Teacher Certification in Texas: District Strategies to Recruit and Retain a Credentialed Workforce

Texas employs the largest teacher workforce of all states in the United States, and the state consistently posts teacher attrition rates higher than the national average. Texas schools have had to hire more than 40,000 teachers per year to replace those exiting. In the 2022–23 through 2024–25 school years, more than two thirds of these newly hired teachers entered the profession on emergency permits, while completing preparation (i.e., interns), or without any state certification (i.e., uncertified). While teachers entering through such pathways can fill classroom vacancies quickly, Texas-based research has found that they are less likely to stay in the profession and are less effective than other new teachers, on average.

Enacted in 2015, the state’s Districts of Innovation (DOI) policy allows participating districts to bypass certain state requirements, including regulations on curriculum, graduation requirements, and teacher certification. As of the 2025–26 school year, almost all traditional school districts were designated as DOIs and therefore could potentially hire uncertified teachers at the discretion of their school boards. Meanwhile, the number of teaching candidates prepared through university-based preparation programs has substantially declined.

As a result of high attrition, changes in certification policy, and declines in university-prepared teachers, Texas has experienced rapid growth in the number of uncertified teachers. Overall, the share of uncertified teachers in the Texas teacher workforce more than tripled between 2019–20 and 2024–25, increasing from 3.8% to 12%. As of 2024–25, there were 42,103 uncertified teachers across the state, with more than half teaching foundational subjects (English language arts and reading, math, science, and social studies).

As explored in this report, Texas districts varied widely in how much they relied on uncertified teachers to fill open positions. Given the average lower retention and effectiveness of uncertified teachers, this study identified districts with higher certification rates to understand their local context and policies. This study analyzed district-level data from the 2023–24 and 2024–25 school years to examine whether students have equitable access to certified teachers and to identify contextual factors associated with higher certification rates. To illustrate how district policies, practices, and partnerships can support certification, this report then presents findings from interviews with district leaders in six districts with noted success in maintaining high certification rates and/or supporting their uncertified teachers to become certified.

Texas Teacher Certification and Preparation Policies

Over the past 2 decades, there have been significant shifts in Texas state policy that have allowed more teachers to enter the profession with little to no training. These changes, including the DOI policy and regulatory changes related to educator preparation programs, enabled the rapid increase in the number of uncertified teachers as well as the increasing share of new teachers trained through for-profit preparation providers that primarily rely on asynchronous, online instruction with little clinical practice or support. To counter these trends, the state has made recent investments in the teacher pipeline to incentivize high-quality preparation and increase the pool of fully prepared and certified new teachers.

House Bill 2, landmark legislation passed in 2025, included over $400 million annually for statewide investments in recruitment, preparation, certification, and mentoring, and an estimated $4 billion for teacher and staff pay raises aimed at retaining teachers in the classroom. The legislation established the Preparing and Retaining Educators through Partnership (PREP) Program Allotment, which will provide ongoing funding to support teacher preparation and mentoring programs for new teachers. House Bill 2 also revised some of the certification flexibilities enabled by the DOI policy. By 2027–28, all teachers in all foundational subjects must be certified unless their districts have applied for and been granted an extension. As of March 2026, just over half of traditional school districts have been granted an extension, postponing meaningful implementation of these new certification requirements.

Teacher Certification Rates Across Texas

While 12% of all Texas teachers were uncertified in the 2024–25 school year, teacher certification rates (i.e., the percentage of teachers in a district with any state certification) varied tremendously across the state’s nearly 1,200 districts. Charter schools are often exempt from state certification policies, and only teachers teaching in bilingual, English as a Second Language (ESL), and special education programs are required to be certified. In 2024–25, the average certification rate in charter school districts was 52%, much lower than the 87% average certification rate in traditional public school districts. Despite the large statewide increase in the number of uncertified teachers, a subset of districts has maintained very high teacher certification rates. Overall, just over 250 Texas districts, including 243 traditional school districts and 9 charter school districts, had teacher certification rates over 95% in 2024–25.

Certification rates were typically higher in larger, more urban districts compared to smaller, more rural districts. Geographically, school districts in North and Central Texas had higher certification rates, on average, while districts in West Texas tended to have the lowest certification rates. Districts serving more Black students, more Hispanic/Latino students, and more economically disadvantaged students also tended to have lower certification rates. These differences reflect underlying inequities in district resources and local access to certified teachers, as well as differences in district approaches to recruitment and hiring.

How District Policies Prioritize Certification

Despite the challenges in the supply of new teachers statewide, interviewed Texas district leaders identified different approaches to support certification in their recruitment, hiring, and support structures for new teachers. The six districts participating in this study were identified for having relatively higher certification rates and/or effective district strategies to prioritize certification and to support their uncertified teachers through the certification process.

