For Aspire Public Schools in Los Angeles, the turnaround took a couple of years.
Coming back from the pandemic, the 11 charter schools serving about 4,400 students saw a steep drop in credentialed teachers sticking with their roles. So relying on a program at Alder Graduate School of Education that pays graduate students to work as teachers-in-training, Aspire built an internal pipeline of new educators.
The program has been successful, according to Christopher Carr, executive director for Aspire in Los Angeles. The retention rate for teachers in the network has soared from around 60 percent to 90 percent, Carr reports. The biggest success of the school's internal pipeline has been in special education, which suffered the highest personnel loss after the pandemic.
But perhaps the best benefit has been that this allows incoming teachers to absorb the culture of Aspire. Aspire focuses on “antiracism,” according to Carr. He credits this approach with helping the network to increase its number of Black teachers, by allowing schools to consciously recruit them. A couple of years ago, around 7 percent of Aspire’s teachers were Black. Now, that number has doubled, to around 14 percent.
But it’s still really hard to attract math and science teachers for middle school and high school: “It’s almost impossible to find a physics teacher right now,” he says.
Still, to the extent Aspire schools have been successful recruiting and keeping teachers, the chain is in a rare position.
In California, like elsewhere in the country, teacher pipelines are drying up.
Nationally, states have relaxed educator credential requirements to help schools navigate workforce issues. But without greater investment into alternative teacher-training pipelines, some experts worry that schools’ struggle to find and keep teachers will only get worse.
But at the same time, some states have had to make rules more strict: Texas has reversed course on educator credentials, from 2001 — when the state loosened regulations and functionally allowed teachers-in-training to rely on fully online programs — to this year, when it passed a new law to reduce reliance on underqualified educators.
State experiments with strict and lenient credential rules have not yet yielded definitive solutions.
Comparative Advantage
California has some of the most robust teacher qualification requirements, says Beatrice Viramontes, executive director of Teach for America Bay Area.
The state’s education system desperately needs quality teachers in schools, but the traditional credential requirements are expensive and include a lot of steps for prospective teachers, Viramontes says. It creates an additional barrier to boosting staff numbers — along with other hurdles like pay — and schools are having a difficult time attracting teachers, especially among younger generations. Gen Z and millennial teachers tend to leave the field earlier. It means that, as older teachers retire, it’s harder to replace them with quality new hires, Viramontes says.
Solving the problem has required schools to take on a DIY spirit.
“There’s a lot of energy in getting creative, because the current process is cumbersome,” Viramontes says.
Teach for America runs an alternative teacher credentialing program. Since the pandemic, schools have started creating their own in-house alternative training programs, too. Some of these try to even usher students currently working to earn a bachelor’s degree through the credential process.
Viramontes praises some approaches as “innovative.” For instance, there’s Rivet, a paraprofessional program that works to bring students pursuing a bachelor’s into classrooms; and TeachStart, a teacher academy that specializes in pathways to credential substitute teachers.
But others have warned about teacher quality issues when schools have to rely on substitutes and other uncredentialed instructors.
California doesn’t have good metrics for weighing the quality of these alternative programs, Viramontes concedes. Yet, anecdotally, she says there’s a steady flow of demand from schools for these programs, which she argues speak to “a yearn” for more teachers.
Precisely how this affects schools depends on where they are.
In rural areas of the central coast region of California, online options have made certification more accessible, says Caprice Young, CEO and superintendent of Navigator Schools.
A charter network of four schools, Navigator has around 2,200 students in transitional kindergarten through eighth grade, and around 300 staff (about 100 are teachers). Three of the network’s schools are rural, all sitting about 40 or 50 miles outside of San Jose, with a fourth school in Hayward, wedged between San Jose and Oakland. For teachers, the schools largely rely on the Cal State University system's TEACH program, which has a virtual credentialing option.
It’s common for Navigator schools to cultivate teachers internally, Young says. With the end of federal pandemic relief funding, Navigator schools have focused on hiring tutors and paraprofessionals who can transition into teaching roles, and they have put energy into teacher coaching programs.
