Why Is There a Teacher Shortage ?

 

A new report from EPI shows that the pandemic exacerbated a preexisting and long-standing shortage of teachers. The shortage is especially severe in schools with high shares of students of color or students from low-income families. The shortage is not because there is an inadequate number of qualified teachers in the U.S. economy. The problem is simply that there are too few qualified teachers willing to work at current pay levels, given the increasingly stressful environment facing teachers.   Teacher shortages are widespread, but are especially acute in some subject areas, as seen in the chart below.

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A shortage of qualified teachers and other staff threatens students’ ability to learn, undermining the education system’s goal of providing a sound education equitably to all children.  This situation must not be allowed to continue. To end the teacher shortage, we must address the two most pressing reasons for the problem: The long-standing decline in the pay of teachers relative to other workers with a college degree; and The high and increasing levels of stress public school teachers face every day in the classroom.

Duane, a sound education system is central to economic justice, and fair compensation and working conditions are necessary for a well-functioning education system. Please help EPI spread the word by sharing this chart with your networks and, if you are able, please consider making a gift to support EPI’s important work.

Thank you for your support and for helping to expand our reach.  John Schmitt Senior Economist  Economic Policy Institute

'Five-Alarm Crisis': US Has Shortage of 300K Teachers,

 'Five-Alarm Crisis': US Has Shortage of 300K Teachers, School Staff

To stay in their profession, said a union leader, educators need "professional respect" including fair pay and the right "to make teaching and learning decisions for their students."

JULIA CONLEY

August 12, 2022

National Education Association president Becky Pringle on Thursday warned that the U.S. teacher shortage has spiraled into a "five-alarm crisis," with nearly 300,000 teaching and support positions left unfilled and policymakers taking desperate—and in some cases, questionable—measures to staff classrooms.

Pringle told ABC News that teachers unions have been warning for years that chronic disinvestment in schools has placed untenable pressure on educators as they face low pay and overcrowded classrooms.

"The political situation in the United States, combined with legitimate aftereffects of Covid, has created this shortage."

"We have a crisis in the number of students who are going into the teaching profession and the number of teachers who are leaving it," Pringle told the outlet. "But, of course, as with everything else, the pandemic just made it worse."

As a survey taken by the NEA earlier this year showed, 91% of educators said pandemic-related stress and burnout is a "serious problem" in the profession, and 55% reported they plan to leave their profession earlier than originally planned.

Chronically low pay is a problem in the profession which was well-documented prior to the pandemic, and educators across the country report it is a contributing factor as teachers leave schools. The national average salary for teachers is $64,000, but in states including Mississippi, South Dakota, and Florida, many educators earn far less.

As The Week reported on Monday, teachers in Arizona are paid an average of $52,000 per year as they face one of the highest teacher-to-student ratios in the nation.

"I do think the main root cause of the teacher shortage is pay," Justin Wing of the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association told Fox 10 Phoenix, adding that the state has a "very concerning" shortage of 2,200 teachers.

While advocates have for years called on state lawmakers to invest heavily in schools in order to recruit and retain highly qualified educators—with Arizona teachers staging a walkout in 2018 after legislators passed corporate tax cuts that would have left the state $100 million short—Republican leaders this year have turned to other methods of keeping classrooms sufficiently staffed.

California and Teacher Preparation

One certain way to ruin one’s reputation is to take on an impossible task, and then fail at it. The essential qualification of any contractor is the ability to tell what is possible and what is not. Say, if you want to have a floor made of thin glass, your contractor should tell you, no, sorry, you cannot do that.

The State Legislature is asking us, the teacher preparation industry to solve the problem of teacher shortage. Our culture is that of public service, and that is true for both state-supported and private institutions. Of course, we say, “Yes, we will do our best!” The Legislature hears something slightly different, “Yes we can do it!” The difference between what we say and what they hear is tremendous, but as it is often the case, it goes unnoticed. Then we fail at what they think they heard, year after year. They get frustrated and look elsewhere, trying to deregulate teacher preparation so that almost anyone can do it, school districts, private schools, county offices, and very soon - Starbucks shops. It still does not work, for poorly selected and ill-prepared teachers stay on the job for shorter and shorter gigs. The vicious cycle is the consequence of unclear, unarticulated response on our side and wishful thinking on their side.

Of course, the State wants to solve the problem without raising teacher salaries, and without investing a dime in teacher retention. Who wouldn’t want that? The State is willing to invest some in teacher recruitment, mistakenly believing that recruitment is the main source of the problem. However, retention is far more important, and it boils down to salaries and working conditions. 

Senate Bills Take Aim at California's Growing Teacher Shortage.

But, they do not deal with the problem of a shortage of Latino teachers created by the actions of many CSU- Campuses as described in the prior posts.
excerpt.

