Jessica McLoughlin, associate commissioner at the Texas Education Agency, explained that this document serves as the state’s aspirational vision for what effective preparation in Texas entails.
In addition, Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Teacher Vacancy Taskforce, established in 2022, examined teacher retention and recruitment challenges. The taskforce’s final report outlined priorities to improve the quality of educator preparation in Texas, including support for teacher residency pathways.
Together, the Effective Preparation Framework and Teacher Vacancy Taskforce Report drove a set of rulemaking with the Texas State Board for Educator Certification and programmatic initiatives to ensure all educator preparation programs across the state achieve the state’s vision for effective teacher preparation.
Raising expectations for clinical practice
The Texas State Board for Educator Certification recently approved several new regulations designed to build out support and requirements for new teachers in alignment with the vision set forth in the Effective Preparation Framework.
- Enhanced certification for candidates who complete residency: This certification will recognize that people who have gone through a residency program have stronger preparation than those who went through a fast-track program with minimal clinical practice. Earning this certification requires that candidates meet additional requirements around the length of clinical experiences and the number of observations with feedback. Texas invested in compensating teacher residents completing this program using federal ESSER COVID recovery funding, and TEA is currently providing support to districts to establish systems to sustain these programs when federal funding ends. The Texas Legislature also considered, but did not pass, several proposals (including HB1) to pay teachers who completed a residency program on a higher salary schedule, which would incentivize aspiring teachers to pursue this more robust route into the classroom.
- Support for late-hire candidates: Recognizing that teachers who enter the classroom without clinical experience are at a disadvantage, the state now requires that prep programs provide additional support for late-hire candidates (defined as those who are accepted into a prep program and hired as a teacher of record less than 45 days before the start of the school year), in the form of two observations with feedback within eight weeks of the teacher’s start date.
- Informal observations: The state requires that program supervisors conduct at least three informal observations per semester, including providing feedback. Further, the first observation must be in the first six weeks of teaching. While the first observation must be in person, the state allows the remaining informal observations to be virtual, easing the burden for program supervisors whose student teachers are geographically diverse.
- Increase field-based preservice hours: The state now requires at least 50 hours of field-based experiences (up from 30 hours) prior to full-time student teaching, although these can include a wide variety of activities (e.g., summer school, substitute teaching).
Ryan Franklin, senior director of policy and advocacy with Educate Texas, believes the benefits of these steps are clear:
“New educators who’ve had a more rigorous prep experience get to the other side, see the struggles of educators who didn’t have those experiences, and recognize that their hard work was worthwhile.”Ryan Franklin, senior director of policy and advocacy with Educate Texas
Stipends for teacher residents
The state has made a concerted effort to make residencies not only the gold standard for preparation but also the most financially beneficial approach for aspiring teachers. TEA has vetted 37 preparation programs that offer residency programs in partnership with local education agencies (LEAs) across the state. This work was initially funded by grants supported by federal ESSER COVID recovery funds, but as those funds expire, close to 80% of LEAs expect to be able to sustainably fund these residency stipends.
To fund these stipends, TEA suggests a range of different strategic staffing models. TEA works with districts during a “design year” in which they identify the model that is best suited to their needs and work with districts’ chief financial officers and other leaders to determine how to allocate district funding to pay for the work. After pressure testing the approach for a year, the state provides technical assistance during a second year of implementation, helping solve any challenges that arise so that districts can sustain the model moving forward.
Data systems to understand the teacher pipeline
Texas stands out for its work to build strong and transparent data systems. TEA publishes a set of educator prep program data dashboards (work that they credit to the statutory requirements for educator prep program accountability and public data collection passed by the 81st Texas legislature) on a range of topics, including candidates’ completion rates, employment, and retention outcomes. The data system also provides indicators related to clinical practice, including the frequency and quality of observations. The state has also created data dashboards available to prep programs with detailed information about their own candidates, including employment, retention, and student growth outcomes. In a future phase of work, TEA plans to support prep programs in using more specific information about program experiences related to clinical practice to better understand which program activities (e.g., required hours of clinical practice, number of observations) are associated with better outcomes.
“Data are playing in conversations because we can establish common language around challenges, what’s working and what’s not. There’s a shared understanding of basic descriptive statistics about the state of play and student outcomes; we’re better positioned to have a discussion about the impact of educator prep in the state than we have ever been before.”Ryan Franklin, senior director of policy and advocacy with Educate Texas
Outcomes
As the new regulations were adopted in spring 2024 and will not go into effect until fall 2024, the state does not yet have outcomes to share.
Advice
- Look for opportunities to focus on teacher quality: The conversation for the last few years has been around teacher shortages, perhaps driven by increased hiring stemming from the influx of pandemic relief funds. As that funding ends, districts may be hiring less and may even need to downsize their teacher workforce. This may provide an opportunity to focus on teacher quality and close the revolving door of underprepared teachers.
- Identify proof points: Texas has partnered with US PREP, TPI-US, and Deans for Impact, all of which have been able to share examples of how teacher prep programs can make meaningful changes to their approach to preparation and clinical practice.