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NPR
Frustration.
Burnout. Attrition. It's Time To Address The National Teacher Shortage
Eric Westervelt
The good news: There's an uptick in the hiring of new teachers since
the pink-slip frenzy in the wake of the Great Recession.
The bad news: The new hiring hasn't made up for the teacher shortfall.
Attrition is high, and enrollment in teacher preparation programs has
fallen some 35 percent over the past five years — a decrease of nearly
240,000 teachers in all.
Parts of most every state in America face troubling teacher shortages:
the most frequent shortage areas are math, science, bilingual education
and special education.
We've covered many sides of the shortage issue, including the
disconnect between training and districts' needs; how the
accountability obsession and paperwork aredriving some good veteran
teachers away; what factors help teachers stick around; as well as
efforts to improve training for special-ed teachers to stem that
field's attrition and chronic shortage.
Two comprehensive new reports on the issue, from the nonprofit and
nonpartisan Learning Policy Institute, offer an opportunity to revisit
and dig deeper into a widening problem. You can read the full reports —
A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in
the U.S and Minority Teacher Recruitment, Employment, and Retention:
1987 to 2013 — here. Also, check out the institute'sinteractive map.
I spoke with the institute's president, Linda Darling-Hammond,
professor of education emeritus at Stanford University and co-author of
one of the reports.
Whether this is a full-blown "crisis" or just one of many problems in
education depends, I guess, on where you sit. The report you
co-authored is titled A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Do you think the
question mark is really needed?
If you're sitting in Utah or Arizona, there's no question mark — you
have a crisis in teaching. If you're in better-paying Massachusetts,
where there's something of a surplus in some fields, you feel a little
less concerned about it. The other aspect of the question mark is about
the future. We do certainly have a shortfall of teachers right now, and
it looks like it will get much worse. But if we change our policies, we
could solve the shortage. The question mark is really a question to us
about the policies we'll put in place to address these emerging
problems.
High-poverty schools have some of the biggest teacher attrition and
shortage challenges. Your report notes that about half of all schools
and 90 percent of high-poverty schools are struggling to find enough
qualified special education teachers. These shortages are having the
biggest impact on the most vulnerable students, aren't they?
They are. In some places, we see from the data that 1 in 5 teachers in
high-minority schools and high-poverty schools is unprepared for
teaching. When you think about how dependent on school children are in
these communities and what it means for the quality of education
they'll receive, it's particularly alarming.
Let's talk solutions. You write that teacher attrition and turnover are
key factors that have to be addressed if states are going to get out of
this crisis. Districts need to focus on retention as much as
recruitment. Explain that.
We have a very high attrition rate in the United States: 8 percent of
teachers leave every year. That's a couple-hundred-thousand teachers.
Less than a third of them are leaving for retirement. If you look at
high-performing countries like Finland or Singapore, or go across the
border to Ontario, Canada, the attrition rate is usually 3 percent or 4
percent of teachers. If we could reduce our attrition in half to 4
percent — we call it the 4 percent solution — we would actually have no
teacher shortages right now. We would have plenty of supply and be able
to be much more selective about who we bring into teaching. So it is a
big part of the problem and the solution.
I found it troubling that most of the attrition is pre-retirement
quitting, a kind of, "I'm out of here." It's not the normal retirement
trends of teachers ageing out.
That's exactly right. We actually have a teaching situation right now
that is probably as bad as it's been for many, many decades. Teacher
salaries have been declining since the 1990s. Teachers are earning
about 20 percent less than other college graduates who are similarly
educated. Even after you adjust for the difference in the calendar work
here, in 30 states a teacher who has a family of four is eligible for
several sources of government assistance, including free or
reduced-price lunch for their own children in school.
Teacher working conditions are worse than they've been. Most states
that cut their budgets because of the recession have not even returned
to pre-recession levels of spending, which means books and supplies and
materials and computers are in short supply. Class sizes are larger
than they used to be. Then we have more and more children in poverty,
more and more children who are homeless, so in highly impacted
communities, the needs that teachers have to be responsive to on behalf
of the children are also very, very taxing.
To implement the 4 percent solution, focus on pay and working
conditions equally? Or one more than the other?
Well, you know, the people who go into teaching tend not to go in it
for the money per se. They generally want to do good work on behalf of
children, but you do have to get salaries in the lowest-spending states
up to something that's at least reasonable to support a middle-class
existence. There are high-spending states, mostly in New England and a
few other places where salaries are reasonable, but other states do
have to worry about it. Working conditions, however, are even more
important for keeping people in once they've made the choice to teach.
