Tag Archives: teacher shortage

When There Is a Shortage of Teachers, Will Any “Teacher” In the Classroom Do?

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Every year school principals post openings for classroom teacher vacancies with the intention to hire a licensed teacher with the academic and pedagogic preparation to teach the children a school curriculum. However, the shortage of licensed and prepared teachers seeking employment as teachers means that a principal may not find any candidates with a valid license to teach the posted assignment. This is New Personnel 101 for principals in thousands of schools every year – how to make do without a licensed and prepared teacher.

So, a principal scrambles to hire the next best – a teacher with a different license but who knows how to teach. Or a long-term substitute teacher without a teaching license or academic and pedagogic training. Or an apprentice teacher who is enrolled in an on-the-job teacher preparation program but not yet fully trained. Or a local resident well known in the school who has a baccalaureate degree and is willing to try out as a classroom teacher. The WI Department of Instruction has protocols for issuing permits or temporary licenses with stipulations that allow a school board to employ any of these people who are explicitly prepared for the vacant teaching assignment. Or the principal may give up on finding a teacher and reassign the children to other classrooms. Each of these options has an immediate upside and a longer downside.

New Personnel 101 does not go away when an unlicensed, unprepared teacher is hired. The principal is supposed to continue posting this position as a teacher vacancy until a licensed and prepared teacher is hired. If an unlicensed teacher with a temporary license is hired, the principal is responsible for assuring and supporting the “temp” in meeting the stipulations of the temporary license. That amounts to significant extra time and effort. New Personnel 101 is an ongoing unanticipated and unwanted work effort.

The rub comes if the principal believes the “next best” is good enough and that reposting will not find a better “next best.” This is acutely true if there are no student discipline or parent issues arising from a “next best” teacher in a temporary assignment. The WI DPI will renew a temporary license with stipulations almost indefinitely, if the temporary teacher continues to make “efforts” to remove the stipulations of the temporary license. It does not take much to be an “effort.”

The sad outcome of New Personnel 101 is that a continuing contract for “next best” who never completes a licensing program but never has classroom problems gets lost in all the other high demands a principal faces in the business of administering a school. When the critical attribute for good enough is the absence of discipline problems and parent complaints, the good enough of New Personnel 101 makes the expediency of putting a teacher in the classroom more important than giving all children the quality instruction they deserve and need.

The reality of New Personnel 101

There is a significant corps of unlicensed teachers in our classrooms. “Different sources estimate between 42,000 and over 100,000 unfilled teacher positions nationwide. Moreover, another 270,000 to 365,000 employed K-12 teachers are reported to be unqualified or not fully certified for the teaching assignments that they have been given. In some areas, the inability to find qualified teachers is so bad that anyone who passes a background check gets hired, even without holding a relevant degree.”

In Wisconsin, there are 2,400 unfilled teacher vacancies for the 2024-25 school year with 4,057 unqualified teachers in classrooms.

https://www.fullmindlearning.com/blog/teacher-vacancies-by-state-us?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Apprenticeship resolves New Personnel 101.

One of the options available to school boards is to employ apprentice teachers. An apprentice teacher meets four immediate criteria. An apprentice must –

  1. Have an earned baccalaureate degree. Although this baccalaureate is not in education, it signifies that the apprentice has intellectual knowledge and skills for a college degree and the capacity to become a trained teacher.
  2. Be enrolled in an educator preparation program (EPP). There are a variety of EPPs in Wisconsin and most are affiliated with Cooperative Educational Service Agencies (CESAs). The DPI teacher licensing department supervised EPPs to ensure that the EPP’s teacher training program meets WI’s statutory requirements for teacher training as well as the initial teacher preparation standards for a teaching license. For example, all licensed math teachers must meet the preparation standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM).
  3. Be employed by a school board as an apprentice teacher assigned to a classroom aligned with their educator preparation program. Employment as an apprentice is a HUGE asset for apprenticeship programs – apprentices earn while they learn. Unlike enrollment in a college or university teacher prep program that require almost full-time class attendance, apprentices teach classes in school, attend the EPP’s online courses, and have an ongoing income that meets their life needs.
  4. Pass a criminal background check. This is the same requirement for all public education teachers.

