Then, the Legislature invited for-profit businesses into the game. “Ever since then, the innovation and competition has been phenomenal,” claimed Vernon Reaser, the president of Texas Teachers, the largest of the state’s alt-cert companies.

Here is one indicator of how innovative things are getting. Texas is currently considering — although not with any great intensity — a bill that would require that people who go through these programs spend a couple of days practice teaching before they are turned loose in their own classrooms.

The sponsor is Representative Mike Villarreal of San Antonio. Villarreal first came to my attention as the legislator who proposed requiring that the course content in public school sex education classes be medically accurate. The man is a positive genius for coming up with bills to make the Texas education system do something we really had assumed it had been doing all along. None of which make it out of committee.

At a public hearing on Villarreal’s bill, Reaser vigorously denounced the idea of requiring would-be teachers to actually get classroom experience as part of their training: “Practice teachers in front of kids that aren’t practice learning!”

To get an alternative teaching certificate in Texas you need to take coursework and have 30 hours of “field-based” experience, 15 of which can be spent watching videos. Villarreal says some programs fill up the other 15 with things like chaperoning field trips.

It’s not clear how many people get hired as full-time teachers without ever having stood in front of a classroom for a single hour. The $4,195 Texas Teachers program (its ubiquitous billboards read: “Want to Teach? When Can You Start?”) is a little opaque. For instance, Reaser assured me in a phone conversation that his students were required to have a variety of in-person interactions with their instructors even though the Web site says you can opt for “fully online instruction.”

“On our Web site, we intentionally don’t say everything,” Reaser explained. “It’s basically to get you to call us and ask us.”

When we all started clamoring for more investment in education, I don’t think we envisioned it going into corporate profits. We have seen the future, and the good news is that the kids in Florida will be wearing belts.