CLARKSDALE — Clarksdale had the second highest teacher shortage in Mississippi last year — 40 posted vacancies in July. 

For district administrators, that staffing challenge hits particularly hard each year in late summer when they try to fill vacancies before the new school year begins. The problem affects students, too, when they’re taught by substitute teachers for weeks at a time. 

Clarksdale schools leaders have also tried a solution that researchers and think tanks suggest: Identifying potential teachers early — before they even graduate high school. This approach also in local teacher workforces, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Nearly half of Mississippi public school students are Black, but about a quarter of their teachers are, according to . The gap has only shrunk by roughly one and a half points in the last 10 years.

“We cannot continue to work in the education arena like it’s a factory putting out the next product,” said Adrienne Hudson, who runs Clarksdale-based nonprofit organization , which assists aspiring educators with licensure requirements. “As we can see in the numbers, we don’t have enough products. The supply and demand are not matching.”&�Բ�����;

“We have to do better at cultivating the educators in our schools and communities.”

Cultivating educators in the community would also address disparities between the demographics of teachers and their students. 

 A way ‘to change kids’ lives’

One way the district is trying to cultivate educators is through a vocational educator preparation class Candace Barron teaches at Clarksdale Municipal School District’s Carl Keen Career and Technical Education center. 

Triccia Hudson, the center’s director, had the goal of widening the pipeline for future educators in Clarksdale. She first recruited Barron to teach the course during the 2021-2022 school year.

“You don’t see as many families of educators any more,” Hudson said. “It was clear to me that aspiring teachers needed more mentorship.”

More than a dozen Clarksdale students are getting a feel for a career well known to them: teaching. In a classroom once devoted to a cosmetology course, students are learning how to plan lessons, manage classrooms and about the different roles in a school district.

In Barron’s course, students start their first semester learning about the origins of public education. The introductory lectures fascinate students.

It was interesting to learn that it’s always been about helping people by “spreading information,” Clarksdale High School sophomore Khloe Reed said.

Beyond having the opportunity to join a profession that predates the country’s founding, students in Barron’s class say they are drawn to education because of their lived experiences in their community. 

Barron has observed that high school-aged students understand the obstacles facing their fellow students and are in a good position to learn skills teachers employ to educate and inspire developing minds.

For sophomore Leah Myles, helping kids with learning disabilities inspired her to take the course. She saw how her brother struggled with his reading lessons, and she was moved “to learn how to help students like him.”

Sophomore Jamarick Davis said education has the power to “change kids’ lives.” He remembers his assistant teachers fondly and saw the impact a good teacher can have on a student who struggles in the classroom and at home — and might act out in class for attention.

Davis’ favorite teacher never seems to be in a bad mood despite challenges that educators face outside and inside the classroom.

Some students come from teacher families, while others admire alumni who entered the profession. All were aware that a teacher’s role involves more than what is in the textbook. 

As Reed put it, teachers are a positive role model in a young person’s life. Myles said teachers help students by challenging them, and demonstrating how they care.

“Teachers play a very important role in our community because without them, we wouldn’t really know anything,” said Reed. “It wouldn’t be a very lively life if you didn’t know anything at all. 

22 years in the classroom

Candace Barron has taught elementary school for 18 years and high school for four, but she still lights up with admiration when a student grasps a new concept or demonstrates eloquence. 

The Clarksdale native has taught hundreds of students and seen her corner of the world regress and progress from under the fluorescent bulbs in Clarksdale’s city classrooms.

When she graduated college, Barron followed in her parents’ steps when she became a teacher. She realized how important empathy was to a teacher whose classroom has students from various households and skill levels. 

“I do have bad days, but I try not to bring it to work,” Barron said. “I don’t know what (students) have been through at home and I don’t want to add to that by coming in and bringing my problems. So I come in, I have my game face on, I’m going to do what we have to do.”

That dedication matters as the teacher shortage has gotten worse in Clarksdale in the past year. 

“We really have lost a lot of the efforts that were put in place to combat the teacher storage crisis, ” Adrienne Hudson said. “Many of the scholarship incentives that used to be prevalent and professional development opportunities no longer exist.”

Barron said she believes the program can ignite students’ interest in an education career. The lessons give students the confidence and skillset to pursue careers where communication and project management are components — even those who don’t end up pursuing education, Barron said.

One student told Barron the class helped her with a speech impediment. The student felt more confident delivering presentations, and began to imagine careers that she felt discouraged from pursuing previously. 

“At this age, they’re still trying to decide what they want to do. So the more you expose them to every different area, it’ll help them decide,” Barron said.

Outside of the state-approved curriculum and textbook, students learn the art of crafting classroom bulletin boards. Fewer craft projects conjure as much nostalgia and appreciation. Some teachers spend hours with a ruler and yards of colored construction paper decorating their classroom in late July before school starts.

Creativity is the key to a successful poster board, Barron said. One student was inspired to construct a data wall with construction paper made to look like wood, while another put together a yellow bulletin board with crayons bearing the name of students. 

“I really hope that by the end of the program that they feel like they can make an impact on somebody’s life by becoming a teacher or getting into the education field,” said Barron. “That is my hope. So all of the negatives that they hear, I hope that I can dismiss some of them. 

“Students tell me at the end of (the course), they want to be successful like teachers.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

A White House decision to add $100,000 to the price of a work visa, allowing employers to hire from overseas for hard-to-fill positions, has California’s technology industry and other businesses reeling. But another group is also on edge: the state’s schools.

California employs more teachers on H-1B visas than any state except Texas and North Carolina, according to a National Education Association . Last fiscal year, 506 U.S. school districts employed 2,300 H-1B visa holders.

The demand for the visas from California school districts has grown over the last seven years as the state’s schools, facing teacher shortages, have turned to overseas teachers to help fill openings.

Last school year, 294 H-1B visas were granted to the state’s school districts, compared to 193 in 2018-19, according to the California Department of Education. The visas are typically good for three years with a possible three-year extension. 

But the new $100,000 charge for the H-1B visa is beyond what most districts can afford.

“For these small, resource-limited districts, a $100,000 fee would be entirely cost-prohibitive and would effectively close off one of the few pipelines for qualified teachers,” said Yuri Calderon, executive director of the Small School Districts’ Association.

Until Sept. 21, school districts and other employers paid application and processing fees of about $3,700 for the visa, depending on their size. But that was before President Donald Trump  adding the $100,000 fee, effective two days later. 

The increase is meant to prevent the replacement of American workers with lower-paid workers from overseas, according to the proclamation.

 Although the fee increase may not immediately impact school districts, because it will not be levied on renewals or extensions of existing H-1B visas, it will have repercussions in a few months when school leaders begin to hire for the next school year.

Rural districts could take a hit

The $100,000 fee could be especially devastating to small school districts already facing , Calderon said.

“Rural and geographically isolated communities are increasingly dependent on international, fully credentialed teachers to fill positions that have proven nearly impossible to staff,” Calderon said. “This is particularly true in the case of middle and high school math, science and special education.”&�Բ�����;

More underprepared teachers

The Vallejo City Unified School District has more than 20 teachers working on H-1B visas this school year, said Hattie Kogami, director of human resources at Vallejo City Unified. The district was granted 12 more visas last school year. 

District leaders had planned to hire 15 additional teachers from the Philippines on H-1B visas for the coming year, but only managed to hire nine before the new fee was levied.

“Our district is in declining enrollment, and so we’re dealing with the real struggles of cutting $40 million,” Kogami said. “So, we definitely don’t have a hundred thousand dollars to bring in these six people or anyone else for that matter.”

That means the district, with a student population that is more than a quarter English learners, will probably have to hire more underprepared teachers. The district already hires between 20 and 30 teachers without the appropriate teaching credentials each year, Kogami said.

“We always have a ton of non-credentialed teachers,” Kogami said. “That’s why we started wanting to use the H-1B. Those people have been through a program; they know what to do.”

In 2022, an  found that nearly 1 out of 5 classes in California were taught by underprepared teachers working on emergency-style permits because of a shortage of credentialed teachers. Many of the shortages were in special education, math, science and foreign language classrooms.

Teachers with H-1B visas who have been  have at least a bachelor’s degree and have completed teacher preparation programs. Their college transcripts, certificates and licenses are evaluated by an agency approved by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing before they are issued a preliminary teaching credential.

Like all California teachers, they have to prove subject-matter competency, complete a CPR course and a U.S. Constitution course, and finish a two-year individualized program of mentoring and support called . 

The United States government limits the number of H-1B visas to 65,000 a year, with an additional 20,000 going to people with master’s or doctoral degrees. There have historically been more applicants than available visas, so the applicants are selected through a computerized lottery system. 

School leaders want an exemption

The Trump administration has already made changes to the $100,000 fee requirement, updating the  last week to clarify that the fee would not apply to people already in the U.S. under other visas who want to move to an H-1B visa.

Education leaders are hopeful that the Trump administration will go a step further and exempt schools entirely from the fee.

“Without such an exemption, this change could have a devastating impact on small school districts already facing severe teacher shortages,” Calderon said.

Relief could also come from lawsuits challenging the fee filed this month, including one by the U.S.  and another by a , employers and religious groups.

J-1 visa offers short-term option

The J-1 visa, also called an exchange visitor visa, is an option for school districts in need of teachers, but it has more stringent requirements that make it a difficult fit for low-performing school districts, Kogami said. She prefers H-1B visas because they can lead to a green card and permanent residency, which often means a long-term employee.

“We’re going to try to move all of our folks that we’ve hired that stay with us to green card status,” Kogami said.

Evelyn Anderson, principal of the l, likes the J-1 visa because it doesn’t use a lottery system to allocate the visas, and although the teacher candidate must be interviewed at the U.S. Embassy in their home country, they are seldom denied.

But she started helping some of her teachers move to H-1B visas to extend their stays after having difficulty finding teachers during Trump’s first term and during the Covid pandemic.

The Santa Rosa City Schools charter school is one of more than 50 similar schools in the U.S. that are accredited by the French Ministry of Education. One of the requirements is that all its teachers have French teaching credentials, which means most are from France or French-speaking countries.