The essential benefit of the apprenticeship program is that a “next best” teacher is not hired and forgotten. Apprentices are supported by

  • EPP instructors. I use preparation for a math teacher as an example. As apprentices learn each of the seven NCTM teacher prep standards, the instructor uses course assignments that directly connect each standard to the apprentice’s teaching assignment. Apprentices use their daily work as the application of each standard. Instructors are first-hand supporters of the apprentice’s daily teaching practices.
  • EPP licensing observers who observe the apprentice teaching and coach the apprentice to apply what the apprentice learns in EPP courses into practice in classroom teaching.
  • School principals who make required evaluative classroom observations of the apprentice’s teaching and provide the apprentice with both critical and constructive recommendations.
  • School mentors who teach the same grade level or the same courses as the apprentice.

The downside to hiring an apprentice teacher is that on the first day of classroom teaching the apprentice also is in the first days of course work learning how to teach. As a teacher, the apprentice immediately is a work in progress.

The upside to hiring an apprentice is that the apprentice is constantly learning about the best teaching and learning practices. There is not a settling for good enough that never changes because the apprentice is constantly learning how to become a fully prepared licensed teacher. And at the end of the apprentice’s EPP courses the apprentice has pedagogical training that is equal to the preparation of any university or college depart of education.

The Big Duh!

New Personnel 101 leaves school boards and principals with critical decisions to make when they cannot find a fully licensed teacher that meets their employment needs. They can settle for a “good enough” adult to be a classroom teacher.  They can allow “good enough” to become a permanent employee forgotten in the grind of a school year’s work. Or they can work with an EPP and hire an apprentice and collaborate to create a fully prepared and licensed teacher.

I endorse the employment of apprentice teachers. Through personal and professional experience, I know that this program works when school principals and EPPs collaborate to educate, train, and grow a new teacher one at a time.

New Personnel 101 is not going away. The lack of new teacher candidates is a recurring fact of school life. The question of how to make do with less than fully prepared teachers is our problem and requires school boards and principals to invest in new strategies for causing all children learn.

Good Classroom Management is Not Easy; It is a Learned and Practiced Skill and Art

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Teacher preparation in the United States is in crisis mode. There are not enough new teachers each year to replace teachers who leave the classroom. The cold fact is that four in every ten young teachers leave classroom teaching for other employment in their first five years of teaching. “Multiple reasons rise to the top of the list. Student behavior is a leading complaint Long hears from teachers who contemplate or leave teaching, and one he believes is among the hardest to address. ‘I don’t think anyone has the answer,’ said Long, referring to accounts of extreme student behavior targeting teachers that has resulted in physical or emotional harm.” Zachary Long quit teaching and with his wife co-founded Life After Teaching. He helps teachers who want to quit teaching to quit.

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/behind-the-stats-3-former-teachers-talk-about-why-they-left/2023/04

Student behavior runs teachers out of teaching. It is a fact, but it need not be a continuing fact. When we know teachers quit teaching because of unsuccessful classroom management, we need to aggressively improve how we prepare teachers.

When your boat is taking on water, you can abandon the ship, or you can fix the hole in the hull. We tolerate and accommodate the abandonment of classrooms even though we know a huge “hole” in teacher preparation is classroom management.

A review of teacher preparation curriculum in local colleges of education tells the story. Our local university, for example, provides teacher candidates with 72 credits of college course work toward a major in K-9 education. But there is only one three-credit course that teaches classroom management, and it combines learning theories with student behavior. When we know that an inability to manage children in a classroom setting is one of the leading causes of teacher attrition, is this adequate?

EDUC 340. Supporting Learning and Behavior in the Classroom. 3 Credits.

Course provides pre-service teachers with an understanding of how students learn in educational contexts. Learning theories reviewed, & learning strategies to enhance learning and prevent/manage behaviors are introduced and applied in direct interaction with a learner. Course may be repeated 2 times for a total of 6 credits.
Fall and Spring.

No Longer Is It a Hit Them Hard and Often Response

How to organize and manage groups of students is an age-old problem. The first Normal Schools (state teacher prep schools) endorsed corporal punishment for misbehaving students. Students went to the proverbial woodshed where their teacher administered discipline with a paddle. Teachers taught children to behave by fearing physical punishment. Although some schools began banning corporal punishment as early as 1914 it continued as a disciplinary practice in many states in the late 1990s.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/corporal-punishment-schools-still-legal-many-states#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Department%20of%20Education,dropped%20over%20the%20past%20decade.

