Texas has a teacher shortage, but that doesn’t stop the state from piling new requirements on teachers.
Brian Lopez of The Texas Tribune reports:
It was one thing to ask Texas teachers — during an ongoing teacher’s shortage — to make extra room in their busy home routines for online classroom teaching for months, then to monitor the latest in vaccine and mask mandates while waiting and adjusting yet again for a return to the classroom.
But now, as teachers attempt to restore all the learning lost by their students during the pandemic, the Texas Legislature has insisted those who teach grades K-3 need to jump another hurdle: they need to complete a 60-to-120 hour course on reading, known as Reading Academies, if they want to keep their jobs in 2023.
And they must do it on their own time, unpaid.
For many like 38-year-old Christina Guerra, a special education teacher in the Rio Grande Valley, the course requirement is the final straw and it is sending teachers like her and others out the door.
“I don’t want to do it,” she said. “I refuse to, and if they fire me, they fire me.”
Course adds to teacher workload
In 2019, the Legislature wanted to improve student reading scores and came up with a requirement that teachers complete this reading skills course. Every teacher working in early elementary grades — kindergarten through third — along with principals, had until the end of the 2022-23 school year to complete it.
Governor Greg Abbott is not satisfied with the performance of Texas students on NAEP. But Texas has a growing crisis of teacher shortages.
But the pressures of the pandemic have forced many teachers to reconsider whether to remain in the profession. From 2010 to 2019, the number of teachers certified in Texas fell by about 20%, according to a University of Houston report.
After recent reports of more teacher departures, Gov. Greg Abbott formed a task force to address teacher shortages.
But teachers and public education advocates alike believe the state should hold itself accountable for the teacher departures, especially when adding requirements that add to teacher workload.
“I just feel like a lemon just squeezing, squeezing, squeezing,” said Guerra, a special education teacher in La Joya Independent School District. “But there’s no more, there’s nothing that you squeeze out anymore. There’s no more juice.”
Guerra plans to leave the profession at the end of the school year.
One way to increase the teacher shortage is to crack down on teachers, demanding more while paying less.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wonder WHAT company and WHO will make $$$$$?????
Grifters are at work.
Someone got a kickback, doubtless. Or had a cousin or golfing buddy who would benefit.
Whoever offers the course the teachers need to read. Public university profs also have to take more and more training courses each year: security, Title IX, diversity, etc. They are mindless, poorly designed by various private companies.
Texas is sure making a name for itself. Maybe it is something in the water. Or maybe they have too much lead in their water pipes, the same kind of thing that led to the fall of Rome according to some research. Whatever it is a sad commentary on the “intellect” of the politicians there – and elsewhere –
and worse for the future of the U. S.
soon there will no teachers in the state…all they do is fuss and punish
Teachers should be able to update their skills through continuing education programs. Some school districts offer continuing education through in-house conference days in which teachers are paid. Some states like New York require teachers to have a master’s degree that is paid for by the teacher. However, as a result of having completed the degree, the teacher is compensated by moving up a step or two on the compensation scale. Most school districts in the South do not offer too many opportunities for increasing salaries through additional training. Leave to Abbott to issue a mandate and a threat. According to the article, some districts have money to offer scholarships to teachers, and the TEA website mentions the availability of some state scholarships.
My grandson’s school in Texas was closed for two weeks in the beginning of March. However, since my grandson did not take the STAAR last year, he was required to attend an intensive test prep week. It is counter productive to spend so much time, money and energy on testing that means nothing in the real world. High stakes testing is undermining public schools and destroying its true mission which is to educate.
My opinion has always been that standardized testing is the root cause of this whole mess…..It is the Hydra. Slay the Hydra and the tentacles will die.
Amen
“. . . Gov. Greg Abbott formed a task force to address teacher shortages.”
Wonder how many public school teachers will be on that committee?