"But credentialed teachers from the Latino community and several Asian communities will not be available to hire because the Sac State pipeline for minority teachers  has been broken.  A new generation of mostly Anglo teachers will be hired which will continue the past failure to integrate the teaching profession in this region. Ending the pipeline will shape the nature of the local teaching profession for decades. Latino students make up 37 % of Sac City Unified students, Asians 17.4 %, African Americans 17.7 %, and White students 18.8 %. Latino families now make up over 37 % of California residents and Latino descent children now make up over 50% of public school students.

   The Bilingual Multicultural Education Department at Sac State was  set up as  a structure so that the university, CSU-Sacramento, could  serve the community by preparing and advancing hundreds of Chicano and Asian teachers each year.  Unfortunately, others shut down this vehicle. Between 1994 -2006, Latino descent students were about 35% of the total teacher preparation students each year ( 60 -90 students per semester).  After the termination of the department in 2010, Latino descent students were less than 10% of the total students in teacher preparation at Sac State (about 7 students).  This decline was a direct consequence of eliminating the department. "

See the post below this one.  Area Shortage of Latino Teachers Caused by...

Tuesday's  News Conference 
Each of the local news organizations, the Bee, KCRA, CPR, repeated the comments in the news release (below) as news. They did not consider the context of the "news" which ignores the lack of Latino teachers. Only publishing government sponsors news releases without analysis and context is commonly known as propaganda. 

Helping future teachers with the old programs...

SACRAMENTO -- Following on the heels of a Senate Education Committee hearing that highlighted the severity of a growing shortage of qualified teachers in California, three senators are proposing legislation to address the crisis.

After years of decline during the lean budget years that followed the Great Recession, the demand for teachers is again on the rise, as districts hired an estimated 20,000 new teachers for the current school year. This comes at a time when enrollment in teacher preparation programs at state universities has plunged — falling by 75 percent from 2001 to 2014.

As a result, school districts are increasingly being forced to hire individuals who are not fully prepared. The state Commission on Teacher Credentialing reports that nearly 8,000 teachers with substandard credentials or provisional permits were working in California classrooms in the 2014–15 school year — a 63 percent increase from just two years earlier.

The Latino Teacher Shortage in the Area Was Created by the Sac State College of Education

Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil.

by Duane Campbell. Prof. Emeritus.  Bilingual/Multicultural Education. CSU-S. 

In 2015 after the Great Recession  a new state budgets sent large amounts of funds to k-12 schools and the funds of the Local Control and  Accountability Plan  were targeted to low income schools.  This increased funding will lead to a dramatic need for new teachers.  Sacramento City Unified plans to hire 100 new teachers, and many other local urban districts will do the same.  This faculty growth will continue for from 3-5 years.

But credentialed teachers from the Latino community and several Asian communities will not be available to hire because the Sac State pipeline for minority teachers  has been broken.  A new generation of mostly Anglo teachers will be hired which will continue the past failure to integrate the teaching profession in this region. Ending the pipeline will shape the nature of the local teaching profession for decades. Latino students make up 37 % of Sac City Unified students, Asians 17.4 %, African Americans 17.7 %, and White students 18.8 %. Latino families now make up over 37 % of California residents and Latino descent children now make up over 50% of public school students.

   The Bilingual Multicultural Education Department at Sac State was  set up as  a structure so that the university, CSU-Sacramento, could  serve the community by preparing and advancing hundreds of Chicano and Asian teachers each year.  Unfortunately, others shut down this vehicle. Between 1994 -2006, Latino descent students were about 35% of the total teacher preparation students each year ( 60 -90 students per semester).  After the termination of the department in 2010, Latino descent students were less than 10% of the total students in teacher preparation at Sac State (about 7 students).  This decline was a direct consequence of eliminating the department. 

The Teacher Shortage is No Accident

In These Times · http://www.inthesetimes.com

BY Kevin Prosen

Like much else in the national education debate, panics about teacher shortages seem to be a perennial event. In a widely discussed article for the New York Times earlier this month, Motoko Rich called attention to sharp drops in enrollment in teacher training programs in California and documented that many districts are relaxing licensure requirements as a result, pushing more and more people into the classroom without full certification or proper training.

“It’s a sad, alarming state of affairs, and it proves that for all our lip service about improving the education of America’s children, we’ve failed to make teaching the draw that it should be, the honor that it must be,” mused Times columnist Frank Bruni.

That Bruni would bemoan such a state of affairs is ironic, as he has used his column over the years to repeatedly argue that teaching is too easy a profession to enter and too easy to keep, and amplified the voice of reformers who want to want to make the profession more precarious. But the reality is that speaking of a “shortage” at all is a kind of ideological dodge; the word calls to mind some accident of nature or the market, when what is actually happening is the logical (if not necessarily intended) result of education reform policies.