The Texas Teacher Certification Scandal
by Dr. Michael Marder, Executive Director of UTeach, The University of Texas at Austin
According to the New York Times, “More than 200 ‘unqualified teachers’ in Texas were able to get jobs or promotions at schools across the state under a broad scheme in which impersonators were paid to take more than 400 certification exams for them…” CNN says that teaching certification candidates would pay a teacher at a Houston school $2,500 to arrange for an impersonator to take their exams
This is a scandal. How could it happen? How on earth were all these teacher candidates convinced to pay $2,500 each and land themselves in disgrace … for a test they had little actual need to take, let alone pass?
Because while certificates absolutely give candidates a strong edge in hiring and promotion, and while certificates mean a teacher has met demanding and meaningful Texas quality control standards, certificates are not needed to teach in Texas anymore.
Of the Houston scandal, Houston ISD spokesperson Alexander Elizondo said to CNN, “Any educator who engages in conduct of this nature abdicates their responsibility to our students and to our staff and represents a complete betrayal of the public trust.”
Indeed. Falsely certified teachers are not actually certified at all. And neither are half the new teachers in Texas.
According to the Texas Education Agency, in 2023–2024, out of 33,863 new full-time teachers, 16,599 (nearly 50%) were “Unprepared.” This means that not only did those teachers not pass the test, they did not even take the test, and so far as we can know they did nothing else to prepare to educate students. They do not have a certificate and based on the history of the past few years only around 20% will ever get one. A law from 2015 allowing “Districts of Innovation” makes this all completely legal. Parents don’t have to be notified when their kid’s teacher is uncertified.
Quality control before and after people teach is dropping. In Houston two sexual predators ended up in classrooms. Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said to CNN that the predators “ had access through their employment to underage kids on campus and off… One has been charged with indecency with a child, another with online solicitation … We only know of those two cases now but there could be others.”
That’s bad. Yet the cheaters had to go through more preparation and vetting than 16,699 uncertified educators who entered Texas classrooms in the last year alone. Houston ISD hired 1069 of them and Dallas ISD 619, more than any other districts. That’s worse.
If you are a parent with a kid in school, take comfort that prosecutors dismantled a cheating scheme. But Texas schools are hiring tens of thousands of teachers with less preparation and less vetting than the 200 cheaters: no one is checking into them, no one is telling you, and no serious plan is in place or proposed to fix it. This shocking legal betrayal of the public trust is the Texas teacher certification scandal.
