Investing in a High-Quality Teacher Workforce: Lessons From Texas Teacher Preparation Programs

Texas has the largest teacher workforce of any U.S. state, with over 375,000 teachers in 2023–24. However, this workforce is characterized by a revolving door of teachers entering and, too often, quickly leaving the profession, with the state having experienced persistent teacher shortages for well over a decade. To address vacancies, many Texas districts have needed to rely on short-term approaches that can ultimately undermine student learning, including the frequent hiring of underqualified or underprepared teachers.

These challenges are not unique to Texas, but they are more pervasive in-state than nationwide. The Texas teacher attrition rate exceeds the national average by over 50%, and a large majority of first-year teachers in Texas enter the profession via either alternative routes that abbreviate coursework and allow the candidate to become teacher of record while still training, or no certification route at all. These accelerated pathways enable classroom vacancies to be filled more quickly, but they are an unsustainable solution to the teacher shortage: Research shows that candidates coming through these pathways leave the profession at much higher rates than candidates prepared with a full complement of coursework and clinical experience. Moreover, students taught by alternatively prepared teachers or uncertified teachers in the state experience substantially smaller achievement gains than students taught by traditionally prepared teachers.

These circumstances warrant a deep look at educator preparation programs (EPPs) that prepare teachers who remain in their positions and help maximize their students’ opportunities and outcomes. To this end, this study documents the design, structure, and content of three high-quality EPPs in Texas that offer full-year clinical teaching pathways: the University of Houston (UH), the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). The study aims to illuminate replicable practices for other EPPs. While each of the highlighted programs feature residencies as a model for candidates’ clinical experiences, with UTRGV also featuring a yearlong clinical experience called STEP UP, many of the insights shared here apply to EPPs using other preparation models. The study also seeks to inform the ongoing evolution of statewide policies—including Texas’s recent statewide investment in teacher residency programs—that support preparation to develop a well-qualified, stable, and diverse workforce able to meet the wide-ranging needs of students from day one on the job.

Common Features Across Educator Preparation Programs

Each of the three programs featured in this report are situated at federally designated minority-serving institutions. They have all purposefully and successfully redesigned their EPPs to provide enriching and cohesive preparation coursework aligned with intensive full-year clinical experiences, in close partnership with local PreK–12 school systems. Each EPP has been implemented at scale, producing between 50 and 500 program completers per year. Program participants and alumni, along with school and district administrators, described the programs’ successes in preparing “day-one ready” teachers equipped to deliver rich learning experiences to their students. In service of this outcome, each of the programs do the following:

• Provide high-quality learning opportunities that scaffold relevant, rigorous coursework and link course content to a full year of intensive, gradual-release clinical practice under the guidance of an experienced mentor teacher. Each program has undertaken a recent review and restructuring of its coursework. Programs focus on practice-based program design that tightly couples course content, assignments, and assessments with opportunities for teacher candidates to apply their learning. Assessments, formerly assessing what candidates know, now evaluate what candidates can do. In some cases, practice-based refers to what UH and UTRGV faculty call “no-harm opportunities,” where candidates initially practice their skills on peers or with instructors, rather than on students; in other instances, candidates practice skills in classroom settings with students, but with scaffolding and support from an experienced teacher or clinical instructor. During the coursework redesign process, each EPP also intentionally sequenced and scaffolded its course content during both the preclinical and clinical years to introduce concepts and skills progressively, gradually adding more layers of complexity.
  
  For candidates’ clinical teaching experience, all three programs offer teacher residencies; UTRGV also offers a yearlong clinical experience called STEP UP. With the expansion of traditional, semester-long student teaching into an entire year of clinical experience, candidates participate in the full scope of a school year—from the first day of school through the last—and participate in teacher planning days, faculty meetings, parent conferences, and other aspects often excluded from semester-long student teaching placements. Candidates are considered co-teachers who are expected to take on responsibilities from day one of their clinical placement. Guided by their work with US PREP, a Texas-based technical assistance provider supporting residency implementation, each EPP provides structures for candidates’ learning, delineating general timelines for candidates’ progression of responsibilities and co-teaching practices throughout the school year. Mentor teachers, purposefully selected and trained for the role, play a key role as candidates’ clinical educators by co-teaching, monitoring candidates’ progression of responsibilities in the classroom, and providing feedback and coaching.
   