Although the $100,000 fee for the H-1B visa isn’t impacting the Santa Rosa French-American Charter School directly, because school leaders haven’t hired teachers from overseas on the H-1B visa, Anderson, the principal, still has her concerns.

“When I do have to recruit the new teachers to come on a J-1, will they be hesitant because there is this overall feeling that the U.S. isn’t as welcoming?” she wondered.

At Teach For America, we have spent the past five years learning what it takes to make tutoring work at scale through our Ignite Fellowship. We have reached over 40 communities, partnered with hundreds of schools and trained more than 5,500 virtual tutors. In the past school year, more than 2,000 college fellows or tutors delivered nearly 200,000 hours of customized learning.

The academic results are compelling: Test scores for middle school math students grew at up to 2.5 times the expected rate, and elementary readers grew up to three times faster than average. But the full story goes beyond scores. Tutoring, if designed with care, can advance student learning, support current teachers and inspire and prepare the next generation of educators. Here’s what we’ve learned:

Lesson 1: Training and Support Must Be Non-Negotiable

Too many tutoring initiatives assume goodwill and enthusiasm are enough. They are not. Without structured preparation, tutors risk becoming an inconsistent add-on rather than a transformative force. Ignite builds training into the model itself. Experienced site leaders at each partner school provide curriculum-aligned onboarding and ongoing coaching. This investment matters. Students report not just better understanding of content, but deeper confidence in their ability to learn. Schools see tutoring as part of their instructional strategy, not a Band-aid.

If policymakers want tutoring to stick, they need to fund programs that take support seriously.

Lesson 2: Technology Should Expand Relationships, Not Replace Them

Ed tech is often pitched as a shortcut to efficiency. But high-dosage, virtual tutoring is not a shortcut. It is relational and strategic. Teach For America Ignite uses technology to make those relationships possible at scale, not to substitute for them. Virtual platforms connect fellows to students and teachers across 43 communities, including rural areas where schools struggle to recruit talent.

At Alliance Marine Innovation & Technology in Los Angeles, eighth graders who were three grade levels behind in math saw a 77-point jump in state assessment scores after a year of TFA Ignite tutoring. The technology enabled access, but human relationships drove the breakthrough. As one student put it: “My Ignite fellow could understand me like no other.”

The lesson? It is possible for students and educators, particularly when both are members of generations who grew up surrounded by rapidly changing technology, to use tech as a tool to build important human relationships that accelerate learning. 

Lesson 3: Tutoring Is a Teacher Pipeline Strategy, Whether We Treat It That Way or Not

Perhaps the most underreported story about tutoring is what it means for the future of teaching. A recent provides the first causal evidence that tutoring can spark interest in teaching careers. Using Teach For America’s tutoring and teacher training programs, the research finds that working as tutor for Ignite nearly triples the likelihood of applying to TFA’s teacher program, with the largest effects among men, people of color, and students who didn’t major in education. That is a breakthrough in a sector facing constant shortages and a workforce that doesn’t reflect the students it serves.

TFA Ignite is living proof of this. Since the program launched, 550 fellows have gone on to join Teach For America’s teaching corps. This year alone, 280 new teachers entered classrooms because they were inspired by the impact they had as tutors. For Destiny Edens, a North Carolina A&T undergrad, tutoring became the bridge to a calling she had not considered before. She began tutoring second graders in literacy and discovered a passion that has now led her to join the TFA corps as a middle school science teacher in Philadelphia.

Education leaders talk endlessly about how to attract this generation to teaching as if the pipeline is broken. Tutoring offers one way to strengthen it, by giving future teachers direct experience, mentorship and proof that they belong in the classroom.

If educators keep treating tutoring as an emergency response, we will miss its long-term potential. Tutoring is not just a path to accelerate learning, it is a path to accelerate leadership. It advances growth for students and jump-starts careers for educators. If we’re all serious about helping students thrive and building the next generation of educators then tutoring must be part of the future of schooling.

More than two-thirds of lower-performing students come from historically disadvantaged populations, such as English language learners. With English learners projected to make up — and 76.4% of those being Spanish speakers — it’s time to remove the barriers hindering Latino students. 

A key factor holding back Latino students academically is that educators rarely mirror the demographics of schools. When Latino students have teachers with the same background, these teachers reflect the same culture as students, creating an environment for students to have their identity affirmed. Research links exposure to minority teachers to improvements in and .

Latino students now represent across the U.S., yet only identify as such. At the same time, teacher candidates of color encounter obstacles to entering and staying in the classroom. 

Four critical areas need to be addressed to strengthen the Latino educator pipeline: financial support, strategic recruitment, professional networks and culturally responsive practices.

First, financial support must be enhanced at crucial points in educators’ careers. Competitive salaries that allow for a middle-class lifestyle — combined with loan forgiveness programs, scholarships and performance bonuses — can make teaching more attractive as a career path for Latino educators. 

Second, Latino educator recruitment requires strategic workforce development approaches similar to those used in other fields. For example, the Tulare County Office of Education in California has been administering the since 2019, preparing single-subject teachers who focus on STEM and English to meet the needs of local rural school districts. 

“We strive to mirror the student population of the schools we serve and implement grow-your-own programs for preparing local talent as educators in our communities,” explained Marvin Lopez, executive director of the Tulare County Office of Education. All schools in partner districts have a higher population of socioeconomically disadvantaged, Hispanic/Latino and English learners than the state overall. On average, 68.2% of learners qualify for free/reduced lunch rates, 49.2% are Hispanic/Latino and 15% English learners. 

conducted by the Wheelock Education Policy Center on behalf of MassINC in partnership with Latinos for Education recommended a similar initiative in Massachusetts. The study found that while Massachusetts doubled the number of teachers of color hired from 2012 to 2022, students of color increased at a faster rate, leading to a larger gap in representation.

 According to the report, “a homegrown strategy to close gaps in college access and success could have considerable impact.” The researchers also noted that if new hires reflected student demographics, by the end of the decade, the percentage of teachers of color would double — from 10% today to about 23% by 2030.

Third, robust support systems and professional networks for Latino educators are essential for their success and longevity in the profession. pass the Praxis exam even after multiple attempts, while 75% of white candidates ultimately pass. Supporting test preparation for Latino teacher candidates can make a big difference in addressing this hurdle. 

A between ETS®, Study.com and TEACH demonstrated significant improvements in exam pass rates through test prep. The study showed that, with sufficient support, teacher candidates from historically marginalized backgrounds experienced meaningful increases in pass rates. This focus on certification support represents one step toward building a more representative teacher workforce. 

Supporting professional growth is also essential. Latinos for Education’s Aspiring Latino Leaders Fellowship offers one solution, giving Latino education leaders culturally responsive professional development to envision long-term careers in education rather than temporary positions. There’s always room for more organizations to help keep these vital teachers in classrooms. 

These support systems should provide opportunities for leadership advancement, professional development and mentorship connections that understand the unique challenges Latino educators face when navigating school systems.

Fourth, promoting culturally responsive practices that reflect student communities helps retain Latino teachers and improves educational outcomes. It’s not just schools and administration that must address this challenge. Family and community support are vital to expanding the Latino educator pipeline.

One huge asset in this population’s favor: Nine out of 10 Latino parents see high-quality public schools as instrumental to their child’s success, according to a Latinos for Education survey of Houston-area parents.

The same Houston survey uncovered strong support for more teachers who can bridge language and cultural divides. A striking 80% of Latino parents said they would become more involved if more Spanish-fluent educators were present. And teachers see similar value in family support: A of 700 teachers found that 87% believe increased parent and family engagement is the most impactful way to close student learning gaps.

Schools that incorporate culturally responsive curriculum and ensure staff composition reflects student demographics create environments where Latino educators feel valued rather than isolated. These practices also benefit students directly by exposing them to varied perspectives and teaching approaches.

The declining academic scores of Latino students require urgent action. Increasing Latino teacher representation offers a powerful long-term solution. When students see educators who share their cultural background and experiences, achievement gaps begin to close.

Financial support enhancement, strategic recruitment, robust support networks and culturally responsive practices will strengthen the Latino educator pipeline. As more Latino teachers serve as “mirrors” for Latino students, academic outcomes can improve, creating better learning environments for all students.

As the saying goes: never let a crisis go to waste. These cuts present a chance for TFA not only to address its funding structure, but also to rethink how it prepares the young people it recruits. Now is the right time to evolve the model in ways that improve both financial sustainability and teacher readiness.

I say this not as an outsider, but as someone who went through the program. I’m a Teach for America alum, and like many of my peers, I entered the classroom deeply committed — but not fully prepared. I cared about my students, I believed in the mission, but I didn’t have enough time, training, or support to meet the demands of the job on day one. That experience has stayed with me and shaped my thinking about what future corps members need.

One powerful way forward for TFA? Become a registered apprenticeship program.

Registered apprenticeships are gaining traction as a practical solution to the national teacher shortage. These programs allow individuals to earn while they learn, combining paid, on-the-job experience with structured training and support. For TFA, integrating into this model could strengthen the quality of corps member preparation while opening up access to federal and state workforce funding.

Rather than placing corps members into classrooms after only a few weeks of training, TFA could design a first-year experience as a paraprofessional apprenticeship. During this year, participants would work under the guidance of a certified teacher while gaining real-time experience and completing relevant coursework. The result: corps members who are more confident, capable, and better prepared to take on full teaching responsibilities in their second year and beyond.

This would be a meaningful shift from the current model, which places new corps members in lead teaching roles almost immediately. But the whole point of an apprenticeship is that someone learns to do the job — they’re not expected to fully do the job on day one. That’s what separates this model from TFA and why it has become so attractive to states seeking to address both quality and pipeline issues.

TFA could also offer an early admittance track. College seniors accepted into the corps could spend their final year of college working part-time as paraprofessionals in local schools. This would give them an earlier entry point into the profession while helping districts meet staffing needs and reducing the ramp-up time before full-time teaching begins.

TFA has already laid the groundwork for the registered apprenticeship approach. In Memphis and Nashville, the organization operates as its own educator preparation provider (EPP), training corps members directly in alignment with its expectations and priorities. Expanding this model to additional states — particularly those supportive of registered apprenticeships — would give TFA greater control over training while accessing workforce dollars to support instruction, coaching, and operational costs.

