,” Popinski said.
The TEA also said more uncertified teachers are now being hired by the district: The percentage of new uncertified teachers hired in CCISD jumped nearly 12 percentage points from 2020 to 2023, according to TEA data.
Moses confirmed this, saying more applicants “have not had traditional training through a university program.”
Moses said the number of people from various professions who currently want to become teachers, as well as a decline in universities offering teaching degrees and unpaid student teacher programs, could be the underlying causes of the rise in unqualified applicants.
What’s next?
Several agencies and organizations are looking to help bring more teachers into the profession.
San Jacinto College in Pasadena will launch a second bachelor’s degree program with a focus on early childhood education in spring 2024, university officials announced.
Meanwhile, education advocacy groups are hopeful that the next state legislative session, which begins on January 14, will see the passage of solutions recommended by the Teacher Vacancies Task Force, established in 2022.
The task force is made up of teachers and school system leaders across Texas who work in public education. The task force proposed eight solutions for the Texas Legislature to consider in 2023, focusing on increasing compensation, providing more support and training for new teachers, and helping teachers balance their time. The solution passed during the 2023 session is just one of the solutions.
Public education advocates like Cave and Popinski said they believe the task force’s recommendations, if passed, could alleviate the state’s teacher shortage.
“Resources to help alleviate teacher shortages are not being allocated equitably to school districts,” Cave said. “Treat teachers as professionals, take them at their word and trust them to do the good work they do.”