• Establish the infrastructure to deliver, maintain, and continuously improve upon high-quality preparation, including appropriate staffing and partnerships. Each program has created specific clinical and administrative roles to coordinate, manage, and monitor program implementation and efficacy. An especially important role is that of the site coordinator (a role common to all US PREP residency transformation sites), who fulfills the responsibilities of traditional university field supervisors—including supervising, coaching, and conducting observations for residents during their clinical experience. Site coordinators also teach resident practicum seminars and courses on teaching methods, regularly collaborate with EPP directors and faculty, train and collaborate with mentor teachers, support residents mentally and emotionally during their clinical year, and facilitate quarterly governance meetings with each partner district. Because site coordinators’ work affects many dimensions of candidates’ experiences, support structures for teacher candidates are well scaffolded and aligned.
  
  Collaborative structures and the strong communication lines they create enable both EPPs and partner districts to de-silo the traditional boundaries between higher education and PreK–12 education. In particular, quarterly governance meetings between the EPP and each partner district—another hallmark of each program—include key players from across the partnership who collaboratively make programmatic decisions based on candidate data from observations and walk-throughs. Shared governance meetings help establish joint buy-in, strengthen EPP–district partnerships, and contribute to program improvement. For example, UTEP and UTRGV shifted the timing of when they required candidates to take certain certification exams in response to district concerns that residents were not completing certification exams in time for the districts to make employment offers to those they wanted to hire after graduation.
  
  Each of the EPPs is thoroughly embedded in its local community and tailors its efforts to the needs of its region’s teacher labor market and the priorities of its partner districts. This locally contextualized engagement creates a shared sense that the work the EPP is doing is important for communitywide success and is embedded in community values. Additionally, because each EPP prepares a critical mass of teachers who go on to teach in surrounding districts, the EPPs can make the case that moving the needle on high-quality teacher preparation pays communitywide dividends. Similarly, the well-trained candidates that the EPPs prepare today become tomorrow’s mentor teachers and administrators across the region, strengthening local educator career ladders.
  
  In all three EPPs, program improvement is considered a continuous process, with faculty consistently engaging in reflective and collaborative processes to improve the integration of practice-based learning opportunities and to strengthen the clinical experience. Even after the initial redesign and incorporation of a practice-based approach, program faculty have invested time in shared reflection on and iteration of coursework and program structures, revisiting course content and assignments to improve learning opportunities for candidates and examining student data to determine how the programs can better serve their teacher candidates. A hallmark of each EPP’s culture of continuous improvement is administrative trust and flexibility.
   
• Support candidates—financially and otherwise—to successfully complete their preparation programs and attain certification. All three programs serve diverse candidate populations who represent a variety of racial, ethnic, linguistic, and other background characteristics. Many candidates, too, are the first in their families to attend a postsecondary institution. To support all candidates in successfully completing their degrees and attaining certification, the programs invest in paid residencies, with funding streams varying across partnerships. By offering stipends for resident expenses, the programs aim to offset the need for candidates to work another job while they are completing their clinical experience. Each program also offers a range of additional supports, including around course planning and sequencing; course content tutoring; certification exam preparation; and, in some cases, assistance with certification exam fees.
  
  While these individual components are important to each program’s success, so is the strategic and thoughtful way each program weaves them together. The three programs take an intentional approach to ensure that each of these components is part of a coherent system, developed in partnership with local PreK–12 districts and supported by US PREP. 

