Despite a small uptick in the number of people enrolled in teacher preparation programs, the state still faces a large shortage of qualified teachers.
24,000 credentialed teachers are needed, but the pipeline produced only 8,000 last year.
Bill Raden and Eunice Park write in Capital & Main:
April findings by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing noted that 23,832 prospective teachers were enrolled in state teacher prep programs during the 2016-17 school year (the most recent data available) — an increase of nearly 2,500 over the previous year and 4,000 more than in 2012-13. But that’s still a trickle compared to the 77,705 enrollment over 2001-02. Last year alone the state came up short about 8,000 of the 24,000 fully credentialed teachers it needed. The result, said California’s newly appointed State Board of Education president Linda Darling-Hammond, is that “half the people coming in are not yet prepared and most likely are teaching in the highest-need communities.” The fix? Darling-Hammond said the state must restore discontinued programs, such as scholarships that cover teacher preparation program costs, or student loan forgiveness in exchange for teaching in high-needs schools or hard-to-fill subject areas.
As the new president of the State Board of Education, Darling-Hammond is well situated to push these reasonable fixes into reality.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Stanford has an answer. It’s in a paean to TFA posted at the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Spring 2019). White, privileged college grads, (“5% of a university’s senior class apply for TFA”) can gain, “Empathy Through Service”. The cringe-worthy article would have greater credibility if it showed that TFA’ers had a strong record of subsequent employment in places other than investment firms that expand charter schools and administration at billionaire funded non-profits. As an example, there’s a current Senior Fellow, former V.P. of Education Policy, at the Gates-funded Center for American Progress.
One of CAP’s papers shows us what empathy looks like- raising funds for schools by selling advertising on buses and by privatizing public education.
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TFA is not about improving education; if it were, the recruits would have at least a year of preparation before entering the classroom, not five weeks.
And they would commit to a minimum of three years of teaching, not two.
TFA is about giving recruits a star on their resume and getting them entry into lucrative post-teaching jobs and careers on Wall Street and in corporate America.
Above all, TFA is about TFA itself, hiring out young people as if they were indentured servants, for which TFA gets a fat finders’ fee.
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Indentured servants; yes. While we so often talk about TFA alumni who aggressively go on to jobs in politics, banking and lobbying, we usually gloss over the many idealistic students who are brought into the program, hired, harassed, demoralized and dismissed — their entire teaching experience lasting two years or less and leaving them in dire mental straits.
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Pipelines transport inanimate objects, not people. Intentional misuse of the word reflects the dehumanization preferred by unbridled capitalists. “Outsourcing” is similar, in reality it is exploitation of labor and avoidance of safety and health concerns.
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So true! Pipelines transport inanimate objects. But then, billionaires probably see most people as inanimate objects — as data.
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Why would there not be a teacher shortage after years of social hostility to the profession? In popular literature, teachers are depicted as boring (Ferris Buhler), dangerous, hostile, incompetent, and flirtaceous. Or they are impossibly heroic as in Stand and Deliver or Mr. holland’s Opus (not to be confused with Bloom County’s Opus). What young person would want to step in to those shoes for a wage that makes a single earning family eligible for food stamps?
This climate makes some places lucky enough to get the spouse of a professional in the classroom. Where professionals live, their significant other often graces the classroom, the library, the copy room. Where few professions exist, teachers are usually there because they either love their communities, love intellectual independence, or both. The erosion of these two motivations is obviously eroding to the soil that produces teachers. Over the past forty years, teachers who are excited about both children and their subject have been obliged to give way to teachers who can make peace with the testing and data-driven climate. It narrows the possibilities.
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Cogent Roy; indeed, basically perfect. And thank you.
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Yes. And the damage done for forty years will take forty years to undo — once the overclass decides to begin undoing it. They won’t because to them, it’s all about the money. I know a Hollywood screenwriter and I’ve asked him to portray schools and the teaching profession in a more realistic and therefore positive light. He said no can do because he believes only scandal sells. Sex and violence sells. It’s all about the money. The media industry, the charter industry , the testing industry, the billionaires… it’s all about the money. Democracy and civic duty take the back seat to capitalism every time. Unchecked greed is a cataclysmic disease.
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I see that NYU has a new Walton-funded program teacher education (or training?) program that sounds a lot like a one year paid residency with on-line coursework patterned after TFA. I hope that it is not filled with a strong dose non-nonsense discipline. I see that the program is for selected subjects but also is planned for something like dual certification in special education (most common issues).
The announcement came to my attention here. https://www.the74million.org/3-ways-nyu-is-training-new-teachers-to-use-special-ed-and-ell-strategies-to-better-serve-all-kids/ See program details at https://teachereducation.steinhardt.nyu.edu
Because this is Walton funded, and the amount of financing was not clear from the press release, I checked out the amount of the grant and other funding flowing to NYU (Steinhart School of Culture, Education, and Human Development).
2018 K-12 Education $295,586 To support the Steinhart Teacher Residency
2017 K-12 Education $251,200 To support grantee’s initiatives in: 1) the expansion and improvement of its teacher residency program (Embedded Masters of Arts in Teaching, EMAT), and 2) the creation of a learning network of teacher preparation providers (the “Making Teacher Education Better” Network Improvement Community, NIC.)
2017 K-12 Education $148,745 To support The Research Alliance for New York City Schools at New York University
2016 K-12 Education $282,057 (no detail)
2015 K-12 Education $169,198 (no detail)
I earned a master’s degree in art education at NYU, the Washington Square campus, an unbelievably long time ago,
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NYU, like most other universities, will never say NO to a huge grant, no matter the source.
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I attended on a full tuition scholarship. Some endowment unknown to me likely made that possible.
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“unbelievably long time ago,” I tell my students that I did not have to learn but one continent when I was in school:Pangea. It was so sad to,watch all the land masses drift apart. Just like the American electorate.
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If there is such a shortage, then why is my school district, one of the largest in CA (MDUSD) cutting teacher jobs next year to the point of a rally last night? Further, if there is such a scarcity in supply, why then is there not a huge increase in the pay?
Perhaps if we honor the teaching profession by paying teachers a lucrative wage, giving them freedom from ridiculous standardized common core CAASPP testing demands, and eliminating the constant humiliating pink slips they get every year due to the higher ups inability to budget and forecase correctly, then maybe we won’t have a teacher shortage.
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In rigged capitalism, which is not a free market, salaries don’t go up when there is a labor shortage. For the richest 0.1%, a labor shortage is addressed with “continuous improvement” which translates as labor does more with fewer resources.
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Never has been a “free market” either. I google-earthed “the free market” a while back and this is where it took me:
13, 33 14.99 North and 29 29 42.44 West.
Pretty hard to drive there.
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New Market, Alabama is nestled in the coves of the western face of the Cumberland Mountains near Huntsville.
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Ah, but Roy, New is not Free. . .
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I’ll bet the #1 driver of teacher flight from many schools (not just inner-city) is difficult student behavior. Indeed almost all of the ex-teachers I’ve met left the profession for this reason. There is one older female teacher at my suburban public school who is retiring early this year for just this reason. But few dare talk about this. And rather than empower teachers to take control of their classrooms, we’re stripping them of the few tools that they’ve had at their disposal –detention and the prospect of suspension.
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The problem is not with the students. The “problem” of student discipline lies with the adminimals who make and (maybe) enforce the discipline policies.
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Administrators have become enablers under the NCLB, RttT, and ESSA.
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