Anyone know the composition of the “task force” (I guess their task is to force teachers to accept whatever nonsense they come up with.)
https://tea.texas.gov/about-tea/news-and-multimedia/news-releases/news-2022/tea-announces-immediate-expansion-of-teacher-vacancy-task-force-to-include-two-dozen-additional-texas-public-school-teachers It had two teachers initially and then they added more after teachers started screaming bloody hell. But the teacher they put in charge of it has testified before the state leg that it is a GOOD idea to use pay-for-performance schemes that tie teacher raises to test scores like Dallas ISD does. So, any Texas teacher with a lick of sense can see right through this task force charade. It’s either an election year ruse or a backhanded way to take the pay-for-performance statewide. Not a lot of hope things will actually get better for teachers here anytime soon.
It’s called stacking the deck in poker. Hmmm. . . where can we find some more marks for our con?
Well said, Duane!
Nailed it, Duane!
Teacher pay is so low, compared to the pay in other professions, that many teachers live paycheck to paycheck, and an added expense like this is a significant burden. In my penultimate year of teaching, I was told that I was going to teach the AP English course, which prepares students for the AP exam, and that I would have to attend in person the College Board’s course for AP English teachers, a summer workshop that costs $775, and I would have to pay for this, take the course, and then–this would be months later–submit a form for reimbursement.
Your reimbursement would likely be based on how many students you could persuade to submit themselves to the abuse of the Common Bore AP class (monotony) so that they could be rated on a scale of 1-5 on the ridiculous and confusing test. No lie, my daughter told me when she took the test that one area was a long reading about the history of concrete….talk about boredom!
David Coleman. He’s the gift that keeps on giving, huh?
I think as a teenager I would have preferred watching paint dry more than reading about the history of concrete and then trying to answer some slick, trick questions to try and score a “5”. At least with watching paint dry, one has the ability to imagine or daydream a better situation to fend off the boredom.
Amen, Lisa!
And then there was the requirement to take 300 hours of English as a Second Language “training” (Roll over. Sit up. Bark. Good boy) in order to maintain certification in English. 300 hours is a lot. But understanding how to approach teaching ESL/ELL students must be valuable, right?
Well, it sounds like it would be until you get into the classes and find that the extensive, posted, required readings and exercises are FULL of basic errors in fact about language and history and law and often barely intelligible because they are so full of errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, paragraphing, formatting, organization, and so on. The courses required that after each set of readings, one had to write and submit a “Reflection.” I took to simply sending for these long, long lists of error corrections.
At the same time, I was required by my district to compile a roughly 800-page documentation of my teaching based on extremely explicit instructions, showing how I was doing things like addressing the standards, addressing multiple intelligences, addressing issues experienced by kids with IEPs, blah blah blah blah.
This on top of preparing, for each class of my FIVE weekly preps, a three-page lesson plan and submitting these on Monday morning.
This on top of preparing for each semester an extensive required document on my goals for growth during the year and an extensive required reflection on how well I had met those goals at the end of each.
This on top of doing car line duty. And doing test prep coaching on my prep period and after school. And mentoring clubs.
And preparing data walls and conducting data chats.
I could go on. And somewhere in all that I was supposed actually to do some teaching.
All for A FIFTH of my salary in my previous job in a publishing house.
The Texas Reading Academies promise that upon successful completion of these courses, which cost $400 or $3,000, depending on which path the teacher takes, the teacher will be “steeped in evidence-based reading strategies (STR).”
You know, like a teabag.
A lot of what is being pushed in red states is the so-called science of reading, i.e. phonics.
And one of the worst parts of this is that the “trainings” will be a regurgitation of the idiotic stuff that teachers already had forced down their throats in their college teacher prep courses (you know, like a goose with her feet nailed to the floor and forcefed to produce fois gras). Looking over the outlines for the “trainings” on the Texas site, one can see that it’s the same-old, same-old moronic stuff typically shoveled out in these “reading” classes by people who have very little understanding of what reading actually entails, of what being able to read well actually requires. “Strategies instruction.” What a load of utter BS, and here’s why:
Implementing SEL STRs with ELLs! Why are there so many of these jargony abbreviations in educationese? Because they create a veneer, a facade, of in-group “evidence-based” “scientificy” understanding where there are really airy nothings not based in any real understanding of what reading involves. It’s like the incessant Ed Reform use of the word “data” to describe results from clearly invalid tests.