Considerations for Programs, Districts, and States to Strengthen Educator Preparation and Support 

The EPPs profiled here represent different regional contexts, student populations, and program redesign timelines, all of which have shaped their preparation program pathways. Despite their differences, this study finds core commonalities in the EPPs’ approaches to teacher preparation that unearth considerations for other EPPs, school districts, and state policymakers within and beyond Texas.

Considerations for EPP and District Administrators

Our research suggests that key elements of the profiled programs’ success were associated with the following strategies, which other EPPs and district partners can learn from and emulate.

Support the transformation of learning opportunities.

• Create the time, financial and technical assistance resources, and incentives for EPP faculty to engage in course redesign and alignment that integrates practice-based learning experiences.
• Develop a structured framework for progression of candidate responsibilities, paired with field supervisor and mentor teacher training on coaching and feedback, to create a scaffolded and tailored clinical experience.
• Engage with technical assistance providers who are experienced in supporting practice-based course redesign to support coursework transformation.
• Offer additional compensation and adjust job responsibilities for mentor teachers, thereby setting them up for success in the mentor teacher role while creating career ladders for experienced and effective teachers.

Support the development of infrastructure and partnerships.

• Delineate and fund roles for site coordinators or similar personnel who have both coaching and instructional expertise.
• Identify opportunities and sources to recruit site coordinators or similar personnel, such as educators nearing retirement, senior teachers, and instructional leaders.
• Ensure sufficient staffing to maintain a low ratio of teacher candidates to site coordinators, enabling site coordinators to provide frequent, meaningful feedback to each teacher candidate they oversee.
• Establish regular shared governance meetings that address program implementation, program quality, and the needs of candidates.
• Regularly share data and make EPP–district decisions jointly to meet the needs of candidates and the regional education system.

Support the teacher candidate experience.

• Adopt “strategic staffing” models, which redirect district funds to subsidize residency stipends by having residents take on part-time instructional support responsibilities. In implementing strategic staffing, maintain the rigor of the clinical experience by providing residents with scaffolded support in their strategic staffing roles and ensuring residents spend the large majority of their time working alongside their mentor teacher.
• Secure federal, state, and philanthropic dollars to fund paid residencies.
• Assign individual faculty advisors or site coordinators to monitor candidate progress and provide early interventions.
• Provide tutoring and testing preparation, either integrated into coursework or separately.
• Cover the costs of certification exams. 

Considerations for State Policymakers

States may consider the following strategies to support the establishment, continuous improvement, and sustainability of successful educator preparation programs and EPP–district partnerships like those profiled here.

Support the transformation of learning opportunities.

• Provide guidance on and examples of integrating practice-based approaches into coursework, as Texas has started to do through its Effective Preparation Framework.
• Require or incentivize candidates to complete a full year of stipended clinical experience to earn a teaching credential.
• Fund EPPs and their district partners to develop and help sustain yearlong clinical experiences, including funding for mentor teacher compensation.
• Provide technical assistance or fund technical assistance providers to support EPPs in transforming learning opportunities.

Support the development of infrastructure and partnerships.

• Provide guidance and examples of high-functioning shared governance structures.
• Require robust partnerships between EPPs and PreK–12 districts as part of program approval processes.
• Provide technical assistance or fund technical assistance providers to support EPPs in developing partnerships with PreK–12 partners that include frequent data sharing and joint decision-making.

Support the teacher candidate experience.

• Provide guidance on blending and braiding available funds to support paid residencies.
• Provide state funding for paid residencies, especially those that incentivize teaching in high-need areas and certification fields experiencing teacher shortages.
• Reduce or eliminate testing fees.

Investing in a High-Quality Teacher Workforce: Lessons From Texas Teacher Preparation Programs by Jennifer A. Bland, Kimberlee Ralph, Wesley Wei, Victoria Wang, Steven K. Wojcikiewicz, and Marjorie E. Wechsler is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Core operating support for LPI is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. We are grateful to them for their generous support. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.