Email, Clay Robison, public affairs specialist, Texas State Teachers Association, Jan. 12, 2018

12:19 p.m.

Attached is a table prepared by the State Board for Educator Certification showing where the new teachers came from for each of the last five years for which they had data, ending with the 2015-16 school year. The middle category, University Undergraduate, denotes those new teachers who were certified by getting a college degree in education. The first category, alternative, denotes those teachers who didn’t get a college degree in education but got a degree in chemistry, English or something else and then went through an alternative program to get their teacher certification.

The red column with percentages is the work of TSTA’s researcher, who compared those two categories for each year, showing that the number of new teachers with alternative certification has been  growing, reaching 60 percent by 2015-16. This is what we based our candidate question on: “A majority of incoming teachers no longer graduate from college with education degrees.” The others have degrees, but they don’t have degrees in education. Andrew White or someone on his staff may have failed to see the differentiation. I don’t know. But TSTA certainly applauds White’s interest in raising teacher pay and finding a way to pay for it. Texas teachers, on average, are paid about $6,300 below the national average, based on the National Education Association’s most recent estimates of state budgetary data for 2016-17. Average teacher pay in Texas for 2016-17 was estimated by NEA at $52,575, or 26th in the country. TSTA is NEA’s Texas affiliate.

We didn’t include the Out-of-State or University Post-Baccalaureate categories in our calculations because we don’t know what kind of undergraduate degrees those teachers had. Some out-of-state teachers take jobs in Texas after receiving alternative certification because they don’t have degrees in education either. The University Post-Baccalaureate category includes teachers who stayed in school for graduate work in education and others who pursued other careers and then went back to school to get graduate degrees in education. If you combine them with the University Undergraduate category, the sum still is less than the alternative certification category.

The alternative certification programs vary, but generally they include an exam in the relevant subject matter and internships.

I don’t know where White came up with the Texas education ranking of 43rd in the nation. It did not come from our questionnaire. We have a question on education funding in our questionnaire, but it notes that Texas ranks 36th in funding (ADA) per pupil. Texas spent an estimated $10,017 in student per ADA in 2016-17, or $2,555 below the national average. This is based on the same National Education Association report cited above, and that, in turn, is based on official budgetary data collected from all the states and the District of Columbia.

...

Clay Robison

Texas State Teachers Association