My eldest daughter wanted to be a teacher. She admires her own instructors, and she thought she could build a meaningful career working in special education. But when she shared her hopes with teachers we know, their reactions were uniform: Don’t.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love the kids, but I don’t think you want to box yourself into this job. It’s not what it used to be—not what you think.” “There are other careers where you can serve kids and have a much more stable life—better pay, better working conditions, better work-life balance. Choose one of those!” “You’re a smart girl! Keep your options open.”
The first time this happened, I thought maybe we’d caught the teacher on a bad day. But then it just kept happening. Every time the subject came up, teachers tried to dissuade her from joining their ranks. No one responded with enthusiasm. At every turn, she was discouraged and redirected by the people doing the very work she thought she might want to do.
I’d like to think that this is an aberration—that it’s just the teachers in our circles or our town. The numbers say it’s not. My state of Texas is losing (12.9%) more teachers than it can hire (11.8%) each year.
And it isn’t only Texas. According to a report published by the University of Houston last March, teacher shortages are a national problem that has worsened since the pandemic. The number of people becoming teachers just hasn’t kept pace with attrition rates. The reasons, the study notes, are myriad: “issues of stressful or unsupportive working conditions, increased expectations and accountability, noncompetitive pay, few opportunities for upward mobility, and a declining reputation of the profession.”
As a citizen and mother alike, I find this alarming. What does it say about our schools if so many educators are so unhappy with the reality of their work? If they’re leaving the profession and warning would-be teachers like my daughter to change course?
Forget debates over reading instruction and dubious EdTech programs and “new math” and educational culture wars: If we don’t have quality teachers, we won’t have quality schools. Unless we’ve resigned ourselves to a robotic future, everything we decide about how our public schools should work is always downstream of the living, breathing human beings standing in front of our children.
For those of us not in education, it can be easy to miss just how unusual and difficult the work can be.
If you’re a teacher, you can’t go meet a friend for a workday lunch. You can’t switch your meetings to Zoom to stay home with a sick child. You can’t get to work late or leave a little early to snag that last-minute dental appointment. Teachers have very little flexibility in an age when the majority of workers—especially college-educated professionals—want a flexible job.
And saying yes to teaching costs more than your freedom and flexibility. It might cost you an eye, as more and more children with significant behavioral issues are taught in overcrowded and under-resourced classrooms.
I spoke with a veteran teacher—gifted and passionate about education—who resigned from her job in our community’s public schools this past year. She’s leaving public school for two primary reasons. First is the parents: too often angry and disrespectful and inclined to blame teachers for students’ poor grades and behavior. And then the bureaucracy: At the state and district level alike, endless hunger for more data means more reporting responsibilities for teachers on top of instruction. Not only was this time-consuming, but it also often required one-size-fits-all classroom practices that ran counter to what this teacher believed her students needed.
And don’t forget the pay: Texas ranks 29th in the nation for teacher compensation, and when adjusted for inflation, during the 2025–26 school year the average Texas teacher was paid “3.67 percent less than in 2017.” Teachers have an unusually challenging job, yet their wage growth does not keep up with other industries. According to an essay published last year in The Washington Post, “2 in 5 educators have a second job, and a majority—77 percent—used their own funds for student needs in the 2023–2024 academic year.” Teachers are commonly expected to pay for their own classroom supplies—a functional pay cut—or badger parents to chip in. What other workplace would run this way?
With the Teacher Incentive Allotment, Texas has tried to structure pay standards to reward the highest-performing teachers who consistently raise student achievement. (My own district has more than 60 teachers who make over $100,000 a year thanks to this program.)
But how do you fairly assess teacher efficacy? Standardized tests are controversial, and the same teacher putting in the same effort will see different results with different student populations. A class of native English speakers, for instance, is obviously in a different position than a class of recently arrived immigrants who primarily speak other languages. Furthermore, not every subject-matter teacher is eligible. How can a pay scale control for so many factors?
In practice, the standards are notoriously vague and ever shifting—in some cases, totally unknown. Houston Independent School District, which is controlled by the state education agency due to chronic failures, didn’t reveal its performance-based pay structures for the 2026–27 school year until after the teacher contractual start date, which meant some Houston teachers were asked to report to their campuses for work not knowing what their compensation package for the year would be. Put more plainly: The teachers were asked to honor a contract the state could not articulate.
This isn’t a new frustration. The state has a history of moving the accountability goalposts mid-season, even facing a lawsuit a few years ago for holding teachers accountable for the “arbitrary application of new measures without the required advanced notice.”
In conversations I’ve had with teachers across the state, I hear a common refrain: They welcome high standards. What’s wearing them down is being expected to meet ever-shifting performance objectives with a workload the state educators’ association has described as “so above what can be humanly done.” They’re held to a professional standard that those above them, at the district and state level, fail to meet—required to produce outcomes that the state itself struggles to define, fund, and sustain. As a result, teachers and parents across Texas have lost trust in the state’s educational leadership, so much so that it’s become a central campaign issue in the governor’s race this fall.
In a climate like this, is it any surprise that so few teacher candidates are in the pipeline?