In states like Arkansas, TFA could consider a different kind of partnership. The Arkansas Department of Education has created its own EPP and is launching a K-12 special education teacher registered apprenticeship program. TFA could partner with such states to enroll corps members in high-quality, state-run programs at no cost. These arrangements would allow TFA to focus on recruitment, placement, and ongoing support while relying on the state’s infrastructure for licensure and training.

These strategies offer clear financial benefits. Apprenticeship funding can cover tuition, licensure costs, and other expenses currently borne by TFA or corps members. In a time of tightening budgets and rising preparation costs, these savings could help TFA maintain or expand its footprint without compromising on quality.

It would also allow the organization to better support the people it recruits, many of whom want to become effective teachers but find themselves underprepared and overwhelmed. By investing in a more gradual and structured on-ramp into the profession, TFA can reduce burnout, improve retention, and ultimately deliver better results for students.

TFA has always been known for innovation and responsiveness to the needs of schools. By embracing the registered apprenticeship model, it can meet this moment with a new strategy: one that addresses the funding crisis head-on while finally tackling long-standing concerns about corps member readiness.

This is not about walking away from the core of what made TFA successful. ����’s about strengthening it. Apprenticeship offers a chance to double down on the mission by building a better bridge into teaching, honoring the complexity of the role and giving new educators the time, training, and support they deserve.

She and 15 other students had started at the college that fall in the hopes of studying to become highly effective educators. Many of them planned to return to their rural communities after graduation to help fill a gaping teacher shortage. They were all recipients of full-tuition scholarships through the , a three-year, federally funded project meant to diversify and increase the number of teachers in Nebraska and Kansas.

What they learned that February afternoon has left many of them reeling and questioning what comes next: Abrupt federal cuts from the Trump administration — meant to root out ��෡��” practices — resulted in every one of them losing their scholarships, effective immediately. They’d be able to finish out the spring term, but as of May, the money would be gone. Of the 16 students, 14 are first-time freshmen, just beginning their higher education journeys.

“I knew we were going to get told something terrible, but I couldn’t put a stop to it,” said Vianey, who asked to be identified by her first name only because of concerns that speaking out in the media could have negative ramifications. “To me, this scholarship was my way out. It was my way to be something. To contradict all the odds that were placed on me,” she added as her voice broke and she began to cry.

“I’ve wanted to be a teacher my whole life. Now, with all of this happening, I don’t know if I can recover.”

Amanda Morales, associate professor at UNL and principal investigator on the RAÍCES project, said telling her group of undergraduate students about the funding cuts was “by far, one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”

“When you see young people’s dreams just shattered in an instant because of something you said or this message you had to give, how do you bounce back from that?” she asked. “What is happening to these projects and these programs is unprecedented, and it is really inhumane. There’s no other word for it.”

RAÍCES, whose name is derived from a Spanish word meaning “roots,” was one of many teacher preparation programs that suddenly lost their funding when the Education Department canceled more than in grants. The programs, meant to increase the number of teachers in high-need and hard-to-staff schools, were accused by the department of discriminating against certain populations and embracing “divisive ideologies” which aligned with diversity, equity and inclusion and “social justice activism.”

Eight attorneys general have since filed alleging the cancellation of the congressionally approved grants was unlawful. On Monday, a federal judge ordered the administration to in those eight states, which don’t include Kansas or Nebraska. Three teacher prep programs have also filed  

The scholarship, whose name stands for Re-envisioning Action and Innovation through Community Collaborations for Equity across Systems, had been promised $3.9 million through a grant, which sought to train more highly effective educators. It was housed at UNL and Kansas State University, which were required to match at least 25% of the federal funding.

RAÍCES was designed to be a comprehensive program that addressed the intractable teacher shortage in rural areas from recruiting novices to retaining veterans. It began with a high school-based program called Youth Participatory Action Research, providing students with the opportunity to explore careers in the classroom and investigate problems affecting their own education and communities. A number of students who ultimately received the full undergraduate scholarships, including Vianey, were recruited from this program. 

It also included funding for graduate-level scholarships, mentoring for teachers and ongoing professional development — meant to help educators stay in the profession long term. 

On Feb. 10, at 8:55 p.m., Socorro Herrera, professor and executive director of Kansas State’s Center for Intercultural and Multilingual Advocacy and the project’s lead principal investigator, received an email with an attached letter from the Education Department, telling her the grant would be terminated because it “is inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, Department priorities.”&�Բ�����;

She was shocked. 

“My thought is,” she said, “it’s not ‘department priorities,’ but it is community priorities. It is state priorities. It is the priority of human beings who want to go back into those public schools in which they grew up to give back [and] to be the most highly qualified teacher they can be for all students — but also for students who are like them.”

Morales said the letter and “blanket termination” of all SEED grants “left all of us just reeling with no clarity, no support, no one to call. Even our program officers are inaccessible. We were just left in the lurch — left to just flounder and try to pick up the pieces of this shattered project.”

‘[The] teacher that I wish I had’

Vianey was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. as a toddler with her parents and three siblings. The family spent their first decade or so in Washington state, where Vianey attended school as an English language learner. Even as a kid, Vianey was aware of the shortfalls of her school’s program and the negative impact it had on her and her English learner classmates.

“I just want to be that teacher that I wish I had when I was growing up to others,” she said.

She noted it was particularly challenging to not have any teachers who looked like her or shared her life experiences. At the time, this made her feel like her dream of becoming an educator might not be attainable, a narrative she hopes to combat.

“It gives you a sense of belonging when you see somebody that looks like you in the classroom,” she added.

When Vianey was in high school she moved to Nebraska with her mom, where she attended Lincoln High School and participated in the youth action program, which allowed her to do research on English language programs in her state. Eventually this led her to the RAÍCES scholarship at UNL, where she’s studying secondary education for Spanish, in the hopes of eventually returning to her own high school. 

As of December 2024, Nebraska schools had about , meaning they were staffed by someone other than a fully qualified teacher or were left totally vacant. About half of districts that responded to the state’s request for data reported complete vacancies. 

At roughly the same time, Kansas had almost — an 8%  increase from the previous spring, according to the teacher licensure director for the Kansas State Department of Education.

Nationally there were almost according to the Learning Policy Institute’s most recent analysis, likely a significant undercount because only 30 states and Washington, D.C. publish such data. 

has shown that rural schools face distinct difficulties filling their teaching positions, and that teacher turnover is especially common in high-poverty rural schools. And hiring foreign language and bilingual education teachers is especially hard.

“The money, explicitly and intentionally, was about increasing the number of teachers in rural schools,” said Herrera. 

Vianey had acute ELL teacher shortages in her own district in mind when she decided to apply to RAÍCES. Getting accepted into the full scholarship program “meant everything” to her and to her parents, whose formal education ended after third grade. 

“[My mom] felt like she succeeded and she was finally being able to achieve what she came here to do, and that is to give us a better life,” said Vianey.

‘We’re not rolling over here’

Vianey is among the at least 70 high school students, 26 undergraduates and 40 master’s students across the two universities who have been impacted by the cuts, along with the almost 1,000 teachers in partnering districts who were receiving ongoing education and professional development.

The ripple effects are far-reaching, potentially impacting thousands of students whose chances of getting a highly qualified, fully certified teacher have now been diminished.

When the funding runs out this spring, Tiffaney Locke — a 42-year-old career changer who has spent the past 12 years working in community mental health — will be just two courses shy of her master’s degree. 

She said as a Black student in Kansas City schools, she was able to find success because of educators who believed in her. Her plan was to return to a similar school to be that teacher for kids who look like her. She quit her full-time job to complete what she thought would be a fully funded program and is now scared about what comes next but hopeful that her teaching career is still within reach.

While the population of the scholarship recipients is diverse, the only requirement for application was that students come from one of the six partner districts in Nebraska and Kansas, all identified as difficult to staff and, in most cases, rural. One of the districts they partnered with had almost 120 vacancies.

Of the 16 undergraduates at UNL who were supposed to receive full scholarships — including housing, meal plans and a laptop — one quarter identified as white and half identified as Hispanic or Latino, according to Morales. Three-quarters were first-generation college students and over half came from rural communities. They were all high-achieving high school students and 15 of the 16 had GPAs just over 3.5 in their first semester, well above the program’s 2.0 requirement.

“The fact that the government doesn’t think you’re worthy to be here is tragic,” Morales said.

Morales and Herrera are now scrambling to find external funding, making any attempt they can to keep the program alive, but “this may be the end of the road for many of [the students] because just loans and Pell grants wouldn’t be enough to see them through,” Herrera said.

These across-the-board cuts have also had a chilling effect, she said, making those at the university level scared to speak out for fear of retribution from the federal government. Their concern is not baseless: the Trump administration recently in funding from Columbia University and halted payment on in grants to the University of Maine system.

“Everybody’s in this silent mode, like ‘Don’t call attention to yourself, go under the radar, keep doing the work,’” she added.

But the leaders of RAÍCES aren’t done.

 “We’re not rolling over here,” said Morales. “We’re not tucking our tail and just saying, ‘OK, I guess this is just the way it is.’ We’re fighting on every front we possibly can and [are] continuing to fight up until the very last moment. I’m not giving up.”

And Vianey isn’t quitting either. She wants to send a clear message to the people who took away her scholarship: “����’s not going to stop us from achieving our dreams. We will find a way out … my purpose is to become a teacher — and I’m not going to stop until I’m able to.”

The students were up and at ’em. The narrator of the bunch read a passage from the play “Gigi and the Wishing Ring,” then came across a word they didn’t know – “imminent.”

Shannon Lamb, a.k.a. Ms. Lamb, a.k.a. K-12 apprentice, walked them through it. “What does that mean?” Lamb asked. “Who do you know in your life that is imminent?”

“Ms. Rivenbark,” the third-graders said, pointing to Lamb’s clinical teacher.

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That was just a snapshot of one of Lamb’s days at in the (WCPS) system, which has begun its first year of operating the Educator Registered Apprenticeship Program. District representatives told EdNC that they are excited to expand their teacher pipeline and support their local economy. Apprentices said they are excited to give back to the community while getting experience before licensure.

