JanResseger explains the reasons for the national teacher shortage here, which will not surprise readers of this blog.
i encourage you to read the entire post.
She begins:
”You’d have to be pretty out of touch to have missed that teachers, who have been striking all year from West Virginia to Kentucky to Oklahoma to California, have been showing us their pay is inadequate and their working conditions are horrible. Schools in too many places feature huge classes (too few teachers) and an absence of counselors, social workers, librarians and nurses. All this ultimately signals a school finance problem stemming from the Great Recession a decade ago and state legislatures and governors determined to cut taxes.
All this is well documented in academic research. Emma Garcia and Elaine Weiss recently released the first in a series of studies from the Economic Policy Institute, a report they summarize in a short, policy piece: “In our report we argue that when issues such as teacher qualifications and equity across communities are taken into consideration, shortages are more concerning than we thought. If we consider the declining share of teachers who hold the credentials associated with teacher quality and effective teaching (they are fully certified, took the standard route into teaching, have more than five years of experience, and they have an educational background in the subject they teach), the teacher shortage grows. If we compare the share of these teachers in high-needs schools (schools with a large share of students from families living in poverty) with other schools, we see that the shortages there are even more severe in those high-needs schools.” Garcia and Weiss are particularly concerned about the growing percentage of teachers who are not fully certified, or who began teaching with only alternative—sometimes only a few weeks long—preparation for teaching, or who are currently teaching subjects in which they have no educational background themselves, or who are inexperienced. The number of emergency-certified teachers has grown as well qualified and experienced teachers are giving up and leaving the profession.”
Read on by opening the link.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As usual Jan has articulated the many reasons for the decline in candiates for teaching and the compromises being made in hiring “anyone” who has a degree, or relevant work experience, and who can pass minimal criteria for a job with children and teens.
Efforts to de-professionalize teaching through online instructional management systems is yet another factor that is demoralizing some of our most qualified and experienced teachers and teacher educators.
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deprofessionalize, demoralize: all of it in two words
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There were 5 hours of presidential candidates on cnn last night. The subject of teacher shortages was mentioned.
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We have found the solution to our problems in Oklahoma!
https://www.tlioklahoma.org/
Oh wait it is staffed by TFA’ers
https://www.tlioklahoma.org/the-team
And associated with a charter school
https://www.tlioklahoma.org/the-pilot
And paid for by the Waltons, Schustermans and Kaiser
Never mind.
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No public schools should have to accept TFA associates. No other profession would accept such a blatant disregard for legitimate training and credentials.
Once again the bulk of TFA associates are placed in charters with large numbers of poor, minority students. It is so clear and transparent that it is designed, not to improve education, but to offer a cheap alternative that is separate and unequal to what most white students receive.
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Ms. Ressenger has done an outstanding job in this short piece of laying out precisely the reasons for the enormous teacher shortage. It’s well worth reading the whole piece. Thank you, Ms. Ressenger!
Of course, if things were left up to Mr. Gates and Zuckerberg, all those teachers would be replaced by depersonalized learning software–four hundred kids in a room with computers and a proctor from TFA.
New Learning Software (Now with Personalized Avatars!)
Day One: Cool! OK, how come this isn’t working? Oh, OK. Thanks! How do I change the background color?
Day Two: I finished the thing, and it gave me three more! The videos are kinda interesting. Yeah, if you’re a total dork. It’s not that bad. Beats listening to Mr. Shepherd drone on about commas and Mary freaking Shelley. It says I’m not connecting. Try again later. This is so stupid.
Day Three: Please, Mr. Shepherd. Let’s do something else. What do you mean we have to do this? It totally sucks. How many of these modules are there? The WHOLE YEAR? You’re kidding. No way.
Day Four: I’m not doing it. No way. They can’t make us do this. C’mon, Mr. Shepherd. Let’s do Mary Shelley again. Mr. Shepherd should freaking marry Mary Shelley. Really, Mr. Shepherd? Yay!!!!
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Every time. Every piece of learning software. First the hype. Then the boredom. Then the rebellion.
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So, how do you fix the teacher shortage?
Scrap the pedagogically useless, invalid, unreliable high-stakes standardized summative tests and all decision making based on them.
Reduce class sizes.
Increase teacher pay.
Return to classroom teachers control over their own curricula, pedagogical approaches, and materials, and reduce class loads, providing time in teachers’ schedules for them to meet weekly with one another to plan, to discuss what is and isn’t working, to discuss curricular and pedagogical strategies and materials, to share war stories–in short, to do bottom-up continuous improvement via quality circles akin to Japanese Lesson Study.
