The worldwide teacher shortage has impacted rural communities more than urban and suburban communities (Ingersoll & Tran, 2023). When a qualified teacher is not available to teach a particular course, school principals are forced to assign unqualified people or under-qualified teachers to teach the course. If the teacher is fully trained and qualified to teach (e.g., Math), but is teaching a course outside of their training and qualifications (e.g., English), we say the teacher is teaching English out-of-field (OOF) and teaching Math in-field (du Plessis, 2015; Ingersoll, 1999; 2019). Teaching OOF is not a characteristic of the teacher, but a label that describes the misalignment between the teacher’s qualifications and the course to which they were assigned. If the teacher-of-record has no training and no license to teach, then we say the person is an Unprepared Instructor.

The American federal government changed the education laws in 2015 thereby giving states the right to define teacher qualifications as each saw fit. Prior to 2015, teaching OOF was illegal except under specific and limited conditions. Since 2015, Texas has allowed principals to freely assign teachers to courses for which they have no training, and schools are no longer required to inform parents and guardians that this is happening to their children.

Teaching OOF is harmful for student learning. Several studies have found that student learn less during a school year when taught OOF compared to similar students taught in-field (Author, 2023; Clotfelter, Ladd & Vigdor, 2010; Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2002). Teaching OOF has become an issue of educational equity, because Author (2020) found that particular demographic groups of students were significantly more likely to be taught OOF, including Black students, low-income students, and students living in rural communities.

Rural communities have seen a dramatic increase in the number of Unprepared Instructors, with 72% of new teachers hired in rural schools in 2022-23 being unprepared and unqualified to teach, up from only 18% in 2012-13 (Author, 2024). Our goal for this study was to examine changes in the rates of teachers teaching OOF before versus after the federal legislative changes, and to examine these OOF patterns for core secondary course subjects (e.g., English, Math, Biology).

For the purposes of this study, we accessed our copy of the Texas State Longitudinal System (TLDS) that includes data on 5.52 million students annually enrolled in Texas public schools. These data include extensive demographic information, educational serviced received, schools attended, attendance rates, standardized test scores, and the teachers who taught them. The teacher data includes extensive information about teaching licenses held, licensure tests taken, years of experience, and the type of teacher preparation program they completed. The state publishes detailed rules about which teaching licenses are “required” to be held by a teacher in order to teach each course so the rules for in-field versus OOF teaching are explicit. We drew a sample of 193 million student-course records for 2011-12 through 2018-19 (pre-pandemic) from the TLDS with a focus on students in secondary grades (Grades 7-12). We selected the 18 subjects with the largest student-course enrollment counts during the 2018-19 school year; each count was in excess of 300,000 students per subject per school year. We then examined changes in the OOF teaching rates by locale (e.g., rural, urban) and by school year. A summary of the statewide descriptive results for 2018-19 include: secondary English is the subject taught most often OOF with over 4 million student-course records taught OOF. Math is second with over 4 million, History is a distant third with under 2.5 million, and Physical Education is fourth with fewer than 2 million. The same patterns hold for rural communities, with the exception that Agriculture is the fourth most common subject taught OOF. The inferential results will be presented too. Across all 18 course subjects, rural schools had the highest rate of OOF teaching of all geographical locales. The rates of OOF teaching increased from 13.9% in 2011-12 to 23.1% in 2018-19. Approximately 1 in 4 student-courses is now taught OOF. For comparison, major suburban schools increased from 7.7% to 11.6% over the same period. Approximately 1 in 9 student-courses is now taught OOF. In other words, students in rural communities are twice as likely to take classes taught OOF compared to students in suburban communities. In rural schools, the subjects with the largest increases in OOF teaching rates between 2011-12 and 2018-19 are: Agriculture (506%), Biology (203%), Art (163%), Spanish (114%), Math (83%), and English (79%).

We found that students in rural communities are receiving an inferior education relative to students in suburban and urban schools. Students in rural schools have experienced dramatic increases in the number of courses taught by unqualified and under-qualified teachers since federal laws changed. Prior studies found that teaching OOF is harmful to student learning and the current results imply that the quality of education received by rural students has declined over eight years, with the rates of OOF teaching increasing by over 75% in 7 of 18 core subjects, and more than doubling in 4 of the 18 subjects. We are now exploring ways to increase the pipeline of teachers into rural communities. We are examining where existing rural teachers went to secondary school, and what path they followed to become teachers. Preliminary results indicate the importance of 2-year post-secondary institutions for preparing rural students who go on to teach. We are examining effective exemplar programs in high schools that appear to prepare a large number of students who go on to pursue teaching careers in rural schools. The descriptive and inferential results will be presented, as well as our findings about positive exemplars for preparing future teachers to work in rural schools.

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