Forming the apprenticeship

“I would say first, it starts with everyone coming to the table and agreeing on what they want to achieve and accomplish,” said Felicia Brown, director of human resources at WCPS. “And so that’s what we were able to do with Wayne Community College.”

Wayne Community College (WCC) formed the program in 2020. In general, apprenticeships are arrangements where employers provide workers with on-the-job training in a certain field combined with classroom instruction. Students are paid for their time and earn nationally recognized certifications.

In 2022, WCPS became interested in starting an apprenticeship program for K-12 teachers, with a special interest in recruiting high school students. Apprenticeship Wayne partnered with the University of Mount Olive and the , housed under RTI International, in 2023. The role of the intermediary is to apply apprenticeship standards to the needs of the education sector.

“The greatest value-add of the ERA Intermediary was having a thought partner that understood both apprenticeship and education and who could explain how the two work together in the program standards,” Kristie Sauls, executive director of apprenticeships and career development at WCC, said in a . “ERA helped us understand braided funding opportunities and clarified the benefits of apprenticeship to prepare future educators.”

Educator Registered Apprenticeships are registered and funded by the U.S. Department of Labor. As of spring 2024, Wayne County Schools became the first district in the state to offer a K-12 apprenticeship program. It’s the second in the nation to receive ERA funding.

Apprentices are required to enroll in an educator prep program at a community college or a four-year university and then have in-classroom training planned around their school schedule. They earn an hourly wage as instructional assistants and receive additional financial support for licensure assessments, assessment preparation, and anything else related to their training that may not be covered by other financial aid sources.

The apprenticeship lasts up to three years. Throughout their time in the program, participants are to be on track to earn an associate degree or bachelor’s degree in a related education field, or teaching license.

Additionally, the apprentice will earn a nationally recognized certificate from the U.S. Department of Labor and the Office of Apprenticeship.

The district had no difficulty finding teaching assistants, Brown said. So programs like the apprenticeship are ways to help build a pipeline through which assistants can become full-time teachers.

When asked about the apprenticeship program’s success compared with the district’s other pathways, Brown said they are still in the “beginning stages” of the program. Their office is getting more and more inquiries as they get the word out.

Into the classroom

If you had needed math tutoring in Wayne County over the past 20 years, you might have been asked to call Angela Lamb.

Lamb insists she is one of those people who always wanted to become a teacher. That passion to facilitate learning is reflected in how she raised her own children.

“I taught all my children how to read before they got to kindergarten, because I just wanted that to be something that is not a hurdle for them, and also dragging out from classroom management to all the other things that teachers have to do,” Lamb said. “I wanted that to be out of the way, because kids can always learn to read, and I’ve always heard it starts at home, so just that joy of seeing kids grow and learn has just always been like, ‘I love this.’ I love everything about it.”

Lamb is now a WCPS apprentice and a North Carolina Teaching Fellows scholarship recipient. She heard about the apprenticeship program while working as an instructional assistant at Edgewood Community Developmental School, which is also a part of WCPS. After four years in special education, she said, it was an opportunity for her to pivot.

Lamb spends three days a week working at the elementary school to fulfill the experience requirements for both the apprenticeship and her degree requirements at East Carolina University. While working, she teaches lessons in reading and math, learns how to monitor student progress, and gets feedback from her clinical teacher, Shannan Rivenbark.

“From the start, she has been enthusiastic and receptive to this tremendous growth opportunity,” Rivenbark said of Lamb. “The additional support that she is receiving from being a part of the apprenticeship program is undoubtedly helping to further her endeavor toward the goal of becoming an effective classroom educator.”

To continue to give back to the community, Lamb said she plans to get a master’s degree and be certified in teaching children experiencing poverty.

“I do want to go back to those schools that have, you know, those students that are dealing with things that are huge outside of school, you know, in their families.” Lamb said. “These are the schools that I grew up in, and so I want to be the teacher that they deserve, that I deserved when I was going, you know, through school.”

‘I am already seeing so much’

As an apprentice in a kindergarten classroom, Kayla Heitrick spends her time working with students at Carver Elementary in small groups or supervising lunch and recess.

So far, Heitrick said, her biggest challenge has been learning how to do what’s best for each student.

“And I guess that’s the main thing, just trying to figure out what works for everybody so that everybody’s learning – and everyone’s having fun learning,” Heitrick said. “Because I think that’s important too, especially with the kindergartners.”

Heitrick said she is being exposed to things as an apprentice that she would not have known about otherwise. For example, she said she has been helping students who have not been in pre-K make the transition into a classroom environment for the first time. Her clinical teacher also has been showing her how to work directly with students and parents who are not native English speakers.

“And I think being in the classroom before becoming a teacher really helped me … because I am already seeing so much, and I feel like the more experienced, the better you know how to handle certain things,” Heitrick said.

Heitrick was working as a dental assistant and a waitress before she heard about the apprenticeship. She realized that she wanted to work with young children while working with pediatric dental patients.

“I like to help people,” she said. “I like to make that difference. And I think it’s important for children to have that firm foundation, and to know, you know, like they feel safe here, like they can come to our room and they feel safe.”

‘We’re here, we’re present’

Yvette Mason, the assistant superintendent of human resources at WCPS, said the district had to jump several hurdles to recruit and retain teachers.

As natives of Wayne County, both Brown and Mason said they are aware of what their school district has to compete with when compared with other districts across North Carolina and even other states. For instance, neighboring counties may offer teachers higher pay supplements.

Plus, many of the teachers who have found a home in Wayne County are aging out.

“So when COVID hit – oh, my God, that was almost like the exit door flew open for everybody to exit out of education,” Mason said. “There was a change in how to teach, you know, with technology and all of those things. So we did see a lot of our teachers that were at that age to retire move out.”

Yet another challenge, Mason said, is the low number of education graduates from local colleges and universities.

“Some of the colleges and universities are not turning out 200 and 300 educators strong like what I graduated with,” Mason said. “It may be a row of teachers graduating from a school of education, or less than that.”

in North Carolina have shown that pay, mentorship, and support for beginning teachers play a factor in how far they go in the profession.

Apprentices said they feel supported both financially and emotionally by the district and their respective programs. Lamb said they have regular meetings and get to speak with beginning teachers about their experiences.

Lamb said that specifically Brown and Mason are there to “talk her off the ledge,” if she needs it.

“You know, (the response) is, ‘We’re coming to just support you and let you know that we’re here, we’re present,’ and that’s something that I wouldn’t get as just a regular intern,” Lamb said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Cindy Lane takes it personally that Kansas needed a Kansas Blueprint for Literacy initiative to improve preparation of educators to teach reading and funnel more literate students into colleges and the workplace.

Lane, retired special education teacher and former superintendent of Kansas City, Kansas, schools, will soon step down from the Kansas Board of Regents to become administrative director of Blueprint for Literacy. The Kansas Legislature adopted and Gov. Laura Kelly signed into law a bill mandating the state’s education system engrain in current and future teachers evidence-based reading science strategies.

A bipartisan coalition of state legislators earmarked $10 million to implement the blueprint and work to change the lives of 40% of Kansas public school students not proficient at reading.

“Frankly, this is personal,” Lane said. “I was a kid who my favorite subject was recess. It really was. The way that reading was approached at that time didn’t connect with how I think and grow and I really didn’t learn to read until I was in junior high. And, I can’t imagine being a person who never had a teacher that figured out what’s the code for that kid to be able to learn to read. I can’t imagine what their life must be like today.”

Lane, who plans to resign from the state Board of Regents on June 24, will collaborate with universities and school districts to reform instruction of college students studying to become teachers and to provide existing teachers with new literacy tools. The law also required creation of an oversight commission, the establishment of university centers of excellence and regular accountability reports to the Legislature.

“There is an imperative here to make sure that all of our students are highly literate,” Lane said on the Kansas Reflector podcast. “They have to be able to read and write well to be successful today. So, for me, this is dream making. You have a dream. I want to help you get there.”

‘Get off the sidelines’

Blake Flanders, president of the Kansas Board of Regents, said the law could be viewed as the largest workforce development project in state history in terms of targeted training and retraining within the education field.

The Board of Regents, which has jurisdiction over the six state universities, will have a prominent role due to the number of school of education students in the pipeline who must enroll in a pair of three-credit-hour courses offering hands-on experience in teaching reading to children.

Under Senate Bill 438, the state universities must begin offering the two new literacy courses this fall or be sanctioned. Kansas State University and the two other larger universities would lose $1 million if they procrastinated, while Fort Hays State University and the two other regional universities would lose $500,000 if they balked.

“We don’t have enough students reading at grade level,” said Flanders, who argued 40% proficiency among students should be viewed as a crisis. “We’ve got to get off the sidelines. We’re the ones charged with educating the educators. Right? So we’re stepping into the arena to not say we have all the answers, but to open open the tent to everybody.”

The Kansas State Board of Education will be part of the mix given the plan to retrain thousands of licensed Kansas educators in reading instruction, Flanders said. Both boards will be expected to collaborate with the new Literacy Advisory Committee.

Sen. Molly Baumgardner, a Louisburg Republican and chair of the Senate Education Committee, worked on creating the framework for an inclusive approach to elevating reading instruction with higher education institution, education advocates, school districts and parents. It will add to the state’s deliberate work to improve early literacy success of young children.

“For many years,” she said, “the Kansas Legislature has recognized the solid science behind early literacy success in children. It requires early screening of children, solid teacher training and classroom materials that support evidence-base practices.”

Advisory panel key

The advisory committee established by the law must be in place by Jan. 1 with representatives from universities, community colleges, technical colleges, the state Board of Education, the state Board of Regents and the Legislature.

“This group is essential,” Lane said. “We need all the minds at the table. ����’s a big tent kind of mentality. My role is almost like the general manager of a baseball team. And, this advisory committee is on the field in the positions and they will be called on based on their individual knowledge at times, but they also may be called on to go somewhere else on the field and perform.”