That’s what teachers used to do in their department meetings. NO ONE WORKS WELL OR HAPPILY IN CONDITIONS OF LOW AUTONOMY, and only the most saintly and the most incompetent will continue to put up with those conditions for long.
Here’s why Ed Deform fails: It runs contrary to how people tick. Extrinsic punishment and reward systems are actually demotivating for cognitive tasks, as are conditions of low autonomy.
Until these things change, the teacher shortage will continue to grow, and teacher quality will continue to decline precipitously.
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Amen. I’d add: give teachers more tools for disciplining misbehavior.
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It’s extremely important that these be systematic and predictable so that they be perceived as equitable and inevitable.
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Yes, Ponderosa! Very, very important.
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“Return to classroom teachers control over their own curricula, pedagogical approaches, and materials, and reduce class loads, providing time in teachers’ schedules for them “….
This is the gospel I have been trying to spread since I was aware of any educational issues. It lies at the heart of teaching. No one teaches for the money, so long as it is enough to provide for the family. To attract teachers, give them intellectual independence and make their job possible. Give them the tools, and they will finish the job.
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Independence, tools, and support.
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Amen. We belong to the same church there, Roy!
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People teach for the outcomes, not the income, my Principal used to say (though it was easy enough for her to say that, as she made several times what we did, though her job was so tough that she deserved every penny). But here’s the thing: if people are going to make this sacrifice–to work for such relatively low wages–then there have to be compensating factors, like respectful treatment, professional autonomy, and enough free time to do the job properly.
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“Increase teacher pay.”
Here’s my plan and it doesn’t cost local school districts one thin dime.
Tenured teachers in Title 1 schools work TAX FREE. That’s one big raise and the lost tax revenue would barely dent the federal budget.
If a teacher leaves their district, they lose their tax free status. This plan not only attracts teachers to high needs schools but acts to retain those who have proven abilities.
In this era of political correctness and restorative justice and a general denial of the real problems that chronically disruptive students bring into the classroom on a daily basis, I have no great hope for the much needed tools teachers desperately need to manage malcontent teenagers who have willfully rejected their educational opportunities while preferring to usurp teacher authority and turning classrooms into mere hang outs.
School discipline policies and codes of conduct all seem to share the same fatal flaw. They establish rules and consequence, but they do not set limits. When the adults in charge think that children and adolescents should have no limits regarding their behavior, we should not be surprised that their bad behaviors become limitless. My proposed solution is a “Demerit System” that sets reasonable limits with the end result being expulsion or an alternate learning program or a GED program for the recalcitrant and remorseless.
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Great idea, Rage.
I recall that Germany had a plan to exempt some teachers from taxation, plus they get lots of discounts and breaks on mortgage rates.
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Teachers who work in public schools with high child poverty rates should be labeled combat vets and receive all the same benefits military combat vets get.
For instance, VA home loans that require no money down and no need to buy that insurance that pays off the mortgage if the buyer dies or defaults.
And if the teachers end up with PTSD because of the pressures this country forces on teachers, they get free medical care through the VA and that includes free mental health support.
There’s a lot more than combat vets get. Teachers that teach in challenging schools should get all of those benefits.
I just hope the government doesn’t think that means they can start spraying those schools with Agent Orange and dropping bombs on them.
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I like the tax idea, Rage.
I like the demerit plan even more. You are right: unless there are limits with teeth, we’ll never establish a decent learning environment in schools. Enough with the weak tea –let’s give our schools the medicine they need. It will be better for all the kids, even the few who end up getting expelled (it’s the wake-up call some of them need).
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The demerit plan actually reduces referrals as most of the typical infractions would only result in accruing demerits. With the strong support of my principal I was able to implement a modified demerit system in my classroom over the last four years. It worked like a charm; kids, parents, and administration all loved it. It was a rare student who hit 50 demerits and suffered the consequence (out of school suspension).
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The demerit plan also eliminated most of the petty consequences that mean nothing to students, such as lunch detention, PM detention, and in school suspension.
We also had the advantage of a “holding room” staffed by teachers as a required supervisory period. Teacher could, at their own discretion, send an uncooperative, disruptive, or belligerent student directly to the holding room for the remainder of the period. It is a great stress reliever having that level of control.
