In the late ’90s and the early 2000s, Texas was facing the familiar problem of teacher shortages across the state. To address this, the state changed the guidelines for getting licensed as a teacher in two major ways.
The state got rid of a requirement for training programs to include student teaching hours and made it easier for private companies to certify teachers outside of the traditional four-year college route.
This created a boom in for-profit alternative programs and, as of 2020, most newly certified teachers in Texas have gotten their credentials in one of these so-called educator preparation programs.
How this policy change has affected education in Texas is the subject of a new working paper coauthored by Christa Deneault. She joined Texas Standard to break it all down. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Briefly, how are these educator preparation programs different from the traditional four-year college degree route of getting certified as a teacher?
Christa Deneault: So one thing is that they’re tailored towards people who already have a bachelor’s degree. So they’re a little bit more tailored to people who want to switch careers and possibly try teaching out. And so they really just offer the teacher training portion of teacher certification.
They’re a little bit quicker. So there’s an accelerated set of coursework that a prospective teacher does, and then at that point they’ll take one of two certification exams, and if they pass that, they’ll actually be an instructor of record in a school. And so they’ll actually be earning full pay as an instructor of record while they’re completing their teacher training program.
So that’s kind of one of the major differences. If somebody goes through a standard route, those are more like getting an education major and they include a student teaching portion, which is usually unpaid.
And the paper itself, can you tell us a little bit about what you guys actually found?
There were a couple of changes in Texas that really ushered in this for-profit sector for the teacher training portion of teacher certification. And what we find is that that kind of flexibility that those private companies offered in their teacher training programs increased access to the teaching profession for a lot of folks.
So basically we found that there were more certified teachers in Texas. And that actually had downstream effects for school districts. So school districts could hire more certified teachers and relied less on uncertified teachers.
And then finally we look at what happens to student achievement or student test scores once we have this kind of compositional change in who’s instructing our students. And we found that essentially there was no change – students were neither hurt nor helped by this policy. So basically it expanded access to the teaching profession, but it didn’t come at the cost of harming student achievement.
Among people who go through these alternative pathways, they’re more likely to be male and they’re more likely to be nonwhite. And so it kind of diversifies the teaching profession to some extent.
And they’re also more likely to have a variety of background training in terms of college majors. So they’re more likely to be coming from health or STEM business fields, etc. So it’s really kind of pulling a different crowd of people into the teaching profession.
So can you tell us about the methodology? How did you come to these conclusions?
Yeah, so we primarily use a really large administrative data set that Texas has that links individuals across different types of administrative data at the individual level.
So we have thousands of observations on teachers and millions of observations on student achievement. And so we can basically look at pre-labor market outcomes for teachers.
So we can understand things like what their college major was, but then we can also track them through their certification route and into the schools that they actually teach and the students that they’re working with.
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And so there’s no major impact to the performance of a child – that’s essentially the conclusion, right?
Right.
And so these large data sets, I’m curious, do you guys account for the socioeconomic status of the child or is it mostly focused on the teacher itself?
Yeah, so we use a couple of methodologies and both of those are going to do our best to account for things that involve student achievement that are related to students’ backgrounds. And we try to really just isolate and focus on the effect of teachers.
In terms of, I guess, quality… I’m trying to think of a a different word, but I guess the quality of training and when it goes to or when it comes to comparing the traditional route versus these alternatives, since there are no impacts on either extreme on the child, what do you make of that?
Yeah, so what we really find is when we look at teachers and just compare teacher types, we find that these for-profit trained teachers are like slightly lower quality than people who went through the standard training path. And the for-profit trained teachers are also slightly better than uncertified teachers.
So this is kind of why effects on students kind of wash out to be nothing, is that these for-profit teachers are replacing both teachers that are worse than them, but also some in some cases teachers that are better than them.
Why do you think that discrepancy – again, the result kind of just levels out – but why do you think that discrepancy is?
Yeah, so we try really hard to get at this question in our paper and we have some limitations.
So we’re not really fully able to say, but the data suggests that it’s related to selection effects. So basically people who went through these traditional pathways are really interested in being a teacher and they’re really focused on how they can be the best teachers, kind of like a career or vocation for them. Whereas people who go through the alternative pathway may not be as serious.
So another one of our findings is that there are higher turnover rates for for-profit trained teachers than there are for standard trained teachers, meaning that they’re more likely to leave the teaching profession after a short period of time.
