Class Dismissed: The Teacher Shortage

By Antonio Ramirez, November 4, 2009

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Retirement and turnover are drying up the pools of U.S. primary and high school educators at an alarming rate.

Less than a month later, Lisa was ready to quit. She was not prepared for the classroom, as she explained in an e-mail (PDF):

"Most [students] think it is acceptable to steal, not report crimes, cuss out each other and teachers, and talk the entire time I am talking and teaching. My administration promised me less than 20 students in each remedial class -- I have a minimum of 30 -- and it grows every day. 30+ [kids who] make it their mission to make me and everyone else in there miserable for 52 minutes every day... Neither my department head, mentor or buddy has stopped by my room once... I am truly at a loss... if it stays like this, I don't know if I can go a whole year and retain any sense of sanity."

By December, the pressure had overwhelmed her. Lisa quit teaching high school and returned to her previous job as a professor of teacher education at the University of Tennessee.

A Perfect Storm

Today, there is a major teacher shortage on the horizon. According to education researchers such as Dr. Scherff, several factors are combining to create "a perfect storm" in U.S. education. Just like Scherff, thousands of new teachers are leaving the classroom for other careers. At the same time, a massive crop of baby boomers are getting ready to retire, leaving a gaping hole once filled by highly experienced teachers. Last month also saw the economy lose 29,000 state and local education jobs as a result of budget cuts.

Almost every decade since World War II, education specialists have announced a teacher shortage and have organized a response.

This time, say experts, it's different.

According to a recent study (PDF) by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF), of the roughly 3 million people currently working as teachers in the U.S., 1.7 million are baby boomers. Born during the population spike in the 1950s, boomers make up over half of all U.S. teachers.

The next decade will see a tsunami of boomer-teachers approaching the average retirement age of 59, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The study predicts that 95,000 teachers will start collecting pensions every year until 2020, creating the largest mass retirement of teachers since the 1950s.

At the same time, teacher attrition, or turnover, has been increasing. One in five new teachers leaves the profession within three years. In urban areas, 50 percent have moved on after five years. Many researchers argue that a radical solution is needed in order to save public education.

Dr. Cooks: Retaining The Best

WireTap originally interviewed San Francisco State Assistant Professor Secondary Education Dr. Jamal A. Cooks in 2007 about incorporating hip-hop curriculum in the class room. As a Teaching Credential educator responsible for teaching literacies across the content areas, Cooks gave us his thoughts and recommendations for solving the looming teacher shortage. Graduate and undergraduate schools need to recruit the best new teaching candidates and introduce the profession to potential teachers, especially teachers of color whose numbers have been declining in teaching programs. Add an optional fifth year teaching credential certificate to undergraduate majors in History, English, Math and Science with automatic admissions to a Masters degree program if the candidate commits to a teaching career. Young teachers from urban and low income school districts are being recruited to higher paying districts in wealthier areas. Raise starting salaries in California from $35, 000 to $45, 000 to make teaching in urban schools an attractive option.

Recruiting Teachers, Losing Teachers

For the last 50 years, U.S. schools have consistently treated the symptoms of the education system's teacher shortage, perhaps without diagnosing the true illness. Thousands of new teachers are recruited, but at the same time thousands continue to leave.

In the 1960s, the National Teacher Corps was promoted by President Lyndon Johnson to train young people to teach in poor urban and rural districts. In exchange, teachers received stipends and help paying tuition bills. President Reagan discontinued the Corps in the early 1980s, but a similar program, Teach for America (TFA), was born soon after. Although National Teacher Corps trained over 100,000 new teachers and Teach for America has trained thousands as well, shortages continued to be a problem in the following decades.

The U.S. Department of Education announced (PDF) in 1994 that two million new teachers would need to be hired to replace the first wave of baby boomer retirements. A massive recruitment drive was initiated to correct the shortfall, resulting in the hiring of about 2.25 million new teachers. Unfortunately, 2.7 million teachers left or retired during that same period.

In 2000, when pundits began to warn the public of another potential teacher shortage, school districts across the country initiated focused, incentive-driven recruitment drives. Desperate to fill vacant positions, districts offered prospective teachers "signing bonuses, mortgage subsidies, and health-club memberships," said Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Susan Moore Johnson in a recent interview.

Other districts responded to the most recent shortage by offering alternative certification programs as a substitute for four-year university teaching degrees. The benefits of such streamlined programs are debated in today's education circles.

Promoted as a faster, easier way for prospective educators to get in front of a classroom, alternative certification programs have become increasingly popular. The Washington Post reported in July that one-third of new teachers are certified through alternative programs. Some, like The New Teacher Project (TNTP), have been so popular they have accomplished the elusive task of making urban teaching jobs highly competitive. In 2004, four years after New York City Teaching Fellows began as part of TNTP, fellows made up 30 percent of new hires and worked mostly in New York's most difficult schools. This year there were 14,000 applicants for about 700 jobs. Teach for America also received a record number of applicants. It was widely reported that TFA reviewed over 35,000 applications this year to fill 4,100 positions.

Fast-track programs have many critics, though. Linda Darling-Hammond, education advisor to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, says Teach for America's few weeks of training doesn't prepare college graduates for the classroom. As a result, TFA teachers leave schools and students behind at higher rates than fully trained teachers. Darling-Hammond says it's better to prepare new teachers in complete teacher training programs so that they're ready for challenges and will stay to overcome them.