When a wooden paddle was considered too harsh, teachers used a gym shoe. I saw the well-known design of a Converse gym shoe on the backsides of my male classmates in the 60s.

On the first day of my first teaching assignment my principal gave me a well-worn wooden paddle and told me to use it. When I asked what a teacher should do if a child’s behavior did not improve, he implied I should hit them harder and more often. I put my paddle in a closet.

Student Discipline as Pedagogy

As often as we talked about paddling back in the day, we clearly understood most of our teachers would never raise a hand to a student. They created patterns of good student behavior through good teaching. It was not a matter of experience, however. We knew veteran teachers whose classrooms were unruly and undisciplined and novice teachers whose students focused on learning not misbehaving. Even before I began my teacher preparation, it was clear that good teaching and good student discipline are linked.

Our task in teacher preparation today is to create highly qualified teachers of both curriculum and student discipline. A teacher who will stay in the profession needs to learn both.

Toolbox Preparation for every Teacher

Classroom management is as important as teaching methods. If a teacher cannot focus children’s attention on the curriculum, how can a teacher teach the curriculum? It is a what to do first dilemma – teach teachers how to teach or teach teachers how to manage children as learners. Both are equally important, and each needs equally strong emphasis.

Field experience tells us that fitting a student management philosophy to a teacher is like fitting shoes. One will feel better, wear better, and be more satisfying than all others. Therefore, teacher prep programs must teach teachers a variety of philosophies and strategies so that a teacher can find a personal plan that refines student behavior and enhances student learning.

The CESA 7 (WI) Teacher Development Center treats Instructional Methods and Classroom Management as toolbox courses that every teacher candidate, regardless of the license sought, must master. In Classroom Management, candidates study several behavioral management philosophies and strategies that allow the candidate to develop a personal and philosophical “fit” to their classroom management plans.

Candidates study and are assessed for their knowledge and understanding of five philosophies and strategies. They know the basis and background of each, their authors, and field studies of their applications. Candidates must know the following:

  • Choice/Logical Consequences
  • Discipline with Dignity
  • Assertive Discipline
  • Social Justice
  • PBIS

As an “apprentice” teacher development program, teacher candidates are employed by a school district and enrolled in the TDC. From day one they are classroom teachers under the supervision of school principals, mentors, and CESA 7 supervisors. CESA 7 enrolls candidates from districts throughout Wisconsin; districts that know CESA 7’s reputation for quality instruction and personal support given to of its apprentice teachers. The TDC licensing program requires four semesters of teacher prep coursework, daily teaching, and synthesis of TDC instruction into classroom applications.

Classroom Management and Instructional Methods are the first courses candidates must complete in their licensing program. The CESA 7 candidate supervisor emphasizes and guides apprentices to engage their students in the teacher’s learned classroom management design. This “guided” implementation sets up the relationship between learning and behavior and expectations for both the teacher’s and all students’ commitment to both.

Support of Novice Teachers is Critical

A second most common reason for teachers to leave teaching is their perceived lack of professional support. It starts with a principal and administrative structure that is hard pressed to meet daily crisis demands and leaves new teacher support as a low priority.

The Learning Policy Institute says, “New teachers who do not receive mentoring and other supports leave at more than two times the rate of those who do.”

https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Teacher_Exodus_Infographic.pdf

The CESA 7 TDC answers this dilemma with constant support from its classroom-visiting supervisors, a 24-7 online project specialist, and a curriculum and instruction consultant. TDC experience shows that its staff often understands and responds to candidate classroom problems before the school principal is aware of a problem.

Unlike IHEs that supervise student teachers during a clinical semester only, the TDC conducts supervisory observations and counseling throughout the candidate’s enrollment. Through this process, principals and TDC supervisors see, critique, and guide the development of each candidate’s classroom management practices. TDC teachers do not guess at student behavioral management. Candidates apply the methods they studied, use informed supervision, and refine strategies that work. And, they have ongoing professional feedback on the effectiveness of their classroom management.

The Big Duh!

