Over the years, some states have been issuing reduced teaching licenses, and many districts have had trouble filling vacancies, especially in poorer areas. The shortage is being felt more widely due to absenteeism during a pandemic that is testing teachers like any other segment of their careers, raising fears of many more leaving the profession.
To address the problem, states are raising salaries, seeking more teachers outside of formal training programs, and pursuing other strategies to develop more teachers. School administrators hope that this will be enough.
“I see a huge concern, it’s almost like impending doom, when you look at what could happen in a few years,” said Randall Lutz, superintendent of the Baldwin-Whitehall School District near Pittsburgh, where German Had to go to classes. Last year completely online when none of the handful of applicants qualified for the vacancy.
Based on surveys of teachers about the decline in enrollment in teaching colleges and their future plans, the shortfall is likely to be more widespread, affecting areas and subject areas that have not traditionally been affected, Jacqueline King , said a researcher at the American Association of Colleges for Teachers. Education.
“What we are seeing now is a more widespread shortage in areas such as primary education and secondary English,” King said. “These weren’t areas that we previously thought, oh, there’s a big shortfall.”
In Pennsylvania, the number of new teacher certifications declined by two-thirds in the 2010s. Although many of the state’s public universities began as teachers’ colleges, the number of education majors studying in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education has fallen from about 30,000 a decade ago to nearly 17,000 last year.
The trend worries Tanya Garcia, Pennsylvania’s deputy secretary of state for secondary and higher education.
“We used to be a major exporter of teachers, and now we’re not holding people,” Garcia said.
Not every measure has been serious. Florida’s American Rescue Plan application states that “Day 1” teacher vacancies for the coming year dipped between 2019 and 2020. And the Teacher Credentials Commission of California said that elementary teaching certifications increased from 15,400 in 2015-16 to 18,000 in 2019-20. Nevertheless, both are grappling with a shortage of teachers in particular specialties.
Belvedere Education Partners, a non-profit education group, argued in a January 2019 report that shortages were clearly a problem in some areas, but the general teacher shortages that had been warned in recent decades have gone downhill. have not been completed. “The misalignment between teacher supply and demand is where the crisis of teacher shortage arises and resides,” the report said.
To get through the Omicron-drive surge, which hit school staff hard, schools filled in as a substitute for administrators, parents, and even National Guard soldiers. On-deck approach is adopted. The credential requirements have been temporarily loosened. And bonuses backed by federal relief money have been offered to make working in schools more attractive amid labor shortages.
In the longer term, states have recognized the need to invest in strategies to strengthen the teacher pipeline. State officials outlined a plan last year to improve retention in teacher recruitment and applications for federal COVID-19 relief funds. They include promoting teacher aides to qualify for classroom teaching vacancies and subsidizing college tuition.
Kansas is working on expanding “classroom pathways” to bring more diversity to its teachers, requiring mentorship for new teachers, and developing new programs for math teachers. The Education Agency of Michigan encourages districts to pay special attention to increasing pay for teachers at lower levels and to help them move through pay schedules more quickly. Michigan also hosts virtual job fairs for teachers.
In its application, Nevada warned that its teacher pipeline has been shrinking over time. Michigan reported that annual certification of new teachers is not in line with demand. Kansas said its commission’s work to address teacher retention and recruitment was hampered by the pandemic and the number of new teachers could not keep pace with the vacancies.
University of North Dakota education professor Diana D’Amico Pawlewicz said that in the past, concerns about a shortage of teachers, sometimes during war, have prompted stopgap measures that are currently being developed. The results, she said, can be ineffective and even counterproductive, with poorly prepared trainers who are more likely to quit within a few years of starting.
“We may be solving a problem – there is no teacher, no adults in the room at the moment – but we are creating a ripple effect of problems that are going to resonate for years,” she said.
Factors responsible for the current shortage include declining hiring during the Great Recession, availability of better payment options, politicization of curriculum, frustration over standardized tests, less generous pensions and concerns about class size, lack of autonomy and inadequate Huh. Resource.
The stress of working through the pandemic threatens to further lower the ranks of teachers. A survey of National Education Association members released this week in January found that 55% planned to leave education early because of the pandemic, up from 37% in August.
“There really aren’t enough staff to keep the schools open,” said NEA President Becky Pringle. “This is the sad result of decades degrading education and shortchanging students for a long time.”
Kerry Mulvihill, a science teacher at Gerald Heusken Middle School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said only five people applied for 8th grade science positions this fall and none of them made it to the interview stage. He said two special education teachers recently resigned in the middle of the year, which was a rare occurrence during his 25 years as a teacher.
“We really have a crisis,” Mulvihill said. “Now, I’m like, oh my golly. I’m begging people, wait, wait, we need quality people, for sure. We can’t all retire together.”
,