Likewise, the advisory panel would develop a plan by Jan. 1 to establish the centers of excellence in reading that would provide assessment and diagnosis of reading difficulties, train educators in simulation labs and support other professional learning opportunities. The intent of the law would be for all elementary school teachers in Kansas to earn a reading instruction credential by 2030.

The law set goals for student achievement. Half of students in third to eighth grades would be expected to achieve Level 3 in standardized testing in reading by 2033, which would mean they understood skills and knowledge needed to be college or career ready. Also, the 2033 target would be for 90% of these 3rd to 8th grade students would read at Level 2, which is viewed as equal to their grade level in school.

Flanders said one estimate indicated the state’s economy would create 56,000 new jobs by 2030. Eighty percent of those would require a baccalaureate degree and the current rate of achievement in reading in Kansas public schools wouldn’t fill that workforce gap, he said.

The state university system would be “committing malpractice” to acknowledge students and teachers were struggling with reading instruction but choose not to be part of the solution, Lane said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on and .

Increasing numbers of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are acting as incubators for innovation in the teaching profession, and helping to grow the nation’s Black teacher pipeline.

����Ӱ�� recently partnered with the Progressive Policy Institute for an online panel examining how HBCUs are key contributors to bolstering Black educators.

In the replay below, you’ll hear from experts Katherine Norris of Howard University’s College of Education, Dr. Artesius Miller of Morehouse College and Utopian Academy for the Arts Charter School, Sharif El-Mekki from the Center for Black Teacher Development and ����Ӱ��’s Marianna McMurdock. Watch the full conversation:

Go Deeper: Explore our recent coverage of the teacher workforce below.

• How Black Educators in America’s Fastest-Shrinking City Are Reimagining Teacher Pipelines

• Teacher Prep Programs See ‘Encouraging’ Growth, New Federal Data Reveal

• Breaking Down the Walls to Teaching: Alternative Pipelines Boom

• Preserving Black History Starts with Ensuring There Are Black Teachers

All the while, many of their most gifted educators sit patiently in their classrooms, waiting to be called on but overlooked in favor of individuals outside their school doors.

Instead of focusing on external recruitment to hire talent, districts need to look within to identify those educators who aspire to the next level and to invest in the training needed to help them get there.

Not only do these efforts signal to staff they are valued and respected, but they cultivate talent at a time of seemingly never-ending turnover.

For 20 years, I worked as an educator in New York City Public Schools, where aspiring leadership programs are deeply embedded. When I transitioned to a superintendent role in a small suburban district, my eyes were opened to the reality that most districts lack professional advancement programs to help educators thrive at each step in their careers. 

Because promoting and hiring leaders is a significant investment of time and resources, the team at Uniondale Union Free School District wanted to ensure our educators were happy, successful and around for a long time. And the only way to do that was to provide support at every step of the leadership ladder. To achieve our goal, we applied a three-point theory of action to professional development.

The first focuses on teacher assistants, who play a — particularly post-pandemic — as students need significant support with literacy, math and social-emotional learning. However, many of these experienced education professionals were frustrated over being relegated primarily to administrative tasks. That was a missed opportunity we couldn’t afford to waste.

Over the past three years, we’ve allocated a portion of our CARES Act funding toward a program called the Teacher Assistant Learning Lab that offers instructional sessions led by contracted staff development experts and in-district teacher leaders. Topics are tailored specifically to TAs and include classroom management, how to read individualized lesson plans, literacy instruction and effective use of small-group teaching.  

The program, which takes place over four Saturday sessions and a three-day summer institute, also helps provide a pathway for TAs to move into teaching. Since 2022, three TAs have become teachers in our district.

Creating an effective teacher-to-administrator route required us to deconstruct the traditional pipeline. Rather than focus our efforts solely on individuals ready to step into a new role, we put the call out for any educators who were thinking about administration, but unsure if it was the right fit. 

Our Aspiring Leader Program consists of an educational cohort made up of teachers from across the district who were nominated by their principals because of their leadership potential. The program is facilitated and run by Matthew Ritter, assistant superintendent of data, assessment and accountability, and focuses on understanding various leadership styles, improving school systems and facilitating change. Teachers are expected to meet with their principals regularly to develop a project for their school that impacts student learning or well-being. The last session of the program includes presentations of these projects to senior leadership staff.

One has already been hired as an assistant principal in September 2023, and having completed six months of preparation, walked in fully prepared for the challenges ahead.Last year, we had 12 participants in the program, and this year we have nine.

The program allows assistant superintendents and other senior leaders to locate the innovators in their district and provide teachers with a platform to advocate for and pursue their career goals.

Still, leadership can be lonely, with overwhelming demands and an expectation to never show weakness. After witnessing the stress our administrative staff has endured since the pandemic, we wanted to construct a districtwide network of support.

Our Administrator Development Series provides every new assistant principal, principal and dean of students with external professional coaching to ease the transition. What makes the model so successful is our commitment to confidentiality. Because their coaches are not employed by the district, participants are encouraged to be completely transparent when discussing their challenges and mistakes, knowing they won’t be shared with their supervisors. In turn, they receive objective and unbiased feedback to help them navigate a new path forward.

In addition to one-on-one coaching, administrators connect and support each other through monthly meetings to discuss problems of practice and a book discussion focused on leadership.

Our theory of action is that developing leaders will help our schools become centers of excellence and innovation, where all students will receive an education that prepares them for college and careers. This has worked well for two essential reasons. First, our school board members are supportive of our financial investment in professional development, knowing that the upfront expense of nurturing leaders internally is minimal compared with the cost of continual turnover. Second, as the program has evolved, we’ve relied on feedback from TAs, teachers and new administrators to identify learning gaps and tailor programming to their specific professional needs.

With all the talent embedded in our district, providing educators with an equitable opportunity to share their gifts has been incredibly beneficial. Our district’s chronic absenteeism rate has decreased by 5% in the last two years, and participation in Advanced Placement classes has increased by 14% in the last three years. We’re not only able to watch qualified professionals rise through the ranks, we’re able to maximize their skills to launch new initiatives that help strengthen our schools overall.

But new federal data has given researchers some cause for optimism, suggesting efforts to make teaching more financially viable with strategies such as paying student teachers have helped to move the needle. 

From 2018 through 2022, enrollment in teacher preparation programs grew 12% nationally, or by about 46,231 more candidates, according to a from Pennsylvania State’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis.

Nine states lead the pack with notably higher bumps in teacher prep programs in recent years: Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina and, with the highest average growth, Maryland. 

The modest upswing, seen both in enrollment and completion rates, during some of the most strained years in American education, has surprised experts.

“It was encouraging to see … at the height of the pandemic, it certainly was not what we were expecting,” said Jacqueline King, research and policy consultant with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. 

Only 11 states saw continued enrollment declines in the prep programs during the last three years, among them Montana and Minnesota. 

“I think that all the work that we’ve been doing around grow your own, apprenticeships and residencies… to open up more affordable pathways into teaching are starting to bear some fruit, which is amazing and fantastic,” King added.

Contributing factors also include federal pandemic relief funds and new laws in states such as and that pay student teachers. In Maryland, for instance, some during their year long teaching residency. 

“It’s real,” said King. “It’s enough money that you’re not thinking, how am I gonna do student teaching and have a part time job?” 

Still, researchers caution, the growth is not nearly at the pace required to match hiring demand. Teacher shortages are , and in key areas like special education and math. 

Enrollment in teacher preparation programs in just one decade — about fewer teachers are prepared annually. Compounding social, political and economic strains fueled the decline, including a major recession and education reform efforts that negatively impacted public perception of teaching and America’s schools. 

By 2021, only five areas had bucked the overall trend, with more enrollees than a decade prior: Arizona, Mississippi, Texas, Washington and Washington, D.C. Texas’s growth can be attributed to rapid expansion of a particular alternative program, Teachers of Tomorrow, . 

“Over the last seven years, we’re kind of treading water in terms of the number of teachers,” said Ed Fuller, education professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of the most recent analysis. “We don’t need to be where we were in 2010 because we don’t have as many students, but we need to be a lot closer to that than we are now.”

About in K-12 public schools nationwide in 2022 than before the pandemic. The steepest drops are in the younger grades, partially a result of declining birth rates.

On the whole, districts did not pump the brakes on hiring teachers because of the alarming 2% drop in student enrollment. Flush with expiring pandemic relief funds, schools added 15,000 teaching positions last school year. 

Even as full-time school staffing reached an all time high, a quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student than they did in 2016. 

The demand for teachers is far from met, with about 55,000 teaching jobs open nationwide. Since 2008, the decline of teachers in training has impacted schools in every corner of the country. 

Even places like Pennsylvania, whose supply of teachers historically was so abundant that many newly-credentialed teachers were sent out of state, are of a shrinking teacher workforce. Its surplus has gradually disappeared over six years. 

“People weren’t paying attention,” said Fuller, who recommended that public figures talk up the professions’ value and that the legislature take on teacher scholarships to tailor recruitment for local needs. Scholarships could be earmarked for teachers of color, math educators, or those serving high-poverty schools, for example. 

But if districts and states, tasked with building diverse, robust teaching pools, are focused solely on producing new candidates, King cautioned efforts would be in vain, akin to using a hose to fill a leaky bucket with water. 

By the end of the 2021-22 school year, 10% of teachers left the profession nationally, 4% more than before the pandemic, according to . Experts point to job dissatisfaction, political polarization and exhaustion. 

In Florida, one of the nine states that saw a higher enrollment bump than most, more than 5,000 teaching positions are vacant, the . The job has gotten harder, too — remaining educators teach more students per classroom than they did before the pandemic. While the enrollment data suggest a move in the right direction, it will take years for today’s teachers in training to enter its workforce.

“We’ve really got to think more about the job of a teacher and how we make it more sustainable — financially, from the perspective of work-life balance, and giving people opportunities for growth,” King said. “We need to look at teaching and why it’s such a difficult job to sell.”

Teachers may not get rich, but they live comfortably middle-class lives. Plus, teachers get to retire a couple of years earlier than other workers. 

Those are some of the positive narratives that policymakers need to amplify and repeat if they want to convince more young people to go into teaching, according to , a partnership between the Colorado School of Mines and six national STEM societies.

