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On a conference stage in February 2022, Aldine Independent School District Superintendent LaTonya Goffney pressed Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath about how the state would confront its growing teacher shortage.
“Are we prepared … to address the fact that we have a crisis at hand?” Goffney recalls asking Morath. “We have a task force for everything else. What are we doing about teachers?”
Exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Texas schools have been struggling for years to place high-quality, certified teachers in front of their students. Teacher turnover has increased and, as more experienced educators leave the profession, districts increasingly have relied on first-year and uncertified teachers.
Two weeks after Goffney’s questions, to her gratification, Gov. Greg Abbott announced the “Teacher Vacancy Task Force,” a group of teachers and education leaders charged with recommending how the state should address recruitment and retention challenges.
Educators hoped the findings could spur crucial fixes for the mounting struggles teachers face. But now, nearly a year after its conclusion, some have been left frustrated by a lack of state action on the task force’s major suggestions.
In its 39-page final report, the task force called on the Legislature to fund many of its key solutions, such as increasing teacher salaries, incentivizing people to enter the profession and improving working conditions. But lawmakers left their last session with a $33 billion budget surplus and minimal increased funding for public schools relative to the surplus size, after instead engaging in a months-long unsuccessful debate over school vouchers.
“You can talk, spend months together coming up with amazing plans and all of these recommendations, but unless someone does something, there is no impact,” said Goffney, who served on the task force. “The report is not going to do the work. We need people to lead, do the work and make it happen. I think that's the missed opportunity.”
Lawmakers serving as the chairs and vice chairs of both the House and Senate education committees did not respond to requests for comment.
Here are some of the largest solutions suggested by the task force, and where they stand today:
Increase teacher salaries
Key recommendations:
- Increase district funding to raise teacher salaries: Minimal action. The Legislature hasn't increased the basic allotment, the state's primary avenue for funding significant raises, since 2019.
- Raise the minimum teacher salary: No action. The minimum teacher salary remains $33,660.
- Update salary minimums so it doesn’t take 20 years for a teacher to reach $54,540: No action.
Districts received no help from the Legislature to act on the task force’s central suggestion to boost teacher compensation, which hinged on increased public school funding. That prospect died in the last legislative special session after lawmakers tied it to private school voucher legislation that never received enough support.
Now, public schools likely won’t see an increase in funding until 2025.
Dwayne Lacy, a social studies teacher at Katy ISD’s Beckendorff Junior High, said it was disappointing to see lawmakers lose sight of the task force’s recommendations and instead stay wrapped up in voucher debates.
“This task force … it was promising at first,” Lacy said. “It's disheartening. I wish important people in our Legislature and the governor would just really just see the teachers and what we're going through.”
Incentivize the profession
Key recommendations:
- Legislature should fund marketing campaigns and incentives that attract past educators back into teaching: No action.
- Legislature should fund a statewide application that tracks vacancies and open positions to simplify teachers’ job hunts: No action.
- Legislature should subsidize certification costs and fund hiring incentives for difficult-to-staff positions, including special education and bilingual teachers: No action.
- Difficult-to-staff educators should make more than the minimum salary in their first year: No action.
- Reduce the cost of healthcare insurance for retired teachers: Took action. Provided $5 billion in cost-of-living and other benefits increases for retired teachers, and dedicated nearly $600 million to keep insurance premiums steady.
Districts increasingly have taken unconventional routes to recruit teachers in recent years as they grapple with a shortage of experienced candidates.
The Legislature did not fund any of the suggestions the task force believed would bring more new and returning educators into the field. As such, hiring hasn't gotten any easier since the report offered solutions, Goffney said — district leaders have had to get creative with recruitment, including scouting for candidates overseas.
“It's a war for talent,” Goffney said. “It is brutal out here. A level of talent is competitive because the great teachers have choice. So there's a quality inequality.”
The Legislature did deliver for retired teachers, who had gone nearly 20 years without a cost-of-living adjustment.
Improve workplace culture
Key recommendations
- Expand access to counseling staff for students and teachers: House Bill 3 gave campuses $15,000 in school safety funds, which can be used for hiring mental health professionals — a sum critics have said is not sufficient as schools also struggle to fund other security requirements, such as placing an armed guard on every campus.
- Decrease the student-to-counselor ratio: The student-to-counselor ratio has decreased from 389:1 to 363:1. The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of 250:1.
- Help school administrators create schedules that increase time for teachers to plan: No action.
A 2023 TEA task force on mental health described a “staggering increase” in Texas students experiencing mental health issues, such as anxiety or depression, since the beginning of the pandemic. And as teachers across the state struggle to address students’ needs, they’ve called for more professional support to lighten the load, as well as increased care for their own wellbeing.
Jill Adams, president of the Texas School Counselor Association, said it’s most important that the state gets the student-to-counselor ratio down to the recommended level of 250 students per counselor, which would require the state to allocate much more funding for districts to hire additional counselors.
In its last session, the Legislature allocated $1.1 billion in school safety grants, as well as about $10 per student and $15,000 per campus to spend on school security and mental health support. But the law also makes security demands that districts are struggling to meet financially. Critics have argued that money for mental health support shouldn’t be tied to physical school safety funding.
For Halee Porter, a teacher at Houston ISD’s Northside High School, funding more mental health support feels crucial to keeping teachers in the profession.
“We're teachers, we're counselors, we're mamas, we're daddies, we're nurses, we're doctors, you name it — just in the course of a day,” Porter said. “We teachers need as much support as we can get. … All we want to know is that someone cares and someone is doing what they know that they can do to help better the working conditions.”
Correction, Jan. 26: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated some of the actions taken by Texas lawmakers during the 2023 legislative sessions. Lawmakers dedicated additional money to Texas public schools, though they did not allocate significant funds for teacher raises. This story has also been updated to provide additional context to the Legislature providing additional benefits to retired teachers and grants for school safety measures.
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