Over the last two years, Texas’ public education system has been through the wringer, from shifting to online classes and debates about making masks mandatory to the ongoing tensions over how race and sex should be taught in schools to, most recently, the renewed discussion over school safety in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Uvalde where 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed.
Teachers have been at the front lines of all of these issues — and it’s taken a toll on them. Texas has long had a teacher shortage, but the consensus is that the pandemic has made it worse, pushing teachers to their limits and out of the job.
Issues like receiving low pay, being overworked, having bad benefits, worrying about their health during COVID-19 and being caught in the middle of Texas’ culture wars have had a negative effect on the workforce.
To top it all off, Texas ranks as one of the worst states for teacher retirement. Retired Texas teachers have not received a cost-of-living raise since 2004, and it’s getting worse as inflation rises.
The combined effect of all of the above is that educators are leaving the field in droves. Most of them are new, early-career teachers.
So what exactly does the teacher shortage mean for Texas? How does the state estimate the optimal number of teachers needed, and how does the shortage affect the public education system? And what is being done to fix it?
Here’s what you need to know about the state’s teacher shortage.
What does the teacher shortage in Texas look like?
The Texas Education Agency says there is no statewide definition for what constitutes a teacher shortage, but it knows the state is going through one.
The agency collects data every year about how many teachers get certified, how many are employed and how many leave their jobs.
A major indicator that points to a shortage now is the state’s attrition rate, which tracks the number of teachers who have left the field in any given year. The rate suggests that retaining teachers has become difficult and schools are having to refill positions on a yearly basis.
“We have a lot more teachers leaving the profession, which is creating a lot of additional vacancies,” said Kelvey Oeser, TEA’s deputy commissioner of educator and system support.
Since the 2011-12 school year, Texas’ attrition rate has hovered around 10%. That number dipped to about 9% during the 2020-21 school year but is going back up — rising to almost 12% during the 2021-22 school year.
“We saw teacher attrition go up,” Oeser said. “What we don’t know is [if] it’s going to level out again, or are we going to see it continue to go up?”
Teacher retirement is up as well. About 8,600 teachers retired in fiscal year 2021, an increase of about 1,000 teachers from the previous year. The data for 2022 is not yet available, so it remains to be seen if teacher retirements will level off. Texas has been averaging about 7,500 retired teachers since the 2018 fiscal year.
For the 2021-22 school year, Texas employed 370,431 teachers — the most it has ever had. The state certified almost 26,000 new teachers in 2020-21.
But not everyone who is getting certified ends up going into teaching, TEA data shows. And while Texas is producing teachers, Oeser said it is also losing them at a high rate. Schools are struggling with open positions that they have to fill year after year.
Oeser also said most of Texas’ educators get certified through alternative programs and are more likely to leave than teachers who went to more traditional four-year schools.
In Texas, people who want to become teachers but did not get a degree in education can do so in about a year through the state’s alternative certification program. They are placed in a classroom under an intern certificate before getting fully certified as a teacher.
It is unclear why teachers who become certified through alternative programs leave the profession at higher rates — some have speculated they do not receive the same amount of support as educators who go through four-year programs — but during a State Board of Education meeting on June 15, TEA data showed that “if teachers prepared in alternative certification programs were retained at the same rate as teachers prepared in traditional programs, over 3,700 fewer new teachers would have been needed last year.”
“We are really thinking about how we improve the preparation of our new teachers so that those new teachers are more likely to stay and we will have fewer new teachers that we need to replace year over year,” Oeser said.
Why are teachers leaving?
Over the last year, The Texas Tribune has spoken to several teachers and reported about why they’ve decided to leave the profession.
The main themes are health and safety concerns during the pandemic and being overworked and underpaid. For some, the pandemic and Texas’ ensuing culture wars were the breaking point.
In a Charles Butt Foundation poll of 919 Texas teachers last year, 68% said they seriously considered leaving the profession in 2021, an increase of 10 percentage points compared with the year before.
In the same poll, teachers said they felt undervalued and underpaid. The average pay for teachers did not increase between 2010 and 2019; instead, it decreased from $55,433 to $54,192, according to a University of Houston report released this year.
In 2019, Texas lawmakers mandated raises for teachers in a $11.6 billion overhaul of public school finance. The bill also included a merit raise system aimed at helping rural and high-need school districts attract talent. In rare cases, the program rewards Texas’ highest-rated educators with hefty pay raises that could balloon to six-figure salaries.
In February, a Texas American Federation of Teachers survey of 3,800 of its members found that 66% of educators throughout Texas said they have recently considered leaving their jobs.
“Teachers have been working through this pandemic for like a year and a half, had to make the switch to virtual and then come back [in person],” Oeser said. “It was a really difficult time and the economy heated up, so there’s a lot of additional opportunities outside of teaching that were options for folks.”
Gordon Mock, a former teacher, left the profession after just two years on the job. He taught elementary in the Spring Independent School District, near Houston, until 2018. He thought teaching was his dream job.