Increasing the Pipeline of Certified Teachers. All six participating districts have partnerships with at least one teacher residency program and at least one Grow Your Own program targeting high school students and/or paraprofessionals. Teacher residency programs, developed in partnership between school districts and teacher preparation programs, typically include a yearlong clinical experience in which a resident works alongside an expert mentor teacher while receiving financial support. Grow Your Own programs create a new pool of teacher candidates who have already been learning, working, and/or training in the district. Interviewed leaders emphasized the value of having multiple partnership programs and preparation options to bring certified teachers into the district and noted the value of varied program models that may appeal to different types of teacher candidates.

Prioritizing Certification Through Recruitment and Hiring. All six districts use candidate screening and/or hiring requirements that prioritize certified teachers. The districts also limit the hiring of uncertified teachers to those with prior experience in schools or who have already begun the certification process (e.g., by being enrolled in preparation or having taken certain certification exams).

Incentivizing and Tracking Certification. All participating districts set time limits that require their uncertified teachers to get certified, and two districts incentivize certification through significant salary differentials for uncertified teachers (with commensurate increases when they become eligible for intern credentials). District leaders emphasized the value of having designated staff to track and support certification, such as certification specialists in the district office or new teacher mentors knowledgeable about certification.

Supporting and Retaining New Teachers. District leaders emphasized the importance of retention, with one leader explaining that “our best recruiting method is going to be retention.” Leaders highlighted how mentoring and induction programs—along with specific supports around certification exams and preparation costs—can improve retention of their districts’ new teachers. The quantitative analysis reinforced this finding, with districts’ teacher turnover in the previous year negatively associated with certification rates. District leaders also identified salaries as an important lever to support retention, and certification rates tend to be higher in districts with higher beginning teacher salaries, once accounting for other district characteristics.

Policy Considerations

The findings from this report offer some key considerations for school districts and preparation programs to address pervasive teacher staffing challenges, especially in light of the certification changes and significant investments in the teacher pipeline and preparation that were enacted in House Bill 2. Districts are facing notable short-term constraints as they work to help uncertified teachers in foundational subjects become certified within the next few years. Given these upcoming deadlines and the day-to-day workload of any new teacher, uncertified teachers may opt for preparation programs that offer the shortest and least onerous route to certification. However, a growing body of Texas-based research suggests that teachers trained through online, for-profit preparation programs—often relying on asynchronous, online instruction with little clinical training or support—are less effective and more likely to leave the profession than those trained in other preparation models.

Districts can try to manage these short-term constraints while working to connect uncertified teachers with preparation experiences most likely to support their success by:

• strengthening certification pathways in collaboration with partners that offer high-quality training and meaningful support;
• building district capacity and allocating district staff to support certification efforts;
• communicating expectations and incentivizing certification through district practices and policies; and
• improving district hiring practices and personnel management.

Education preparation partners can also support certification efforts by:

• providing more targeted supports to help uncertified teachers earn certification; and
• communicating candidate progress with relevant district staff to ensure shared tracking of individual timelines.

In the long term, districts can benefit from building a sustainable pool of well-prepared and certified teachers in partnership with preparation providers. Across Texas, a range of efforts have been underway to build sustainable pathways into the profession. This includes the state’s investments in sustainable teacher residencies fueled by strategic staffing models and, more recently, efforts to seed and scale registered teacher apprenticeships. Building on these successes, districts and educator preparation programs can now leverage new state funds available through the PREP Program Allotment introduced in House Bill 2. These new state funds can support districts to build a more sustainable pipeline of well-prepared and fully certified teachers that can help reverse the trends in certification and preparation seen across the state in the past 2 decades.

Importantly, the PREP Program Allotment establishes state funding that is accessible to all interested districts, with funds from some portions of the allotment to be disbursed in the 2026–27 school year and funds from other portions coming in the 2027–28 school year. Early feedback from leaders in the state indicates strong interest from districts in applying for all available portions of the PREP Allotment to build local teacher pipelines. As of March 2026, more than 600 Texas districts had applied for at least one of the three PREP Allotment programs available for the 2026–27 school year. Districts can strengthen their broader preparation and professional learning infrastructure, especially if they leverage multiple allotments. A growing number of tools and technical assistance supports are available to districts for strategic planning. Ultimately, Texas districts can support teacher certification through their policies and practices by balancing high-leverage, short-term strategies to support uncertified teachers with longer-term investments in building their teacher pipeline and improving retention through mentoring and other supports for beginning teachers. 

Teacher Certification in Texas: District Strategies to Recruit and Retain a Credentialed Workforce by Susan Kemper Patrick, Chazz Higginbotham, Ryan Saunders, Tiffany S. Tan, and Steve Wojcikiewicz is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This research was supported by the Houston Endowment. Core operating support for LPI is provided by the 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.