The Get the Facts Out campaign started with a radical premise: To get more young people to consider teaching, it should begin by asking students about their perceptions of the profession. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the researchers found some surprising things — like nearly half of science, technology, engineering and math majors consider becoming a K-12 teacher. 

They also found that many young people who decide not to pursue teaching give low pay as the main reason. But when the Get the Facts Out team followed up and asked what salary would make them reconsider, the students gave numbers that were in line with current teacher compensation. 

In other words, more young people could be convinced to pursue teaching careers in math and science if they were exposed to accurate data. The researchers point to common misperceptions around salary and job satisfaction that are keeping young people from becoming educators. 

Misperception #1: Teachers don’t earn very much

In 2021, asked a random sample of Americans to guess how much the average teacher earned in their state. Those guesses weren’t just wrong, they were consistently too low — by about 50%, or about $22,000. According to the latest data from the , the average teacher salary in 2021-22 was $66,745.

The same disconnect appeared when the American Physical Society led a survey of college STEM majors. Its researchers to guess how much teachers in their state earned. Again, their estimates were thousands of dollars lower than the actual salaries. 

The researchers then took it one step further and asked those same students how much money they would need to earn one and five years out of college to consider teaching. It turns out that students desired salaries very similar to what teachers actually earned; their misperceptions about pay were turning them away from the classroom.

For anyone wanting to put this insight into practice, the National Education Association’s annual Rankings and Estimates report is an excellent resource for the state-level data (the 2023 version is ). Precise district-level numbers can be somewhat harder to find, but has teacher contracts and salary schedules for 145 of the largest districts in the country, and contracts are often posted on district or local union chapter websites. 

Misperception #2: Teachers don’t like teaching 

It would be easy to get lost in negative news stories about the teaching profession, but Get the Facts Out leaders Wendy Adams and Drew Isola point to a in which teaching came out as one of the top occupations for overall well-being. More recently, the long-running General Social Survey and found that teacher job satisfaction is high and has been remarkably stable over time, even during the pandemic and its aftermath.

Another point of evidence is the objective data on turnover rates across occupations. Consider Census Bureau data compiled by . The nonprofit organization analyzes publicly available datasets and recently looked at the percentage of employees who switched roles or stopped working entirely. From 2017-21, K-12 teachers were far down the list of occupations ranked according to departure rates. 

In fact, K-12 educators stayed in their chosen profession at similar rates as civil engineers, social workers, postsecondary teachers and police officers stayed in theirs. According to the Census Bureau data, about 10% to 11% of teachers left their profession, compared with 15% of civil engineers, 13% of social workers and 9% of police officers.

This is not a new or one-time finding. In 2007, Doug Harris and Scott Adams published a peer-reviewed showing teachers had similar turnover rates as social workers and nurses. A 2012  found that people who temporarily left teaching were as likely to come back as professionals in other fields were to return to theirs. 

The Get the Facts Out team has tested the effects of its recruiting messages and found that students who were exposed to large improvements in the accuracy of their perceptions about teacher pay and their awareness of things like loan forgiveness programs. Time will tell if these informational changes will ultimately shift behavior, but for now, Adams and Isola point to data showing a 33% increase on pre- and post surveys in the percentage of students saying they wanted to teach middle or high school.

Policymakers can take heart from these lessons as well. If they are worried about the teacher pipeline in their state or community, they might be able to entice more young people into the profession by highlighting these positive aspects.

The publication of A Nation at Risk (ANAR) in 1983 was the defining moment of the “first wave” of education reform. It articulated improbably long-lived insights that continue to define education policy and discourse to this day. In particular, ANAR underscored, with uncommon rhetorical flourishes, the contrast between the ambitious ideals of a “Learning Society” and existing educational standards defined by modest minimum requirements, such as the low expectations embedded in high schools’ minimum competency tests and “cafeteria-style” curricula. Clearly, ANAR’s most prominent recommendation was the adoption of high school graduation requirements grounded in a “New Basics” curriculum that would feature four years of English; three years of science, math, and social studies; a half year of computer science; and, for college-bound students, two years of foreign language instruction.

However, ANAR also commented on several other dimensions of the education system in the United States, including the state of the teaching profession. In particular, ANAR concluded that “too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.” The report also underscored the inadequate subject-matter focus of teacher training, low pay, teachers’ limited influence on key professional decisions (e.g., textbooks), and the targeted character of teacher shortages. These findings—and the seven specific recommendations ANAR made regarding teaching—have been the focus of education research, commentary, and policymaking to this day.

Below, I provide a compact overview of key insights from the research and policymaking that occurred in the wake of these recommendations. I focus specifically on the developments relevant to in service teachers, while the important issues related to recruitment, induction, and mentoring in the teaching profession are addressed separately by Michael Hansen in a previous analysis. ANAR made four specific recommendations relevant to in-service teachers. One is that teacher salaries should be “professionally competitive, market-sensitive, and performance-based” and linked to “an effective evaluation system” that rewards effective teachers and guides underperforming teachers toward improvement or termination. A related second recommendation advocates for collectively developed “career ladder” designations that distinguish beginning, experienced, and master teachers. ANAR’s remaining two recommendations for in-service teachers focus on supporting teacher improvement through funded time for professional development.

Theories of Action

ANAR’s recommendations for in-service teachers tacitly reflect two broad and complementary theories of action for improving teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. One involves improving the effectiveness of existing teachers. The intent is for this to occur through professional development activities and through the implementation of well-designed financial and professional incentives. Both of these intend to promote an understanding of high-quality classroom practices as well as their consistent use. The second theory of action focuses on selection—that is, performance assessment systems designed to retain and elevate the most effective teachers while ensuring that persistently ineffective teachers exit the classroom. Notably, these policy recommendations stand in sharp contrast to conventional efforts to promote teacher effectiveness through generic salary increases unrelated to performance or need and through reducing class sizes by hiring more teachers.

The motivations for ANAR’s theories of action rest upon several important stylized facts about teachers that have become increasingly well established since its publication. Arguably, the most foundational evidence concerns the variation in effectiveness across teachers. An older debate had questioned whether there are aspects specific to teaching that make it prohibitively difficult to measure teacher effectiveness in a valid and reliable manner. However, richer data and methodological advances have led to a consensus about the general validity of teacher effectiveness measures while also acknowledging important evidence on the degree of noisiness common to such measures.

These studies indicate that the variation in teacher effectiveness is large, particularly relative to the effects of other promising education interventions. Specifically, a one-standard deviation improvement in teacher effectiveness corresponds to a gain in student performance on standardized tests of roughly 0.1 to 0.2 standard deviations. Critically, the manner in which teachers are currently assessed — that is, informal, “drive-by” evaluations — captures virtually none of this documented variation, rates the vast majority of teachers as satisfactory, and results in little performance-based attrition of low-performing teachers from the classroom.

Another important stylized fact is that, at the hiring stage, school leaders have little capacity to identify the teachers who will become more effective. This combination of facts that teachers vary considerably in impact, but this impact can be observed much more easily after several years in the classroom than at the hiring stage—suggests the need for broader access to the teaching profession coupled with discerning assessment systems that guide subsequent personnel decisions. In particular, decisions to tenure rather than dismiss the lowest-performing teachers can have dramatic consequences given the length of teaching careers.

Over the past fifteen years, this evidence has motivated a number of ambitious public and philanthropic efforts to systematically improve the effectiveness of the teacher workforce through performance-based assessment systems. Recent research has also provided more credible evidence of direct initiatives designed to improve the performance of all in-service teachers through professional development. I discuss these policy innovations and the related research below.

Improving teacher effectiveness

ANAR recommended that teachers receive eleven-month contracts so that they could spend more time in professional development and provide additional instruction for students with special needs. While the eleven-month contract has not been widely adopted, broader efforts to improve the performance of in-service teachers through direct training and support involve a substantial expenditure of time and money. However, accurately identifying the magnitude of these outlays is not straightforward given the accounting challenges of categorizing such activities and their demands on time for both teachers and nonteaching staff. For example, a 2019 study by Alexander and Jang examined expenditure reports for Minnesota school districts and found that 1 percent of 2013–14 operational expenditures was spent on activities defined by the state as staff development. In contrast, a 2015 study by the New Teacher Project found that 2013–14 expenses related to teacher improvement constituted, on average, 8 percent of district budgets. This figure consisted of both direct expenditures on teacher improvement, such as professional development, coaching, and new-teacher support, as well as related indirect expenditures, such as the management, strategic, and operational expenses for these improvement efforts.

Focusing specifically on professional development, a 2014 study commissioned by the Gates Foundation found that the typical teacher spends sixty-eight hours per year on professional learning directed by districts, or eighty-nine hours when courses and self-guided professional learning are included. Most of the time spent by teachers in professional development occurs in workshops and professional learning communities conducted by district staff. The cost of this professional development was estimated at $18 billion per year in 2014. Teacher perceptions of the quality of these investments have generally not been encouraging, nor do they appear to have clear links to teacher performance or improvement. The Gates report also stresses the overwhelming use of district staff instead of market-tested external providers to provide professional development, as well as limited teacher voice in choosing their training.

Despite the considerable expense and prominence of teacher professional development, credible research on the impact of these investments has also been quite limited over much of the period since ANAR’s publication. For example, Yoon et al. reviewed more than 1,300 studies potentially addressing the impact of teacher professional development on student learning and found only nine studies that met the evidence standards in the federal What Works Clearinghouse: six randomized controlled trials and three quasi-experimental studies conducted between 1986 and 2003. However, what these studies revealed suggests a striking proof of concept: teachers who received substantial professional development could boost the achievement of the average control-group student by 21 percentile points. Notably, these nine professional development initiatives focused on elementary grades but differed in their theories of action.

However, other quasi-experimental studies serve as a reminder that implementing effective professional development consistently at scale is a serious challenge. Jacob and Lefgren examined the effect of teacher training in Chicago Public Schools using a credible natural experiment in which schools with low baseline test scores received additional resources for staff development. They found that this initiative had “no statistically or academically significant effect” on math or reading achievement of elementary students. Similarly, Harris and Sass examined student-level longitudinal data linked to teacher data for the state of Florida and did not find an overall impact of professional development on teacher productivity. However, they did find positive effects of content-focused math professional development on student outcomes at the elementary and middle-school levels.