But long term, this could be a problem. Tutors and paraprofessionals are now moving into vacant teaching positions, and without additional federal dollars, the schools aren’t filling as many as many of the paraprofessional jobs.
Still, the schools find themselves adding grade levels, Young says. With nearby schools dwindling because of enrollment declines, the pool of teachers they can hire has swelled.
But as other states have learned, finding more teachers isn’t the end of the woes.
Carrots and Sticks
In Texas, there’s another problem.
Recently, the governor signed H.B. 2, which bans uncertified teachers from instructing in “core” subjects (reading, math, science and social studies) in public schools by the 2029-2030 school year.
Texas has a relatively deregulated teacher preparation certification landscape, says Jacob Kirksey, an assistant professor in Texas Tech’s College of Education. A waiver from the District of Innovation policy from before the pandemic has meant that Texas public school districts don’t have to get approval from the state education agency for hiring uncertified teachers if they can demonstrate they have a shortage, Kirksey says.
Some of Kirskey’s work has suggested that, as of two years ago, half of new hires lacked credentials, a trend that disproportionately affects rural areas. Teacher shortages have been the worst in math and sciences for middle and high school, he says, a pattern that’s also worse in rural regions.
Many states appear to be following Texas’ old lead in allowing more uncertified teachers to head classrooms, Kirskey adds. In 2024, more than 365,000 teachers across 49 states plus D.C. were working without being fully certified for their positions, according to the Learning Policy Institute. And some states like South Carolina and Indiana recently passed legislation loosening credential requirements.
While this may boost the number of bodies in classrooms, it also raises questions about the quality of instruction.
Kirksey’s work has highlighted the connection between uncredentialed teachers and student achievement declines. With an average uncertified teacher, the students fall behind about three months in math and four months in reading within a single school year, he says.
Observers praised the new law in Texas for also making funds available to assist underqualified teachers in the classroom to gain credentials, which they argue will ensure teacher quality while keeping the pipelines of educators flowing, in calls with EdSurge. The law also supports university-based educator preparation programs.
Rolling Boulders Uphill
Some think that solving the problem of teacher shortages and educators who lack credentials will take more effort.
It’s not enough to rely on legislators alone to fix the problem, argues Gemar Mills, executive director of College Achieve, a network of 11 charter schools spread across three cities in New Jersey.
In New Jersey, some attempts, predating the pandemic, have kept up the flow of teachers into schools.
For example, there’s Trio Academy, a program that supports students without a college degree, helping them earn the degree and then pursue a teaching credential.
There’s also a state program — run by the New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning — meant to boost the supply of science teachers. The program puts certified teachers through a physics graduate program before assisting them in obtaining a credential to teach the subject. Even before the pandemic, Mills embraced this; and he recalls a gym teacher completing the program and becoming a physics instructor. In recent years, the program expanded from physics into other sciences.
But the pandemic supercharged the search for alternative sources of teachers: “COVID opened the floodgates for what was allowable,” Mills says.
These days, in New Jersey, credentialing sits somewhere between the extremes of California and Texas. The pandemic inspired leniency in the state, prompting policymakers to relax standards for credentialing. Typically, becoming a credentialed teacher there involves meeting a minimum GPA, scoring well on a basic skills test, going through teaching practice and getting a college degree. But under the “limited” certification — a five-year program that started in 2022 — teachers can earn a temporary credential by completing three of those criteria.
Ultimately, Mills’ schools saw a surge of college graduates, longtime teachers’ assistants and substitutes all pivoting into full-time teaching.
But there are still challenges.
For instance, schools are capped so that only 10 percent of teachers can have that lenient credential. College Achieve has maxed out. Plus, finding science, math and special education teachers is still onerous, Mills reports.
School leaders are eager to get more teachers. But solving the problem that will require more innovative and effective certification pathways, Mill says.