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Now Ponderosa if you are interested in our “Fresh Starts” middle school promotion program just let me know. It is free, there are no new teacher demands, and it created a much more demanding academic path of least resistance while providing middle schoolers five chances to re-set their chances for academic success. It is a credit based program in which all classes are credit bearing and students earn their credits every 10 weeks (per marking period). each marking period is independent form the others; no final average for determining grade level promotion, only credits earned (with a built in credit cushion).
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Discipline is a HUGE issue for many schools, which are simply overwhelmed by it. But it’s an issue that gets very little attention because a) pundits and politicians don’t spend enough time in classrooms to know how dramatic an issue it is, and b) no one wants to talk about it, and c ) parents want to deny that their kids are pose problems for other students and have significant means for bullying administrators and teachers into submission, d) real solutions to the problem would require pretty dramatic action that would meet enormous pushback. But the fact is that in high schools, at least, it’s common for a few problem students to rob all the other students of opportunities to get a decent education. A lot of kids need to be pulled out of school and put into some tough love programs where they can do service work until they grow up enough to be mature enough to go to community college or to a vocational school.
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Any school administrator who does not have some sort of demerit plan does not know what he or she is doing.
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So, yes, Rage, I couldn’t agree more. A demerit system works. However, it cannot be used alone, in the absence of other consequences for disrupting class. The part of the brain that does long-term planning, in the prefrontal cortex, isn’t fully developed in people until around the age of 26. Many teenagers aren’t able to think in terms of future consequences, and we are susceptible to a cognitive bias that discounts the future in favor of the present.
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Bob
A demerit system sets the limits for out of control, chronic behavior problems. Too many schools have no limits; you know, James has received 72 referrals and its only February. Of course some incidents are serious enough to compel immediate suspension. NYS has a 5 day limit on suspension, however very serious infractions such as weapons, drug, alcohol, extreme violence, or other criminal acts can result in a long term suspension. However much of the daily disruptions are the result of bad group dynamics or that kid who is an expert at pushing buttons but rarely crosses the line, yet every day they do just enough to convert teaching energy into disciplining energy (psychological jiu jitsu).
The causes of disruptive behavior need to be addressed:
bad mood
exhaustion
grief
skill/knowledge deficits
bad home life
acute stressor
peer influence
personality issues
anti-social personality disorders
mental health issues
psychological displacement
depression
attention seeking
teacher mistakes
etc
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In Florida, our new governor has opted to address the issue by doubling down on an utterly failed policy–teacher bonuses based on credentials (SAT scores) and results on standardized tests. Never mind that this has failed again and again and again and that there is now substantial research documenting this failure.
Here’s how those bonuses work. We had a bright young man in my department a couple years ago. He got a substantial bonus from the state because of his high SAT scores. Then, he quit to go take a graduate degree so that he could work in a profession where he would be paid enough to support a family and would have a reasonable degree of professional autonomy (instead of being micromanaged about matters like the organization of his Data Wall).
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In other words, the way to address the teacher shortage is not through software or through gimmicks like bonuses but by REPROFESSIONALIZING teaching. Deformers want top-down command and control. They distrust and hate bottom-up, Democratic processes, but it is those processes that create real innovation and real continuous improvement. Every teacher knows what the policy wonks in Deformer shill and shell organizations don’t know: that you have to have a systems that works the way people do. That was the great lesson, as well, of the quality control movement initiated by folks like Deming, Juran, and Shewart.
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Bill Gates, a flawed human who primarily thinks in numbers (I’m sure he selected his wife based on her four numbers), revealed why this happened and is still happening when he said the biggest costs to education were maintaining the brick and mortar buildings and paying teachers.
Most if not all of what Gates has done for years is to get rid of the need for large schools, small class sizes, and to get rid of as many teachers as possible and even remove them from the teaching process so those who remain will end up being paid minimum wage as proctors in large industrial sizes buildings where thousands of students sit in huge rooms in front of flickering computer monitors being subtly programmed to think like Bill Gates, only in numbers while being totally obedient to anyone that has more than a billion dollars.
That way, Bill Gates will end up paying less in taxes (does he pay taxes?) and his great fortune that he hides inside the Gates Foundation tax shelter to avoid paying taxes will grow faster enabling him to buy more power.
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I feel like I’m getting a free graduate education just from reading the posts by Diane, Laura C., and Jan. And no tests or tuition!
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I always hope that you or Roy, Greg, will go off on a history rant from which I will learn. Love it when that happens!
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