Third-year Wisconsin social studies teacher Brian Beaudet agrees. TFA volunteers "are there more for their own intellectual growth than for the students," he proposed in a recent interview. "Some candidates have no intention of continuing after their mandated time is up, but Teach For America certainly looks good on a corporate resume."

With looming baby boomer retirements and increasing student enrollment, can these alternative programs be effective in filling the gap?

Dr. Martin Haberman, professor emeritus of education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, designed the teacher training program that President Johnson's National Teacher Corps was modeled on. He says that the issue here is teacher quality. "We are now in a situation where we have over 500 of these on-the-job [certification] programs," he explains. "Some are good and some are terrible."

Most education experts agree that sheer numbers of new teachers aren't enough to solve today's teacher shortage. As education professors Richard Ingersoll and Thomas Smith wrote in a 2003 Educational Leadership article (PDF), "increases in student enrollment and teacher retirement are not the primary causes of high demand for new teachers... a larger part of the problem is teacher attrition."

Turnover: The Real Problem

Theories abound as to why so many teachers decide to leave in their first few years. Many times these theories paint a complex picture of a lack of support, frustration and improper training.

Fitting into a school's culture is important. A teacher must be able to get to know her colleagues and the school's expectations. Dr. Lisa Scherff says that the skills needed to understand and assimilate into a school's individual culture are often ignored in teacher preparation, despite the number of studies highlighting their importance. The quality of a new teacher's interactions with more experienced co-workers plays a key role in predicting whether a new teacher will stay. Indeed, Scherff, Darling-Hammond and Ingersoll have all shown that a positive school culture that includes a healthy professional community and administrative support (PDF) is key to retaining new teachers.

Haberman, who has designed a huge number of teacher education programs, adds that in addition to a supportive environment one of the most common determinants of teacher turnover is student behavior.

Teacher Brian Beaudet also believes that support and student behavior are important in a new teacher's experience. "Schools need to support new teachers more substantially," he explained. "I was given no access to a mentor, and often learned about the job through mistakes. When you have class sizes that regularly exceed 40 students, [that] means that disciplinary issues become much more of a distraction."

However, well-behaved students and support from administrators are often not enough. "There are a dozen other less powerful causes [of teacher turnover]," said Haberman. "The sum of these causes creates feelings of anxiety and lack of efficacy among teachers."

Who Will Stay?

Teacher educators, administrators and school districts have been hard pressed to find people who can feel confident and effective in the classroom.

"When it comes down to it," explained Beaudet, "many people enter the profession with unrealistic ideas about what the career entails... they don't have the stomach for the difficulties of the real-world classroom."

Researchers concur. Haberman thinks that new teachers should have a belief system that allows them to work in high anxiety situations with diverse sets of children. Many new college graduates, although labeled "highly qualified," simply don't have the skills to be successful with diverse groups of young people, he says.

"Highly-qualified" often means fitting the stereotypical profile of a young, white female teacher, said Beaudet. He believes skills and life experiences useful for dealing with the harsh realities of urban schools can't be taught in teacher education courses.

For Haberman, solving the teacher attrition problem is simple: choose the right potential teachers and train them well in quality alternative certification programs.

Teacher candidates should be over 30 years old, or have sufficient maturity to deal with young people, he says. They should believe that poor and minority students are able to learn. They should have real-world experience in areas other than education. And they should be provided carefully selected mentors and coaches.

Haberman also believes that prospective teachers can be found in the same urban communities where schools are located. "There are people of color who are college graduates (at least ten times the number of those in traditional university based programs) who can be brought into teaching," said Haberman in a 2004 address to the first National Center on Alternative Certification Conference. "Every urban area has a substantial pool of college graduates of color who are willing to function as teachers." The Education Commission for the States has also found evidence that minority teachers are less likely to turnover than white teachers.

Support Works

By most accounts, Haberman is right: providing quality candidates with strong support and mentoring has proven successful. However, money for recruitment and mentoring is often not available. As economist Paul Krugman recently wrote in the New York Times, slashes in state budgets and the common belief among conservatives that spending on education is wasteful have aggravated the problem.

However, Linda Darling-Hammond believers that U.S. educators and bureaucrats can learn from other nations' successful investments in teachers. She explained in Time Magazine that countries with the highest-scoring students pay teachers much more than in the U.S. For instance, in Singapore, teachers' salaries are higher than those of beginning doctors. They also emphasize strong preparation and continued teacher training.

Nations like Finland and Sweden pay two to three years of future teachers' graduate degrees as well as living expenses. High-achieving countries like Singapore provide their teachers with 100 yearly paid professional development hours and 20 hours a week to collaborate with colleagues. Such benefits are almost unheard of in U.S. schools.

The need for quality teachers who will stay in the classroom has been part of the educational landscape for decades. Today, with both retirements and turnover on the rise, education experts criticize temporary solutions to the shortages and are calling for a major investment in the next generation of teachers. It's still unclear whether that's a lesson the school districts, state and federal governments are willing to learn.

Antonio Ramirez has worked as a bilingual educator at middle and high schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and as an agricultural migrant educator in rural Michigan. He currently does support work at an immigrant rights organization in Zacatecas, Mexico.