The Learning Policy Institute just published a research paper, A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S. Across the country, the demand for teachers is growing at the same time teachers are leaving in large numbers and fewer college students are enrolling in teacher education programs.
Before looking at the study’s general findings, I want to take a look at the interactive map which gives each state a “teacher attractiveness rating” from 1 to 5, based on factors that would encourage people to apply for teaching jobs and stick around once they’ve been hired. Most of the lowest rated states are in the southwest and the south: Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mississippi and Florida. Three other states, Colorado, Indiana and Maryland also make the list. At the bottom of the bottom is Arizona with a rating of 1.5. The other low-rated states range from 2 to 2.27.
Our teacher shortages began in earnest with the 2008 economic recession, when states began laying off teachers by the thousands. When the economy improved and school districts started hiring again, both because they lowered the number of children in each class and there were more children total, they had trouble finding enough teachers to fill the vacancies. Many of the fired teachers left the profession for good, and the number of students in teacher education programs fell dramatically—a 35 percent drop in the last five years, about a 240,000 teacher-prep-student decrease. Combine that with our high teacher attrition rate (about one-third of teachers who go are retirees, and the other two-thirds just leave), and we’ve got a serious and continuing shortage on our hands.
Here’s the report’s summary on Arizona:
In Arizona, 62% of school districts had unfilled teaching positions three months into the school year in 2013–14. In the same school year, close to 1,000 teachers were on substitute credentials—a 29% increase from the previous year. With one of the highest turnover rates of any state and 24% of the teacher workforce eligible to retire by the end of 2018, the outlook for Arizona’s future points to continued shortages.
Nationwide, the report estimates we have a 60,000 teacher shortage this school year, and that could go up to 112,000 by 2018 and 316,000 by 2025. Here’s a graph with recent and projected shortfalls.
The study makes a few suggestions for ways to decrease potential teacher shortages, most of which take money. It says we need to: increase salaries; increase the number of teachers in hard-to-staff areas, using incentives like loan forgiveness, service scholarships and paid apprenticeships; retain staff by improving mentorship programs and general teaching conditions; and make it easier for teachers who relocate to stay in the profession by encouraging licensing reciprocity and pension portability.
To which I would add: We have to stop trashing teachers. The decades-long, conservative campaign to encourage privatization by talking about “failing government schools” and blaming the teachers who work in them has helped drive teacher morale into the basement. Add increased demands to be “accountable,” which means teachers end up spending much of the school year teaching to the test rather than to students’ needs, and we’ve created a situation where it’s a credit to teachers that they still decide to join, and remain in, the profession.
This article appears in Sep 15-21, 2016.
This publication is becoming so negative and depressing I may start skipping Thursdays.
Do all of the other readers a favour and skip every day. Or at the very least stop posting your nonsense commentary.
Hey are you stalking me?
Here’s an idea…let’s call it the Teachers Matter tax, where one percent of every professional sports players’ and entertainers’ salaries goes into a fund that augments the salaries of every teacher from K-1 through K-12. Now some people will say that is wealth redistribution and it’s not the “American Way.” However, I would argue that back in the “good old days” that so many conservatives seem to reminisce about, a good public education was one of the things every American child was supposed to get and we are failing badly in keeping that promise. Since the sports and entertainment industries need their audiences to survive, a small gift to ensure those audiences are literate and able to contribute to society could go a long way.
Liberals have sure created a mess in the public education sector that they have dominated for the last 30 years. Will they ever take responsibility for what they have done to our children?
For every $1 spent in the budget, only 50 cents goes into the classroom. Fire 50% of the administrators, to increase classroom teaching. Take the at least$26 million spent on illegal immigrant kids, no US parent, and spend on OUR KIDS. Then liquidate the Clinton Foundation and 1/2 her campaign funds on refugee’s kids. Then cry to us Safier.
We had Prop. 301, but our Tea- publican government stole all the money. Now Douchey conned you all into Prop.123. Gophers don’t help the people.