We know that good teaching and good classroom management go together. We know that positive professional and administrative support is essential for novice teachers. We know that too many teachers leave their chosen profession too early because of problems with student discipline and a perceived lack of professional support. We know that novice teachers who learn and implement good teaching and good student discipline programs are more likely to continue their careers as classroom teachers.

When we know these things as true, teacher preparation programs must fix the hole in our teacher development programs that lead to teacher resignations. We can fix these problems and children can have the prepared teachers they deserve.

Disaggregated, There Is a Vast Difference in Teachers

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Teachers are a vast hodgepodge of people.  They come in all colors, shapes and sizes, and from the wide spectrum of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.  At one point, each decided to be a teacher.  Some early in life, the majority during their education, and others after experiencing other vocations.  Each is the product of an educator preparation program.  Each has earned a baccalaureate or more degrees and each carry one or more teaching licenses.  As practitioners today, they range from first year teachers to four decade-long veterans.  Teachers also range across the spectrum of effectiveness.  That describes the hodgepodge of our profession.

Question?

If a teacher teaches a lesson and no one learns, did the teacher really teach?  Though a play on Cartesian logic, it is a question that is asked everyday about teachers.  We teach to cause children to learn. 

Every day there are millions of lessons taught in our schools.  A lesson is a complicated dance requiring teaching skills, teacher empathy, child readiness to learn, and child engagement with the teaching.  Teachers know the dance steps but too often their teaching does not lead to learning.  Some point to the other person(s) in the room – children.  “Only if the children …” is their lament.  Others point to the current morass of distractions confronting teaching and learning.  Technology, social media, unstable home life, poverty, harassment from their peers – take your pick, they each bear guilt.  On the Cartesian other hand, if a teacher teaches a lesson and every child learns, the teacher really did teach.

Not all teachers are created equal.

The following may be generalizations about teachers, but when you close your office or classroom door and consider your faculty peers, their names and faces fall into these.

We know teachers who have learned instruction as a form of mechanical teaching.  They can construct lessons.  They also know their curriculum.  They can attach content knowledge and skill development to their instruction.  They teach and some children learn some things sometimes.  If these teachers were inspired and excited about learning and if they were “connected” to the children they taught, the results would be different.  But they are not

We know teachers who innately care about children and in return children respond to them.  Their classrooms are happy and exciting places.  They teach and children engage because the teacher cares about them, their school life and their home life.  Children hear and see and do and learn something sometimes. However, being happy and excited overpowers their constructive instruction.  Class time is full of talk and activity and excitement, but their instruction is not focused and scaffolded to build learning outcomes.  These teachers are liked by children, but these students will need reteaching next year of what they did not learn this year.

We know teachers who can deliver high quality instruction and innately care about children.  They connect their caring of the child as a unique person to their instruction of the child as a student.  Because the teacher cares about children, children care about their learning what the teacher teaches.  These classrooms combine a caring and inspired teacher with honed and effective teaching skills with children who are wanting and ready to learn.  Children learn.

The crux.

We can teach teachers pedagogy.  We can teach teachers the content and skills of their curricular disciplines.  We can purchase and provide all the curricular print and media, install and train teachers in the appropriate technologies, employ simulations and games in a rich educational environment.  But we cannot teach teachers innate caring.  The amorphous “teacher’s heart” is a variable we cannot grow.

On the positive side, we can train teachers to be responders to child needs.  As trained teachers, they do wonders in assuring that children have the support and programs they need in school.  Training is what moves children from hunger to being fed, unclothed to being clothed.  Training helps them respond to students who are victims of bullying and harassment and low socio-emotional self-esteem.  As trained teachers, they can implement their training, but training is not caring.  There is a difference between caring that is from the heart and caring that is a trained response to need.

Our reality.

There is not a shortage of people who completed teacher preparation programs and are licensed to teach.  There is a shortage of licensed teachers who want to be in classrooms.  We need to acknowledge the latter.

As another generalization, the low arc of teacher compensation over the first decade of employment and the low esteem the public has for public school teachers means that undergraduates in the top half of their graduating class do not choose education as a degree program.  Engineering, medicine, law, and business draw the top half of each graduating class. 

The same reasons have diminished the annual numbers of graduates with a teaching license.  In yesteryear, a district posting a teaching vacancy could expect dozens to a hundred applications.  Today districts are lucky to receive five applications, and some postings result in zero applicants.

