Texas learns lessons from for-profit alternative teacher certification

Q. What makes Texas a good place to examine teacher certification?

Texas is unique for two reasons. One is that Texas was really the originator of for-profit teacher certification programs. They are very popular in Texas, and they've been around for a long time. They exist in some new states now, but that hasn't always been the case.

The second part is that I'm using Texas administrative data to answer these questions [about alternative certification]. Texas is unique in terms of U.S. states in the type of data that it has. [Within the bounds of confidentiality], the data allows us to track individuals into the classroom and see what kind of students they teach. We can also look at different information about those teachers, like what their college majors were and all those sorts of things. That's really something you can't do in other states.

Q. What are these for-profit programs, and why did we need them?

Why Texas allowed these for-profit teacher training programs to operate is the first part of answering that question. The teaching profession has faced shortages for a very long time. Teacher shortages are essentially difficulty filling vacancies with highly qualified individuals. Back in the early 2000s, when these for-profit programs began to operate in Texas, there were teacher shortages.

The federal government was seeking more accountability with [the] No Child Left Behind [Act of 2001] rules [requiring certification and demonstrated subject-matter competency]. Texas had both teacher shortages and a desire to have more highly qualified individuals teaching. Those two things essentially came together [in such a way] that Texas wanted to create flexibility in the provision of teacher certification. That really opened the door to for-profit certification programs.

Q. Before for-profit certification, didn’t teachers mostly come out of college with a degree in education?

That would be what is considered essentially the standard or traditional pathway to teacher certification. And these for-profit programs are different in that they're an alternative pathway. They're really targeted for individuals who already have a bachelor's degree but want to become teachers. They just need the teacher training portion of teacher certification.

These programs are pretty short. Essentially, there's a couple of months of accelerated teacher training for them to learn the content that they're expected to teach. If they want to be a math teacher, they're going to be taking coursework on math classes. They will then take a teacher certification exam.

If they pass, they'll get a probationary license, and they can teach as instructor of record for a full year. At the end of that, they'll be a fully certified teacher once they [pass] their final license exams.

Q. How has hiring for these kinds of teachers been?

The model is working; they're definitely getting hired. It's working as intended in terms of [addressing the use of] uncertified teachers.

School districts, if they can't find somebody to teach in a classroom, they'll use substitute teachers or uncertified teachers. The for-profit [certified] teachers have replaced a lot of uncertified teachers.

Q. How much does it cost to gain certification via the for-profit route?

It costs about $6,000 for the total program. There's some form of a smaller upfront fee, like $100 to begin the program and coursework once you secure your teaching position. The for-profits then essentially deduct a certain amount out of your paycheck. So, you're really not required to take out any loans upfront to pay for these programs.

That's in contrast to the standard way of becoming a teacher, where you get an education major at a college or university. You take out lots of loans, and you have to pay per credit hour for the coursework that you're taking. It has to be paid upfront.

Q. In your research, what was the central question you wanted to answer?

My coauthor, Evan Riehl, and I really wanted to know, did the policy work as Texas intended it? Did these for-profit programs expand access to the teaching profession? Did they certify more people in the state of Texas? We also wanted to know, who were they certifying? What did those teachers look like? Were they very similar to the people who went through traditional pathways, or were they different both in terms of their [background] characteristics and also their quality? Were they lower-quality teachers? And finally, we wanted to really understand, how did this impact students? What happened to student achievement?

As of 2019, half of all the people who get newly certified in a given year are being certified through for-profit programs. They're also more likely to be older than the traditionally certified teachers. Their first [teacher] certification is happening in their late 20s, on average. Whereas, for traditional teachers, it's in their early 20s. They [for-profit-trained teachers] are recent college graduates, and they're also just more diverse than traditional teachers—more likely to be male and more likely to be Black.

They're more likely to be teaching at higher grade levels, which tend to have a harder time [attracting teachers], such as high schools. Most of the people who go through the traditional programs want to work with younger kids.

For-profit-trained teachers are also more likely to teach in schools that have predominantly economically disadvantaged students. And they're also more likely to be teaching in schools that have a lower share of white students; in other words, more minority schools.

Q. Do for-profit-trained teachers remain on the job as long as traditionally trained teachers?

For-profit-trained teachers are 10 percentage points less likely to be working in a Texas public school [five years after certification] relative to standard-trained teachers. Standard-trained teachers may stay in the teaching profession for longer than alternatively trained teachers because they view it as a lifetime career. Many alternatively trained teachers are career-switchers, and they're kind of trying out something new. It may or may not suit them to be in the teaching profession for a longer period of time.

Q. How does student achievement fare?

There are a couple of ways of thinking about the effects of for-profit-trained teachers on student achievement. In the data, we can ask for each teacher, how good are they at influencing student achievement test scores? And then the other way is just looking at how students fare on net under this policy.

For-profit-trained teachers are lower quality than standard-trained teachers. They don't improve student test scores as much. But they are also better than the uncertified teachers that they often replace.

Ultimately, on net, these two effects kind of wash out. And so really, students are neither helped nor harmed by the for-profit certification policy because if they didn't have the certified teacher, they would have an uncertified teacher. Their achievement is not as high as in the classroom taught by a traditionally trained teacher, but they're still better off with a [for-profit] certified teacher than an uncertified one.

Q. What are the public policy implications of your findings?

There are about 10 states that allow for-profit teacher certification programs to operate. Every state has some form of governing body over teacher certifications. How they operate in different states is going to look very different than in Texas. But overall, what we're finding is that these for-profit [certification] programs lower the cost of becoming a teacher and increase the number of certified teachers in Texas. And it doesn't come at the cost of student achievement. So, we think it's certainly worth other states looking into adopting similar policies.

As far as oversight, Texas takes a very free-market approach to this. They're really hands off, so these for-profit programs are allowed to operate kind of however they wish. That's not quite as true in other states that have allowed for-profit programs. Some of these for-profit companies exist in multiple states. So, there's one for-profit program that operates both in Texas and Michigan, for example. In Michigan, the entire program from start to finish takes three years before teachers are fully certified.

We haven't looked at other states as part of our research. Part of that is because these for-profit programs aren't as popular in other states. But that's presumably in part because they take longer. Part of the desirability of the for-profits that operate in Texas is that they really fast-track a prospective teacher.

Q. Are there ancillary costs of the for-profit certification model?

We're looking at kind of the flip side of certification: What happens if a [prospective] teacher fails a certification exam? Our preliminary findings show that this really delays entry into the teaching profession, which is costly, though initially failing a certification exam is ultimately not correlated with how good a teacher is at instructing students.

This is an edited and abridged version of a conversation available on the Southwest Economy Podcast. For more information about the for-profit certification process, please see the study paper.