They both matter, but I would say that working conditions are equally
important.
Preparation and mentoring matter a lot. Teachers who are well-prepared
leave at more than two times lower rates than teachers who are not
fully prepared. One of the things we often do in shortages is bring in
people who haven't prepared to teach. Then we exacerbate the problem
because they leave at two to three times the rate. The same thing is
true with mentoring. If we could prepare teachers well, mentor them
when they come in and give them decent working conditions, we would be
very close to the 4 percent solution.
Speaking of teacher preparation programs, President Obama's long-
promised overhaul of teacher-prep programs never got off the ground.
This report seems to underscore the absolute importance of revisiting
that stalled reform effort, no?
Absolutely. We need to make some investments in teacher preparation.
Obama made a promise when he ran in 2008. He said, "If you will teach,
we will pay for your education." That didn't happen, but if we were to
reboot that promise and actually ensure that people who choose this
noble profession do not come into it with college debt, that would also
make a huge difference in the conditions of teaching and supply.
The reports make clear that minority teachers have some of the highest
attrition rates. What can be done to keep minority teachers in the
classroom longer? They write that one of their biggest problems is lack
of autonomy in the classroom, lack of input in decision-making. That
seems to get down to management, right?
Yes. A lot of these problems do get down to management. If you look at
the reasons that minority teachers leave, the first reason is lack of
administrative support. The second one is concerns about the way
accountability pressures in the No Child Left Behind era created
pressure to teach to the test, lots of sanctions and the loss of
autonomy in the classroom because quite often in central-city schools,
where minority teachers are concentrated, they were moved to a
scripted, teacher-proof curriculum, geared to test preparation, which
is not what people go into teaching for.
They go into teaching to engage students, to excite them about
learning, to create exciting classrooms. I think there's both the
support that teachers need to be enabled to teach, which administrators
are a key part of providing, along with the investments in their
teaching conditions. Then there's the opportunity to teach freely and
creatively in ways that are exciting and work for children.
What are some concrete ways in which school districts can work on
working conditions to make teachers stick around longer?
Of course teachers need materials that are necessary to teach. You
know, the books and computers and that kind of thing. So clearly that's
a first level of need. But beyond that, teachers always talk about how
they want to be able to collaborate with their colleagues. They want to
be in a collegial environment. They want to be clear that they're
supported in their efforts. That there's moral support and the
opportunity to continue to learn and be more effective, which is how
teachers get their satisfaction — by meeting the needs of students in
ways that allow them to see that learning.
That really means we need great principals. We need principals who know
how to create learning environments for teachers as well as kids that
are collegial and focused on everyone pulling together in a common
direction. We do very little in this country to prepare principals.
Talk a little bit more about that. Should more be done to strengthen
principal training or support, and what might that look like?
We do need to do more to support principal training and recruitment. We
want to recruit into these jobs the very best teachers who are dynamic
leaders as well and then help them learn the management skills that
they need to succeed. There are some places that have done good work in
this regard. North Carolina has a Principal Fellows Program that allows
the recruitment of dynamic people and then underwrites their training.
They get to train under the wing of an expert principal in an
internship while they're also taking course work. That's produced a lot
of great leadership in that state.
We need a real coherent approach, both in the states and with federal
support, to be sure that our schools are well-led. I'd love to see us
get a sort of a West Point for leadership in education the way we have
the training for leaders in the military, who get the best access to
state-of-the-art opportunities to learn these very difficult skills.
That would make a huge difference in the quality of our schools,
particularly in the highest-need communities.
Could be called Ed Point.
I like that. I might borrow this from you, if you don't mind.
Yeah. Steal it, please.
It's interesting, as a reporter, the most interesting, innovative and,
I think, most successful classrooms I've visited are places where
teachers feel they have a good measure of autonomy, are supported, and
the schools invest in professional development. Your thoughts?
That is the special sauce right there. Teachers want to work together
and collaborate, but then they have to adapt whatever they figure out
to their needs of their own classroom. They want to be creative, and
they need that opportunity to continue to learn and be supported by the
leadership in the school. That's what makes people who want to produce
learning happy. They are learners themselves. That's why people go into
the profession. If you can get that secret sauce, you've got a lot of
the juice you need for that 4 percent solution.
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