The shortage issue has caused state government to open apprenticeship pathways to a teaching license.  People without teaching licenses are hired by school districts on the condition that this person enrolls in a teacher preparation program.  Concurrently, these unlicensed teachers teach and learn how to teach.  Understand clearly that school boards are happy to have a teacher of any dimension in the classroom even as they acknowledge apprentice teachers are not yet trained teachers. 

This introduces a new category to our generalizations about teachers.

  • The inspired, caring, highly effective teacher who causes successful student learning and growth.
  • The caring teacher who engages children socially and emotionally and causes some children to learn some things sometimes.
  • The technically-efficiently but emotionally vague teacher who constructs lessons and causes some children to learn something sometimes.
  • The apprentice teacher who is learning how to teach on the job.

The Big Duh!

We need to know our teachers and their widely differentiated qualities and understand what we settle for when we place every teacher in a classroom.  Children know the difference, so should we.

To Stop Teacher Shortages and Attrition Pay More and Support Better

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“Is the grass really greener elsewhere?”.  Many teachers consider this question at several times in their careers.  Actually, the question is not worded correctly.  “Is the grass where I stand green enough for me now and for my future” is a better question.  The resounding answer for too many teachers is “There is little grass where I stand, and it is not green enough!”

Teachers have choices and they are making the decision to leave their first profession.  “According to the WI DPI’s analysis, about 4 out of every 10 first-year teachers either leave the state or the profession altogether after just six years (39.4% of new teachers), and only 68 percent of aspiring educators who complete an education preparation program were ultimately employed in a Wisconsin public school”.

https://dpi.wi.gov/news/releases/2024/education-workforce-crisis-report-analysis

State the conclusion first and then develop its reasoning.

Educational leaders and politicians have bemoaned the realities of teacher shortages for decades; however, moaning has not changed its reality.  In Wisconsin, legislators continue to modify the requirements for obtaining and keeping a teaching license believing that this will attract and keep teachers.  Their heads are in the proverbial sand.  It is the conditions of the profession not the entry requirements that are the problem.

Instead, make changes in two of the most critical elements of the profession: compensation and supervision.  First, make and fund a $70,000 starting salary for teachers in every district in Wisconsin irrespective of their current state funding or property values.  After a probationary period of five years, make the continuing salary point $85,000 and let CPI dictate annual increase thereafter.   

Second, guarantee every teacher has adequate principal support and supervision.  Adequacy means that a principal has a face-to-face conversation with the teacher every week and is in the teacher’s classroom at least once every two weeks.  Overkill?  Hardly.  Instructionally proficient teachers will welcome the increased principal presence because the principal will see and know how good they are.  Students will understand there is no distance between teachers and principals relative to student behaviors and discipline.  Instructionally underperforming teachers will profit from the principal’s guidance for improvement.

Why these two remedies?  Because they address two of a teacher’s most pressing concerns.  Is my compensation enough for me and my family to satisfy our needs and some of our wants?  And does my boss know and care about my teaching and the children I teach?  When we answer these two concerns positively, all the rest of the minor career irritants can take care of themselves.

It is easy to dismiss these two steps will because they will cost more money than currently is spent on education.  On the other hand, the constant loss of teacher talent and the constant expenditure of school time and expense in recruiting and on-boarding new teachers every year has equivalent costs.  We should stop paying the cost of teachers leaving begin paying the costs for teachers staying.

As a school superintendent, our district practice was to begin each new teacher to our district with a salary amount large enough that salary was never an issue with the teacher’s ongoing job satisfaction.  Money issues aside, we then could constructively work on teaching and learning.  A second practice was for administrators to purposefully connect with every teacher and staff member weekly.  We were a small school with a superintendent and a principal, but our priorities were clear.  A purposeful connection was non-negotiable and not a discussion of the weather but a conversation about instruction, curriculum, assessment, and student performances. 

Interestingly, some teachers still will leave their profession and they probably should.  But it will not be for lack of compensation or administrative support and supervision.  The truth is some teachers should not be teaching and they need to find that out for themselves.

The conclusion is reached because green differs among professions.

People are comparative shoppers by nature.  As we compare cars in the parking lot, houses by neighborhoods, or vacations by the amount of beach time, people also compare professions by salaries.  A first-year teacher in Wisconsin observes these two facts about her profession. 