This is an oldie, but it gets at what is done in most of these “trainings”:
Well said!
Teachers should have already had to take at least one Methods of Teaching Reading course to receive their credential. California went through this with the LDS which turned into the CLAD (teachers could pay $100 to switch the title on a new certificate) to teach ESL. Many tenured teachers refused to get the certificate so counselors could not assign them “Sheltered” or ESL classes, which was fine with those teachers. Now it is folded into the basic teaching credential. Needs within a school or district will change, but the state should pay for professional development and within school hours.
Even before No Child Left Behind, teachers in California were required to take a certain number of approved classes and/or workshops every year that were supped to improve our teaching skills and we had to prove it or lose our license and our job as teachers.
We took those classes after school and during the summers. Most of those classes or workshops were nothing but a waste of time and fodder for snoozing.
The state also made those requirements more demanding over time.
In 300 hours of required online ESL “training,” I learned ONE thing I didn’t know before, the precise wording of the laws requiring that training. That’s it. There was lots of other stuff, ofc, but often it was really boneheaded, completely wrong. As I mentioned, I was required after each set of readings to write, for these courses, a Reflection on the Readings. Here’s a sample of one of the “reflections” that I produced:
Reflections on reading entitled “The Evolution of Grammar”
This article begins with a usage error (in its title). It’s not a piece about “the evolution of grammar” but, rather, a piece that aims to be about the evolution of theories of grammar. An article about “the evolution of English grammar” would describe how Anglo-Saxon grammar evolved into Medieval English grammar, which evolved into Renaissance-era Early Modern English grammar, etc. It might describe, for example, how English lost most of its inflections over this period, for it was originally a highly inflected language, like Latin or Greek.
The article purports to treat the “three main theoretical perspectives of [sic] grammar since [sic] the nineteenth century.” The author probably meant to refer to “the three main theoretical perspectives on grammar from the nineteenth century on.” The author seems to be a bit confused about the origins of language and of so-called traditional grammar. Oddly, he (or she) speaks of grammar originating “when language was founded,” as though language were a phenomenon, like the United States or the Standard Oil Company, that had a founder or founders. He (or she) speaks of traditional grammar books being “first codified in the eighteenth century.” However, it was not the books but, rather, the rules of grammar that were codified, and these were so codified long, long before the eighteenth century. A quick check of Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica would have told the author that codification of rules of grammar is quite ancient. Traditional grammars of Sanskrit and Tamil were produced in the period from the 6th to the 2nd centuries BCE. What the young person (I assume it was a young person) who wrote this piece probably read about, somewhere, but misunderstood is that in the eighteenth century, several traditional English grammars appeared. These were based on traditional Latin and Greek grammars produced over the preceding couple of millennia. But even if one confines oneself to traditional grammars of English, the first of these appeared long before the eighteenth century. Again, Wikipedia would have told the author that William Bullokar’s Pamphlet for Grammar, which might have been the first traditional English grammar, was published in 1586.
The author makes the claim that traditional grammar “consists of” prescription. This is not, of course, what he or she meant to say. He or she meant that traditional grammar was prescriptive, which it was and is.
After am extraordinarily weak discussion of parsing and sentence diagramming as parts of traditional grammar, the author then proceeds to a mischaracterization of structural grammar. The author says that “Leonard Bloomfield is said to be responsible for beginning this movement,” but, of course, it was Ferdinand de Saussure who founded structuralist grammar in the lectures that became his Course in General Linguistics (1916). The author fails to establish, at the beginning of his description of structuralist grammar, the key principle of the grammar, which is that of dichotomous, contrasting features. He (or she) mentions Zelig Harris’s technique of defining word categories by their appropriateness for various structural positions within utterances, but he (or she) fails to contrast this technique with the method of determination of word class used in traditional grammar, which was to attempt (and fail) to define word classes semantically rather than structurally. (An amusing discussion of this failure of traditional grammars, down to and including the school grammars used today, can be found in Otto Jespersen’s The Philosophy of Grammar (1924).