I moved to Arizona at the age of 5, in 1967 and the schools sucked back then too. My education in this state was completely inferior compared to the education my cousins were receiving in New York, where I was born. Nothing has changed and it never will until we increase property taxes, which is how schools are funded back East. Without properly funded education, our schools will always be inferior and there will be teacher shortages. I, myself, tried to make a difference by getting my Bachelor’s Degree in Education, but could only teach for 5 years in Arizona because I was having to spend my own paycheck on classroom supplies. Additionally, every year, my job was not secure. School districts were constantly laying off teachers. Then, they would call you back in the middle of the summer (after laying you off so they didn’t have to pay for your benefits through the summer months) and ask you to come back the next school year. Who would want to teach under those conditions? Don’t even get me started about the pay scale either. Bottom line, until we make education funding a priority in Arizona, schools will not be successful and teachers will not want to teach.
There’s plenty of money spent by Arizona for K-12 education and it is a priority –
……………for illegals.
Analysis of the latest Census data indicates that Arizona’s illegal immigrant population is costing the state’s taxpayers about $1.3 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration. Even if the estimated tax contributions of illegal immi- grant workers are subtracted, net outlays still amount to more than $1 billion per year. The annual fiscal burden borne by Arizonans amounts to more than $700 per household headed by a native-born resident.
http://www.fairus.org/site/docserver/azcosts2.pdf
Teaching is a profession for which people get an education, serve an internship and obtain hours of further education. However, the amount of oversight and administratium just becomes more than the job is worth to many. Not to mention pay, uncertainty from year to year and so on. And, even before that many leave the business after five years. It is expensive to get the licensing testing ($500) and states do not recognize one another’s – one thing for nurses, who earn more, but for teachers?? Change the way the job is managed and perhaps more people will go into it–we discourage so many young, new graduates, with all of this. I have an unused MEd in AZ…
Let see. The republican legislature has been in the majority in this State for over 30 years. Everything that the public school system is or isn’t is on them. The fact of soaring public university tuition is on them. They fact they are funding a parallel privately operated charter system, many of them for profit, is on them. They fact that they are giving away public revenues to support completely private, religious schools, is on them. The fact that the public school buildings and buses are crumbling is on them (another lost lawsuit they continue to ignore). So unless there are tons of liberals in the repulican majority, it’s all on them.
Nope, “Francis”, it is not ALL on them. Some of it is on the people managing TUSD. The Arizona Daily Star drew a nice contrast between TUSD and Flowing Wells in its article on the AZ teacher shortage. Flowing Wells, like TUSD, is a district serving a relatively low SES population and dealing with the same AZ funding insufficiencies (except that, unlike TUSD, Flowing Wells does not get more than $60 million extra in desegregation funds to apply each school year). Yet this far into the school year, according to the Star article, Flowing Wells only had 1 teacher vacancy. The last report I heard on TUSD indicated that they were more than 100 short of the certified teachers they need to properly staff their classrooms. (TUSD is larger than Flowing Wells, but not 100x as large.)
Why the disparity? Flowing Wells has a well-earned good reputation in the teaching community. TUSD is known as a nightmare of mismanagement and inadequate support to those on the front lines educating kids.
But there was TUSD Sup HT Sanchez: quoted in the Star article predictably saying we should blame our AZ teacher shortage on our legislature. Perhaps he should transfer his attention to other local districts serving similar populations and ask himself why they are doing a much better job attracting and retaining qualified teachers than the district under his management is doing. But that would be an honest, competent attempt to solve a real problem in his schools. No doubt it is more than can be expected of someone taking home close to $500K of the taxpayers’ money in his ridiculously inflated )and apparently self-designed) compensation package this year.
(And by the way, I don’t think the original Francis Perkins of the FDR administration would agree with your reductive and inaccurate interpretation of what’s going on in Southern Arizona education, Francis. Nor would she agree with David Safier’s.)
I presume “Our teacher shortages began in earnest with the 2008 economic recession” could not refer to Tucson Unified School District, which has seriously and regularly had that problem since the 20th century.
A while back, Standard and Poors received a $5 million grant from the Gates Foundation to analyze school districts across the country. The Flowing Wells district was one of two districts in Arizona to out perform its demographics by two standard deviations. When you look inside of Flowing Wells, you see all the classic indicators: long time cohesive board members, leaders who develop other leaders for several generations, leaders who solved the performance pay problem in a way that creates teamwork and creates a culture that does many things in addition to producing good math and reading scores.