Thousands of state teachers lack complete, formal training

There’s a good chance the teacher in front of your child’s classroom this year isn’t fully trained to teach.

Since the 2015-16 school year, nearly 7,200 teaching certificates have been issued to teachers who aren’t fully trained to lead a classroom.

In just three years, the number of Arizona teaching certificates that allow someone to teach full time without completing formal training has increased by more than 400 percent, according to state Department of Education data analyzed by The Arizona Republic.

The surge in these types of certificates is representative of both a years-long shortage of qualified teachers and recent changes in Arizona’s teacher certification laws that give some applicants exemptions from meeting all of the basic requirements to teach.

During the 2015-16 school year, the Arizona Department of Education issued 644 certificates to untrained teachers. The next year, the number rose to 1,856.

Last school year, 2017-18, that number of certificates issued to untrained teachers grew to 3,286. So far, 47 days into this year, the state has issued 1,404 certificates to untrained teachers.

Meanwhile, the number of standard certificates — those given to teachers who meet the state’s basic teaching requirements — issued by the state decreased in that time span. Educators who hold a standard certificate have a bachelor’s degree, completed formal teacher training and passed the required professional exams.

In 2017-18, the state issued 21,143 standard certificates, down from 23,274 certificates in 2015-16. That accounts for about a 9 percent decrease for teachers serving a growing population of public-school students.

In Arizona, every educator in public district schools has to be certified by the state to teach. Charter schools are not regulated by Arizona’s teacher certification laws, though some of them do require their teachers be certified by the state.

While there isn’t one specific data point that tells the complete story of the state’s teacher shortage, the certification numbers are indicative of the shifting sands of Arizona’s teacher-quality landscape.

Education leaders and advocates across Arizona for years have sounded alarms over the possible lasting effects of a teacher shortage they say will take several years to reverse.

While the certifications for underqualified teachers allow schools to more quickly fill empty teaching spots, education advocates warn that the increase in teachers who don’t meet the basic qualifications harms student achievement. Experts say teachers who don’t have the proper training to teach are more likely to quit the profession, exacerbating turnover.

analysis of the state’s teacher certification database includes all K-12 teaching certificates issued between July 1, 2015, and Aug. 14, 2018, that specialize in general education, special education, early childhood education, career and technical education, and arts and physical education.

Foreign teachers who meet the basic qualifications also are included in the standard certificate counts. The database includes educators who were issued multiple certificates during this span.

Untrained teachers can qualify for one of five different types of teaching certificates.

Gov. Doug Ducey and the Legislature created one of those certificates, which debuted last school year, with the intent to attract “subject matter experts” to the profession. A favorite comment among lawmakers who supported the certificate was that if former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wanted to teach in Arizona, the state certification process wouldn’t allow her to without this new certificate.

Teachers were allowed to use two other similar certificates — one intended for emergencies, another for technical education courses —starting in 2016-17.

Alternative Teaching Certificates, formerly named Teaching Intern Certificates, allow someone who is concurrently enrolled in a formal teacher preparation program to teach full time while working to fulfill the basic qualifications.

The state has two “specialized” certificates for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and career and technical education teachers, the latter which was introduced in 2016-17. These certificates allow applicants to teach courses related to those fields without formal teacher training if they have five years of work experience in the subjects they’re teaching.

Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificates, introduced in 2017-18, allow “subject matter experts” to teach a specific subject in grades 6-12 if they have at least a bachelor’s degree and meet one of three criteria: a bachelor’s degree or higher in their area of expertise, five years’ work experience in that field, or postsecondary teaching experience.

In the most dire situations, schools can petition the state to certify a teacher using the Emergency Teaching Certificate. Emergency certificates only require a bachelor’s degree. They’re valid for one school year and school superintendents have to attest to the state that an emergency exists.

Schools have employed teachers through all these certification types as a way to fill vacancies.

And this school year, as public schools are doling out the most substantial pay raises Arizona teachers have seen in more than a decade, there appears to be no decline in certificates for untrained teachers.

Since July 1, the official start of the new academic term, the state education department has issued 1,404 certificates to untrained teachers, compared with 3,141 standard certificates.

The 820 Emergency Teaching Certificates issued in this 47-day period make up the majority of those certificates for untrained teachers.

That figure has eclipsed the number of Emergency Teaching Certificates issued this time last year (736) and the year before that (271).

The state has issued 937 Subject Matter Expert certificates, which are valid for 12 years, since they debuted in 2017-18.

It is next to impossible to fully account for how many of Arizona’s active teachers are not fully trained to lead a classroom. The state has no mechanism to track the data, and schools use other certification types to fill teaching vacancies.

For example, it is common for schools to fill vacancies with “long-term substitutes” — teachers who typically hold traditional substitute or Emergency Substitute certificates that only allow them to teach 120 days per school year.

While it is rare for schools to fill full-time teaching positions using Emergency Substitute Certificates — which only require a high-school diploma — a 2017

statewide examination of teacher quality found more than 40 of those teachers leading classrooms in 2016-17. of

That examination also found that 22 percent of 46,000 Arizona teachers either did not meet the state’s basic qualifications or had less than three years’ teaching experience.

The state Department of Education issued 1,903 Emergency Substitute Certificates in 2017-18. Like the Emergency Teaching Certificates, these certificates are only valid for one school year.

The total number of K-12 teaching certificates — including both standard and untrained — issued by the Department of Education actually went up between 2015-16 and 2017-18 by about 580 certificates.