The description in this reading of transformational generative grammar is hopelessly confused and full of typos. It is confined almost entirely to a very early instantiation of the grammar known today not as transformational generative grammar in general but, rather, as phrase structure grammar. The early version of the theory described here has been dramatically revised through a number of instantiations, culminating in government and binding and principles and parameters theory and (most recently) in Chomsky’s minimalist program. Most textbook discussions of generative grammar now present government and binding and principles and parameters theory as the standard current version of the theory. The characterization of generative grammar presented here is about 30 years or so out of date. Evidently, the author was working from some old source.
So, the only takeaway that I have from this piece that might influence my teaching is a reiteration of Pope’s observation that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and that one should not ask an inexperienced person to prepare a standard encyclopedia-type discussion of a complex subject that he or she knows very little about.
If people are going to require these “trainings,” they should, at a minimum, pay for them and make certain that they are substantive and accurate and that people walk away from them with actual news they can use.
My sister took workshop classes in the summers/breaks to earn a “masters equivalency” in education (state of MD). She was paid accordingly. Unfortunately, she needed to move to another state. The new state didn’t recognize her “masters equivalency” on top of being a state that paid teachers a lot less. It’s a good thing the cost of living was a lot less in the new state….at that point in her life she was basically working for the health benefits for her and her husband until retirement. Teachers get screwed!
Yeah, I went through this repeatedly as I moved from teaching jobs in Indiana, New Hampshire, and Florida. And even within these states where I was certified, certification requirements changed ex post facto. Of course, certification requirements are LEGAL requirements, and ex post facto laws are forbidden at both the national and state levels by Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States.
So, for example, after I first graduated with my B.A. in English from Indiana University, I applied for and received what was called on the certificate itself a “Lifetime Certification in English, 9-12.” I later found out that they had decided later to make those “lifetime certifications” not “lifetime” and that my Indiana certification had lapsed.
Curious if this applies to charter and virtual school teachers as well. Obviously, training in the teaching of reading is a good thing–especially if it is good training. But imagine a hospital telling its staff “You must get 120 hours of training in the treatment of Covid-but you MUST do it at your own expense and on your own time.” The right-wing assault on public education continues unabated.
And imagine if that mandatory, unpaid training was in using oleander and Jim Bakker’s Silver Solution to treat Covid. That’s what this Texas stuff looks like to me. See the links I posted above.
Drs have to do this all the time. They have to keep their CV up to date yearly. Fortunately for them, drug companies, medical equipment companies etc pay for the “in services” and they usually have a swanky dinner/lunch or golf component added for extra fun (sometimes even a full weekend golf affair!). Teachers have to pay for their crappy in services and then are mandated to spread the manure far and wide within their classrooms.
Only private school teachers, to my knowledge, are exempt.
Teachers have had a year from hell.
Texas is just trying to kill their teachers – in multiple ways.
sad.
The teaching shortage is tied to these types of unreasonable exoectations of unpaid labor and working conditions. No private sector job would require you to work unpaid and provide your own supplies.
The answer seems to always be make it easier to “become” or get certified as a teacher to enlarge the applicant pool, never to improve working conditions. I wonder why. Until they get serious about improving working conditions, they will need to lower the bar to entering the profession until there are no qualifications.
I was made aware of this course by teacher friends last night. It is asinine to require this of teachers, unpaid on their own time. Our teachers are overworked already, and all nearing burnout. As a nurse I am paid for my continuing education, this should apply to teachers as well. I seriously hope they rethink this course