Over the past decade, experimental studies of teacher professional development have proliferated. In general, they have provided mixed evidence of the learning impact of investments in professional development. For example, experimental studies by Garet et al. found that reading- and math-focused training changed teacher knowledge and practice but without clearly improving student achievement. However, meta-analytic summaries of such experimental professional development evaluations suggest that positive effects exist but vary considerably by program design. For example, Basma and Savage examined seventeen literacy-focused professional development studies and found an overall effect size for reading achievement of 0.225. Similarly, in a meta-analysis of ninety-five STEM-focused professional development studies with experimental and quasi-experimental designs, Lynch et al. report an average effect size of 0.21.

However, other multisubject meta-analyses suggest smaller but still positive effects on student learning. For example, Fletcher-Wood and Zuccollo identified fifty-three experimental evaluations of teacher professional development and found an overall effect size of 0.09. Similarly, Sims et al. reviewed 104 experimental evaluations and found an overall effect size of 0.05. Given the considerable financial expense of most training investments, effects of this size, though positive, raise serious questions about cost-effectiveness.

These reviews also note and seek to examine the considerable variation across professional development programs in terms of impact. Kennedy argues that the widely discussed design features of teacher professional development — namely program duration, emphasis on content knowledge, and use of professional learning communities — are far less relevant than whether the training addresses any of the four persistent challenges of teaching: portraying content, managing student behavior, enlisting student participation, and knowing what students understand. In a similar vein, Sims et al. characterize professional development programs by the more general ways they change teacher skills and behaviors. Specifically, they characterize teacher professional development by four “IGTP” traits that indicate whether teachers are provided with new insights (I), goal-oriented behaviors (G), and techniques (T) that are embedded in practice (P). And they conclude that professional development programs with all four traits have an effect size on student learning of 0.17. However, these assessments may obscure the relevance of professional development initiatives that focus on the most effective elements of content and practice, such as an emphasis on “science of reading” approaches in literacy-focused training.

Overall, this evidence indicates that ANAR was prescient in emphasizing the need for ongoing training of in-service teachers. The available evidence suggests that such training can have substantial effects on student learning. However, realizing the increasingly well-established potential of this training is not straightforward. It involves the perennial challenge of translating research findings—that is, the critical design features of effective professional development— into genuine changes in high-impact practice at scale.

Teacher evaluation and performance-based incentives

ANAR also made prominent recommendations to dramatically change how we pay and evaluate public school teachers. In general, the status quo to this day compensates teachers according to single-salary schedules that rigidly structure pay according to years of experience and observed qualifications (e.g., a graduate degree) that do not consistently predict teacher effectiveness. This approach has historical origins in well-intentioned efforts to eliminate overt discrimination and capriciousness in teacher pay. Today, critics allege that this inflexible approach has led to low and undifferentiated salaries that do little to attract, motivate, and retain the most-effective teachers and to direct the least-effective teachers out of the classroom, particularly in hard-to-staff schools and high-need subjects. Furthermore, this approach to pay is coupled with low-stakes, “drive-by” teacher evaluations that capture little of the variation in teacher performance and do not provide reliable guidance for professional learning.

ANAR envisioned an alternative in which teacher compensation was substantially higher but also based on performance in a manner that would direct persistently underperforming teachers either to improve or to leave the profession. In the aftermath of ANAR’s publication, several states and districts experimented with providing teachers with extra pay and career-ladder recognitions for demonstrated merit (though, not generally, dismissing chronically underperforming teachers). These reforms tended to be short-lived despite encouraging results. While the rollback of these reforms was clearly a policy choice, the underlying causes are debated. Ballou argued that it largely reflected the opposition of teachers’ unions. Murnane and Cohen contended that it reflected the distinctive character of teachers’ professional practice — that is, multidimensional and difficult to observe. However, random-assignment evidence from a comparatively well-implemented career ladder program in Tennessee indicates that it was effective in identifying teachers who raised student achievement.

The past two decades have witnessed a diverse variety of ambitious efforts, often encouraged by prominent philanthropic and federal initiatives, to measure teacher performance and to link it to improvement supports and incentives such as financial benefits, career-ladder designations, and dismissal threats. The research on these different reforms suggests their promise but also underscores the nontrivial challenges (e.g., design features, implementation, and political credibility) that make the consistent realization of this promise difficult. For example, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) initiative disbursed more than $5 billion to states in a competition based in part on their commitment to developing systems for promoting teacher effectiveness. While RttT was effective in promoting state policy adoption, its effects on key design features and implementation are far less clear. In particular, while states were more likely to have multiple measures of teacher performance in the wake of RttT, the use of this data to inform salary and retention decisions remained uncommon. The state reforms over this period were “rarely sustained over time,” offered low bonuses, and rated fewer than 1 percent of teachers as unsatisfactory.

A more granular focus on the available evidence from specific initiatives provides richer insights into these issues of design, implementation, and political durability. For example, several studies focused narrowly on simply providing teachers with incentives for improved performance. These studies often found null (or weak) effects that are likely to reflect the unique character of these programs. “Cash for test scores” experiments with individual incentives for teachers in Nashville and group incentives for teachers in Round Rock, Texas, found little to no evidence of effects on teacher practices, attitudes, and the learning gains of their students. Similarly, studies of a group-based teacherincentive experiment in New York City found that they had no overall effects on key teacher or student outcomes.

Critics of teacher incentives suggest that these null findings reflect a misunderstanding of teacher motivations and the manner in which such incentives might debase intrinsic motivation. However, three design features of these studies could also contribute to these null findings and have important implications for performance-based assessment and compensation. First, the fact that participants know that these experimental incentives have a short term (e.g., two years) can sharply attenuate the resulting motivation to undertake changes in professional practices. This same concern can also apply to the incentives embedded in at-scale policy reforms that are viewed as faddish and unlikely to endure politically. Second, these initiatives generally focused on student achievement as the incentivized outcome. This may weaken the impact of incentives if teachers do not see or understand how they should change everyday practice to realize these rewards. A related third point is that these incentive studies generally did little to support and guide teachers in how they could change their professional practices to earn these rewards.

Three other studies suggest the potential importance of other design features. A teacherincentive study in Chicago Heights, Illinois, found positive effects on student achievement (but only in the first wave of the experiment) when the incentives were framed as the loss of an award rather than a gain. Second, the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI) found positive effects when offering high-performing teachers a high-powered incentive ($20,000) linked to a distinctly clear, easily observed, and important behavior: working in a hard-to-staff school for two years. However, it is notable that these incentive-based gains were difficult to realize. More than 1,500 teachers had to be approached in order to fill only eighty-one vacancies. Third, the Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program in Dallas similarly provided large incentives to highly effective teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools. Morgan et al. presented evidence that ACE produced dramatic gains in student performance: a 0.3 effect size in reading and 0.4 in math. This study also found that this success replicated as the program went to scale and that these gains were reversed when the program was eliminated.

Notably, these focused incentive programs all fall short of the more comprehensive system of assessments, supports, and incentives recommended by ANAR. TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement (formerly known as the Teacher Advancement Program), which was introduced in 1999 and is currently active in “nearly twenty states and hundreds of school districts across the US,” is closer to ANAR’s vision. Specifically, the defining features of TAP include career ladder designations for teachers and job-embedded, professional learning led by master teachers. In support of this professional learning, TAP also provides teachers with comprehensive evaluations of their professional practice. However, it is not clear that this “instructionally focused accountability” articulates clear mechanisms for directing consistently low-performing teachers out of the classroom (the selection mechanism in ANAR’s theory of change). Finally, TAP includes performance pay typically linked to observations of teachers’ professional practice, such as classroom observation, portfolios, and interviews, as well as test scores.

The available evidence suggests that TAP is effective in improving teacher performance and student outcomes. Specifically, in a quasi-experimental study based on 1,200 schools from two states, Springer, Ballou, and Peng found that TAP increased student performance, particularly at the elementary school level, with effect sizes varying from 0.12 to 0.34 by grade. Similarly, Cohodes, Eren, and Ozturk, leveraging the rollout of TAP across schools in South Carolina, found that it generated improvements in several long-run outcomes, including educational attainment, criminal activity, and the take-up of government assistance. However, a random-assignment evaluation of TAP in Chicago schools by Glazerman and Seifullah found that it did not improve student achievement and that it was also vexed by the challenges of implementing this reform with fidelity, such as teacher payouts being smaller than originally stated and no rewards based on value added because of inadequate data systems.

Two other high-profile studies provided further evidence of the serious challenges of implementing comprehensive reforms of teacher assessments and compensation as well as of credibly assessing their effects. The first example is the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). Congress established TIF in 2006 to provide grants to high-need schools implementing performance-based compensation systems. The four required components of TIF reforms also resembled those suggested by ANAR: (1) measures of teacher performance, including observations of classroom practice; (2) large, differentiated, difficult-to earn performance bonuses; (3) additional pay for career-ladder opportunities, such as becoming a master teacher and coach; and (4) professional development linked to the teacher assessments. A congressionally mandated study of TIF focused on the 2010 grant recipients in more than 130 school districts and found it led to student achievement of 1 to 2 percentile points higher in reading and math.

However, there are two important caveats to this evidence of modest impact. First, the implementation of these reforms in the study districts was incomplete. Only about half of the participating districts reported implementing all four components of the reforms required by TIF. In particular, professional development was frequently not provided, and most teachers received bonuses, “a finding inconsistent with making bonuses challenging to earn.” Second, the treatment–control contrast assessed in this random assignment study did not examine the effect of TIF versus “business as usual.” Instead, the treatment schools in the study were intended to receive pay-for-performance bonuses while the control group received automatic bonuses. And all study participants, both treatment and control, were assigned access to the three other TIF components: career ladder responsibilities and rewards, evaluative feedback, and professional development. In this critical but often overlooked detail, the federal study of TIF more closely resembles the studies of teacher incentives noted above than a true evaluation of teacher assessment systems.

