US public education has been defunded, chastised , beaten and picked clean for decades by republicans & religious right and failing exactly as designed.

Texas is doing this wrong. They need to do it like we do here in Indiana: hire unqualified substitute teachers and make them “permanent” substitute teachers.

So HISD is a mess, no two ways about that. But it’s dealing with serious structural issues in public education (some of them specific to Texas, like independent school districts that are too granular and allow macro inequality even if any given district is trying to do right by all its kids), as well as active malice from the state government that took over direct administration of it. They want a huge failure to point to when they eviscerate the public schools’ economies of scale by letting rich people use their tax dollars to subsidize private schools, so they’re just letting Mike Miles run it into the ground.

For this specific issue, they need lots of teachers due to the sheer size of the district and the turnover of dealing with the problems above, and it’s kinda marginal as an opportunity, given the educational and credentialing requirements, so yeah, it’s attracting grift so the underqualified candidates can get in. While you have to hold the line on competence and licensure and use any shortages as arguments for increasing pay, and you absolutely cannot tolerate shit like letting sex offenders slip through*, something tells me there’s no huge backlog of qualified teachers getting screwed out of jobs by this scheme. I also wonder how many criminally wasteful contracts and educational coverups are helping people friendly to the state government?

*-The articles are unclear whether the scheme cleared known predators to get certificates, or if two of the underqualfied teachers turned to be sex predators.

Doesn’t Texas still practice corporal punishment? If so, then it feels like they’re running a pretty tight extortion scam on Texans.