The average first-year salary for teachers in Wisconsin is $48,520 and in the nation is $46,590.  These are averages with 50% of teachers, first year and veteran, earning less.

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/First-Year-Teacher-Salary–in-Wisconsin

In comparison, the average starting salaries for other careers is

  • Junior civil engineer is $67,795.
  • Junior chemical engineer is $62,229.
  • Junior systems engineer is $67,489
  • Business development representative is $67,934.
  • Junior accountant is $49,745.
  • Junior supply chain analyst is $56,457.
  • Entry-level software engineer is $73,584.
  • Junior developer is $69,547.
  • Junior network engineer is $66,138.
  • Construction manager is $76,625.
  • Project manager is $76,949.
  • Site engineer is $85,454.
  • Risk analyst is $76,869.
  • Research associate is $54,806.
  • Data analyst is $65,681.

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/college-degrees-with-the-highest-starting-salaries

The grass really is greener somewhere else at the start of a professional teaching career.  Teachers do not approach the starting salaries of other professions that require a baccalaureate degree and training.  Further, the difference is magnified over time.  By the time teachers and other professionals are in the 35 to 45 age brackets, the difference in salaries between these same professions will be $60,000 or more per year.  This status has been fact for decades.     

The shortage also is driven by a lack of collegians enrolling in colleges of education.  Enrollments dwindle every year as more and more employed teachers bail out on teaching.    Comparatively speaking, neither beginning nor continuing a career in teaching pays the bills as well as salaries in another profession.

The significant change to a $70,000 starting salary and an $85,000 post-probation salary point irrespective of district will cause collegians and veteran teachers to reconsider their professional decisions.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/02/best-and-worst-paying-college-majors-for-graduates-aged-35-to-45.html

The conclusion is reached because there is more than dollars that causes teachers to leave the profession.

Money matters, but there are other factors we need to acknowledge and address in order to stem the tide of teachers leaving the profession.  A study by the Learning Policy Institute cites these five factors for teachers leaving the profession.

  • Inadequate Preparation – Beginning teachers with little or no preparation are 2 1⁄2 times more likely to leave the classroom after one year compared to their well-prepared peers.
  • Lack of Support for New Teachers – New teachers who do not receive mentoring and other supports leave at more than two times the rate of those who do.
  • Challenging Working Conditions – Teachers often cite working conditions, such as the support of their principals and the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues, as the top reason for leaving.
  • Better Career Opportunities – More than 1 in 4 teachers who leave say they do so to pursue other career opportunities.
  • Personal Reasons – More than 1 in 3 teachers who leave cite personal reasons, including pregnancy and childcare, as extremely or very important in their decision.

https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Teacher_Exodus_Infographic.pdf

An improved and greener professional career derives when teachers are supported and recognized for their good teaching and their causing children to learn.  The caveat to this step in supporting teachers is that principals need to time and resources to be educational leaders for teachers.  A principal trained in curriculum and instruction is wasted sitting in an office writing out discipline reports.  Most student discipline is routine and can be administered by a dean of students or admin-assistant.  Most campus supervision can be successfully provided by paraprofessionals.

The Big Duh!

We have a teacher shortage for two reasons.  Our educational system and cultural mindset do not place a high enough monetary and appreciative value on teaching.  Because the system does not value teachers, teachers do not value the profession.  Change the valuing by paying teachers a professionally comparative salary and ensuring adequate administrative support and supervision.  What we value highly receives more of our continuing attention.

The second reason for teacher shortage is that we keep doing the same inane things in the hope that more people will want to teach and then remain classroom teachers.  Stop mucking around with licensing.  Instead hold high and higher standards for a teaching license.  We don’t value what has been devalued.  Make the profession one of higher standards and more people will value it more.

What the heck!

If we cannot do these two things to enhance the profession, then turn all schools into PK-12-day care centers.  The average annual salary for full-time daycare workers in Wisconsin is $27,640.  There is a new goal for politicians who do not value public education.