Now, about that pipeline: Like most states, Texas has developed alternative certification programs over recent decades in an attempt to bolster teacher recruitment. This can look like allowing people with bachelor’s degrees to teach while pursuing certification, generally a 12-to-18-month process even in the faster programs. This puts subject matter experts in classrooms quickly and can be wonderful—when things go well.
But it also means thousands of Texas educators have been allowed to teach for years without ever getting certified. Some of these teachers undoubtedly have genuine and understandable barriers to finishing their certification programs. Others have discovered that schools are so desperate to “have a heartbeat” in classrooms, they don’t have to complete the certification process to keep their jobs.
While certification doesn’t guarantee good teaching, it does provide baseline instruction in classroom management, lesson planning, pedagogy, instructional practices, and other important skills that teachers need to be successful. It’s more than a box to be checked.
New Texas legislation aims to ensure teachers follow through with certification. But Texas has already reached a tipping point: By the 2023–24 school year, according to a recent report published by the University of Texas, 52 percent of our new classroom teachers had not completed any certification programs. Compare that to 2013–14, when only 10 percent of new Texas teachers were uncertified.
The lack of preparation shows up in the classroom. According to the same report, “students lost 3–4 months of learning in math and reading … when they had an uncertified teacher with no classroom experience.”
And it seems teachers feel unsuccessful, too. According to the report, fully 30 percent of uncertified teachers leave after their first year of teaching. After five years, another 31 percent are gone, leaving only 39 percent of uncertified teachers in classrooms. For comparison, 76 percent of teachers who completed university certification programs last five years. Allowing teachers to remain uncertified serves no one well.
How can we get more certified teachers, with all the goods they bring?
I spoke with Jennifer Seybert, dean of the College of Education at University of Texas Permian Basin (UTPB). After a 26-year career as a teacher, principal, and district leader, she left public education for higher education to prepare teachers to serve the region’s public schools. Her team is searching for solutions to the certification problem now.
“Every single day I wake up and worry that today’s the day we’re going off the tracks because it’s so close to the shortage overtaking the schools,” Seybert told me. “I just want to solve the teacher shortage problem in our region before I retire. I don’t know if that’s possible, but with some things that we’ve turned out recently, I’m hopeful.”
Seybert’s plan starts with recognizing what doesn’t work. Last fall she attended the mandatory UTPB orientation for incoming freshman and asked a group of 200 students how many of them planned to major in education. One hand went up in the crowd. Going to teacher recruiting fairs in Dallas or Houston and trying to convince young people to move to West Texas also falls flat, Seybert said.
She’s come to think a more viable solution is already close to the classroom: recruit the teacher’s aides, office assistants, and substitute teachers who are already invested in our schools. “We’re asking our districts to send us all of the names and contact information of people already working in their schools who aren’t credentialed or not degreed or working in a different capacity,” Seybert said, “and let us talk to them.”
The schools are on board. “Our district partners really believe that the people that they already have in their schools are the right people,” she continued. “They might not be in the right seat, and they might not have the right training. But if we work together, we can solve the problem.” One early success: A UTPB student named Larry is going from substitute teacher in my daughter’s middle school to a fully credentialed college graduate at 67 years old. He hopes to teach into his 70s.
Meanwhile, local foundations have partnered with the university to fund programs addressing teacher shortages. One program covers all the costs for uncertified educators with bachelor’s degrees to remain in their regions’ classrooms while earning their teacher certifications. Another allows school district employees without bachelor’s degrees to apply within their districts for a federally recognized apprenticeship program. If accepted, they can continue working at their campuses while getting fully funded bachelor’s degrees in education.
None of this solves teacher-shortage problems for the school year that starts this month. But it does give Seybert hope for the future.
With each new batch of new graduates she sends into our region’s classrooms, she’s improving outcomes for local students—and helping new teachers too. A few weeks ago, Seybert recalled, she was talking with a man who will finish his bachelor’s degree and student teaching this fall after working as a teacher’s assistant in a nearby school district for 30 years. He’s excited about graduating, he said, and excited about tripling his salary, too.
“It’s more than just ‘Now we have somebody in a school that’s highly qualified and highly credentialed,’” Seybert explained. “We’re changing the trajectory of his life as well. It makes a community impact because we have fewer people living below the poverty line.”
My eldest starts her sophomore year of high school in a few weeks, and if you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she’ll currently tell you she wants to be an occupational therapist or maybe a speech therapist. And maybe one of those will be the path she chooses.
But earlier this month, she met Mrs. Walls, the life skills teacher at her high school who educates medically fragile kids. And in this meeting, for the first time since she expressed interest in teaching, my daughter encountered an educator who talks about her work as a calling and a mission, a woman eager to help my daughter discern “her path forward in helping some of the good Lord’s most precious gifts to us!”
I don’t know what the future holds for my daughter, but I do know she hopes to spend time with Mrs. Walls this year. Mrs. Walls isn’t promising my daughter riches or worldly success but offering a vision of education as a Christian vocation: noble work that’s critical to the health of our society and worth doing well. Mrs. Walls is “working for the Lord, not for human masters” (Col. 3:23). She knows she’s not just a beleaguered teacher in a downwardly mobile profession. She’s building something eternal.