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Childcare-Salary–in-Wisconsin

We Are Short of Licensed Teachers Who Want to Teach

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When you don’t plan for your next generation, you are assured you will evolve into obscurity if not extinction.  Aspects of our culture go missing over time.  Then existed then, over time, their need dissolved and poof!   They are no more.  Consider these areas of employment – telephone operators, elevator operators, gandy dancers, phrenologists, redsmiths, scissor grinders, telegraphists, lamplighters, soda jerks, lectors, town criers, film projectionists, log drivers, and milkmen.  The need for these employments once was and is no longer.  They drifted to obscurity then elimination.  Evolution in the world of work and the elimination of fields of work is real. Our teaching crisis is that we are short of teachers who want to teach.

Extinction takes many forms.  For the dodo bird, extinction meant elimination – there are no dodo birds today.  Through a combination of hunting, deforestation, and purposeful destruction of dodo nests, these birds that were first identified by explorers in the early 1500s were gone by 1681.  Poof!  While the existence of the dodo was in human hands, not the bird’s, they continue to be a landmark in the reality of extinction. 

Obscurity then extinction – will public education teachers be next?  Obscurity is when the primary function of school is day care for children; extinction is when any adult can be a day care provider. 

What do we know.

We know these two facts:

  1. More people are leaving the educational profession than are entering.  The profession has a current gap of almost 70% in the number of teachers quitting, retiring, and moving on compared to the number of new teachers beginning work in the field. 
  2. There are more persons in Wisconsin with valid teaching and other educational licenses than the number of educators currently employed PLUS current and anticipated job openings.  We have an abundance of licensed educators.  However, licensed educators do not choose educational employment.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/k-12-teachers-are-quitting-what-would-make-them-stay#

Hence these questions.  If we have an abundance of dodo birds, why are we experiencing a shortage of dodo birds?  Why do we have an abundance of licensed teachers and a shortage of teachers in classrooms?  Why do people spend the time and resources necessary to gain an educational license and then choose not to be employed as educators?

Why is this thus?

Teaching in public education is on the drifting list.  There is a shortage of teachers in most states leading to either larger and larger classes for an employed teacher or increased numbers of students taught by an unprepared teacher.  There is a clear shortage of teachers with specific licenses, special education being the teacher hardest to find.  Math and science and computer technology are close followers in the shortage market. 

Why?  Compensation has been and continues to be a real downside to teaching.  The source of teacher pay in most states is through legislative funding and state funding is always political.  Legislators balance state budgets by controlling educational spending, one of a state’s largest annual expenditures.  Clearly, teacher pay was not keeping up with the cost of living prior to our current national economic inflation woes and suffers greater discrepancy now.  Teachers chronically lose spending power.  Teachers are choosing to leave classrooms for employment that pays more.

Second, education is being beaten up politically.  Politicians are making education a partisan campaign battle topic.  Conservative legislation dictates what teachers can teach and cannot teach, how they may address children, and threaten teachers with prosecution and loss of license for teaching unapproved subjects.  Some teachers are being bullied out of their profession. 

Third, the deficits of student learning loss in the pandemic put teachers on the hot seat for an impossible speedy recovery of lost learning.  The financial cliff of federal pandemic dollars to schools will cause many recently added school positions to be discontinued due to no continuing local funding.  Tutors and interventionists and additional teaching positions will be terminated.  And the pressure for current teachers to make good on all mandates, all requirements, and all political entreaties within the historical structure of school is causing more teachers to seek other employment. 

Finally, teachers suffer from the “pile on” effect.  75% of departing teachers cite their being overworked and under appreciated as their real reason for quitting teaching.  Piling on happens in many ways.

Going back two decades, No Child Left Behind began a trend of government mandates with the expectations of “do this or be replaced”.  State assessments in reading and math became a school’s annual report card.  Art, music, PE, shop, marketing, technology, computer science, agriculture, and world language teachers all were told to incorporate ELA, reading, and math in their daily instruction in order to raise school test scores. 

Across time family and school relationships have drastically changed.  The number of homes with two working parents struggling economically has significantly increased parallel to a decrease in parental supervision of children doing schoolwork at home.  This is not a complaint about parents but a statement about new realities.  Classroom teachers spend more daily time with a child than the child’s parents.  Teachers have become frontline care takers and surrogates for parents. 

Teacher shortages mean teachers in school needed to assume additional assignments and responsibilities.  The most egregious of these are non-instructional duties, such as recess, lunch, and bus duties, but also more before and after school tutoring for students who need extra time.  These are things that absent teachers used to do.  Every extra duty subtracts from teachers’ workday time for planning, correcting and grading student work, professional meetings, and communication with parents.  Planning, correcting and grading, and communicating are essential work so teachers do these from home.

A teacher’s time for home and family life has been greatly eroded by piling on.  What is billed and contracted as an 8:00 am to 4:00 pm job, now is a 7:00 am to 9:00 pm job.  There is the 8:00 to 4:00 school day with seven or more hours of assigned duties and there is the before and after schoolwork at home necessary to be a complete teacher.  Work life reduces home life for teachers.

Teachers’ resignations are not equally distributed.  Resignations are greater among:

Young teachers.  They are lowest on the compensation scale, carry undergraduate debt, face housing scarcity, and are not seasoned to the realities of teaching today.  They also have the least to lose in a career change early in life.

Teachers in low-income districts.  Resources matter.  When the common response to an inquiry is, “We don’t have that in our district” or “We cannot afford to do that”, it does not take long for teachers to seek employment in districts with needed resources.

Teachers in districts with high diversity.  Diversity equals educational challenges.  There are more non-English languages spoken, more cultural nuances, more special needs students, and more non-educational struggles.  Teaching in high diversity districts requires more than teaching from teachers.

Resignations create the greatest havoc in districts that have the greatest difficulty in recruiting new teachers.

Where schools and classrooms are empty due to diminishing enrollment, there also will be schools and classrooms empty due to diminishing numbers of prepared teachers.

What can we do about this thusness?

  • Compensation is the easy yet wrong answer.  Teacher compensation needs to keep pace with costs of living.  No more and no less.  Why would those in charge argue differently?  Well, there are reasons but that is for another day.
  • Beyond compensation, restructure the work so that the right work, causing all children to learn, can be accomplished.  Do these:
  • Maintain class sizes of 20-25 children.  Although the STAR studies indicated class sizes around 15, there was no compelling research to support such small class sizes.  A class of 20-25 gives school leaders enough flexibility to manage enrollment.  More importantly, a teacher can effectively instruct 20 to 25 children, create positive daily interaction with each, understand the individual learning needs of each, and still utilize whole group instruction as appropriate.  The “paper” load for 20 – 25 is manageable.  The parent contact requirements are manageable.  In many urban schools, 20 – 25 reduces their current daily student assignment by 40% or more.
  • Invest in classroom teachers for initial instruction and level two interventions.  Assign current interventionists to classroom teaching.  Too many dollars are spent in correcting and filling in after-initial teaching.  The hiring of interventionists assumes failed initial instruction.  With proper class sizing and planning time regular teaching can resolve student lapses in learning.
  • Make planning and prep time real and inviolate.  Assign each classroom teacher a minimum of 90 minutes of daily prep time.  This does not include before and after school time as that is when professional meetings occur.  Before and after school time also must be reserved for student and parent access.  90 minutes of uninterrupted prep time allows a teacher to ensure clear and targeted lesson plans, quality feedback on student work, and planning that accommodates all student needs.
  • Extend the annual teaching contract to include 20 days of summer curriculum and teaching development time.  Inserting PD as stand-alone days in the school year is absurd; it is lip service to the school board’s obligation to provide PD.  We wouldn’t expect children to profit from a stand-alone day of essential teaching and learning.  Summer PD provides accountable educational in-service as administrators and teachers have adequate time for professional training, collegial interaction, and practice/reinforcement of new training.  Everything we know about teaching children should be applied to teacher in-service.
  • Assure that teaching is politically agnostic.  There is no place for partisan politics in the education of children.  Our goal is to cause all children to have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for each to be an informed and problem-solving adult.  In the now, we need to stand against partisanship that would tell us what to teach and what not to teach based upon political positions and political retribution. 

The Big Duh!

These are seven bullet points that make a difference between a teacher being in the classroom and being in another profession.  Much like the dodo bird that what made extinct by how people and the culture of the time treated it, classroom teachers are responding to how people and the culture of today treat them.  We can leave things in the current status quo and watch the number of qualified teachers dwindle until public education is truly just day care or we can change the culture to ensure public education continues to be our nation’s most important continuing institution.