The Gates-funded Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative is a second widely discussed example of implementing and evaluating teacher assessment systems. This initiative sought to introduce assessment reforms within three school districts and four charter management organizations. Similar to both TAP and TIF, this effort featured focused professional development and career ladder incentives along with performance pay and retention decisions based on direct, structured observation of teacher practice and value-added scores. A quasi-experimental study found that these reforms did not clearly improve the focal student outcomes of high school graduation and college attendance. However, the implementation of the reforms appears to have been weak. The teacher evaluations flagged few teachers as poor performers, and in sites with available data, only 1 percent were dismissed for poor performance. As with the federal TIF evaluation, the treatment contrast that was studied was muted because the comparison schools in this study often adopted similar policies.

IMPACT, the highly controversial teacher assessment reforms introduced in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), is distinctive as a seminal and enduring effort to implement ANAR’s recommendations with fidelity. IMPACT evaluated DCPS teachers on multiple measures with a heavy emphasis on structured classroom observations, including some conducted by district staff, and linked professional development. These evaluations resulted in measures of teacher performance that exhibited variation rather than being largely uniform. IMPACT linked these measures to high-stakes consequences: substantial pay increases for “highly effective” teachers, particularly those in high-poverty schools; dismissal for a small number of “ineffective” teachers; and a dismissal threat for “minimally effective” teachers who did not become effective within a year.

A quasi-experimental study of the incentive contrasts embedded in IMPACT found it had positive effects on teacher performance. This study’s design leveraged a feature of IMPACT in which teachers with performance scores just below a threshold value were deemed “minimally effective” and subject to a dismissal threat while those with scores at or above the threshold were not. A comparison of teachers just below and above this threshold found that the threat of dismissal caused minimally effective teachers either to leave the district or to improve their measured performance substantially. A powerful financial incentive for highly effective teachers to repeat their prior performance also appeared to have positive effects.

Three other aspects of IMPACT merit emphasis. First, the political credibility and resiliency of IMPACT appeared to be highly salient. In 2010, when the city (and district) leadership who championed IMPACT were forced out of office, the first “minimally effective” designations did not appear to change teacher behavior. However, the ratings reported in the summer of 2011, when it appeared that IMPACT would endure, did drive changes in teacher behavior.

Second, evidence indicates that IMPACT not only improved the performance of existing teachers but also replaced underperforming teachers who exited with substantially more effective instructors. Specifically, a quasi-experimental study by Adnot et al. finds that, when a low-performing teacher exited, their replacement raised student performance by 0.14 standard deviations in reading and 0.24 standard deviations in math. Third, the performance benefits of IMPACT’s incentives endured through subsequent revisions to the teacher supports and ratings structure.

A second district reform of note (and one with strong parallels to IMPACT) began in the Dallas Independent School District in 2015. Specifically, like IMPACT, the Teacher Excellence Initiative (TEI) replaced a single-salary schedule with compensation based on multiple measures of teacher performance. Furthermore, like IMPACT, it also did so in the context of accountability for school principals. TEI also implemented a unique design feature to discourage inflated or arbitrary ratings of teachers. It fixed the overall distribution of ratings and penalized principals for subjective ratings that were highly misaligned with test-based ratings. A synthetic-control study by Hanushek et al. found that these reforms led to statistically significant increases in student achievement that grew over time to a roughly 0.2 standard deviation in math and a 0.1 standard deviation in reading.

Concluding thoughts

ANAR’s recommendations that focused on improving the effectiveness of in-service teachers were a harbinger of some of the most dramatic education policy innovations of the past forty years. And these innovations have provided us with several proofs of concept and new insights that establish the potential to improve student learning through dramatic changes in teacher evaluation, in-service training, and compensation.

However, it must also be acknowledged that there has clearly not been large-scale, lasting change regarding ANAR’s teacher-focused recommendations. Uninformative, low-stakes assessments of professional practice and rigid single-salary schedules are still the norm for the vast majority of teachers in US public schools. And while in-service teachers do engage in extensive professional development, the impact of these expensive and highly variable investments is uncertain at best.

Any serious effort to reimagine the assessment, training, and compensation of in-service teachers should begin by confronting the factors that have contributed to the long durability of the status quo. There appear to be three broad and interrelated impediments to substantive change. The first is the need to improve the knowledge base of how best to design the key features of these reforms. For example, efforts to improve teacher evaluation and introduce performance-based teacher pay rely critically on valid and reliable measures of teacher performance. Promising gains in measuring teacher effectiveness are likely to come from continued improvements to structured rubrics for classroom practices. Incentives can better guide the professional improvement of teachers when they are linked to the high-impact, everyday classroom practices teachers directly control and can enhance through complementary training.

Another important area where improved knowledge is critical to driving at-scale change concerns the design of teacher professional development. The typical professional development experience, workshops directed by internal district staff, is often criticized (e.g., the New Teacher Project 2015). At the same time, a recent and growing body of experimental studies indicates that purposively designed professional development can have substantial impact. This literature generally emphasizes the particular benefits of in-service training that focuses on meeting more general challenges of teacher practice. While more can be learned about the design of professional development, the question of how to design its delivery is even more uncertain. A study from the Gates Foundation suggests that relying more on external providers of professional development will make it easier to move nimbly to market-tested and effective approaches. However, several of the teacher assessment reforms discussed here instead emphasize redesigning internally provided professional development to rely on master teachers who may be better positioned to serve as coaches providing embedded and relevant training. These issues underscore the need to build a complementary learning agenda around any new reforms (e.g., inquiry cycles, networked improvement communities).

A second impediment to realizing ANAR’s vision concerns the multifaceted operational challenges of implementing meaningful reforms effectively at scale. The null findings from credibly identified studies of professional development in at-scale field settings suggest this issue. However, more-direct and sobering evidence comes from several well-funded, high-profile efforts to introduce teacher assessment and compensation reforms at some scale. These include (1) the failure to deliver value-added bonuses because of data-system inadequacies in TAP; (2) the limited variation in teacher ratings and their infrequent use in personnel decisions in the Gates Foundation’s Intensive Partnership for Effective Teaching; (3) the inconsistent delivery of professional development and the broad distribution of bonuses under the federal Teaching Incentive Fund; and (4) the limited use of teacher evaluations to guide salary and retention decisions under the RttT initiative.

A third and closely related impediment is political opposition. With regard to introducing performance-based pay, this most obviously refers to the opposition of teachers’ unions. However, it can also involve unresponsive public-sector bureaucracies. Furthermore, reform efforts can also fail when their success and durability rely on politically determined funding commitments. The political opposition to reform in the broader public also turns on misinformation about what the existing evidence discussed here actually indicates. Specifically, opponents of the types of reforms recommended by ANAR often argue that investments in professional development are effective while performance-based pay has failed.

Given these interlocking issues, a compelling way to achieve change at scale may involve forming political coalitions around compelling reforms that adopt some but not all of ANAR’s proposals. For example, it may be possible to move school districts toward more effective professional development delivered by a carefully curated set of outside vendors if their provision involved cost-sharing that saved district resources. Alternatively, it may be possible to achieve durable political support for a teacher evaluation system if that system focuses narrowly on identifying master teachers and providing them with training and extra pay to coach their peers but takes a more incremental approach toward dismissing underperforming teachers. Intentionally combining such efforts with careful evaluation could, over the longer term, seed further evidence-based change in this important domain.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

In 1983, a special commission organized by the U.S. Department of Education released , an unapologetic critique of America’s public schools. Its publication prompted both a firestorm of public response and a seismic shift of policy and practice reforms at every level of the education system, permanently altering the policy landscape that has shaped today’s public schools. 

The report directed many pointed barbs at the teacher workforce and those tasked with preparing them. It concluded that both the quality of current teachers and the quantity of available talent to fill teaching roles in schools were sorely deficient; both dimensions needed immediate intervention to achieve educational excellence. What the report failed to do, however, was reconcile the inherent tensions in simultaneously pursuing both higher quality and quantity, or offer a strategy to systematically develop the teacher workforce that was desired. 

Consequently, as A Nation at Risk unleashed a wave of education reform, the initiatives focused on teachers were both expansive and incoherent. In my essay, “,” recently published in the Hoover Institution’s series (edited by Stephen L. Bowen and Margaret E. Raymond), I recount the divergent approaches to reforming the teacher workforce that developed over time. 

This post highlights some of the lessons learned from looking back at the 40 years of reform and research on the teacher pipeline since the report’s publication.

Teachers: Part of both the problem and the solution

In the late 1970s and early 1980s leading up to the report’s publication, the public seemed to be losing confidence in the nation’s public schools. , , and desegregation efforts were widely perceived as .

The teacher workforce was also viewed as a depreciating asset. The professional workforce was opening for educated young women, and as a career. The starting in the late 1960s, and public sentiment turned decidedly anti-union under the Reagan administration, with unions often perceived as stymying public schools’ ability to serve students. 

It was into this downtrodden atmosphere that A Nation at Risk’s scathing critiques were published. Yet instead of arguing for divestment from public schools, the report offered a laundry list of recommendations to promote comprehensive reform. Policy recommendations regarding teachers, and the pipeline leading to the classroom featured prominently in this list, including compensation reform, student grants or loans for those who commit to becoming teachers, and alternative certification.

The report’s authors clearly felt that the teacher workforce had problems with both the quality of the workforce and the quantity of people signing up for the profession, and both needed to be remediated. However, the report failed to acknowledge that quality and quantity are inherently in conflict—for example, as far as the teacher pipeline is concerned, prioritizing quality will limit the quantity of people who can meet the higher expectations. 

Improving the teacher pipeline on either dimension would have been challenge enough, but to address both teacher quality and quantity simultaneously would be a Herculean feat.

Two approaches to reform teaching, frequently in conflict

Some teacher policy actions started immediately in the wake of the report—for example, four states had by the following year. Other initiatives incubated for a bit before reaching maturation, including the establishment of the (NBPTS) in 1987.

Looking back at the various approaches to shoring up the teacher pipeline, I categorize these policy actions into two types. Actions that seek to shore up weak points in the teacher workforce and recruit more into the profession I call “outside-in” reforms, as they see the primary challenge of teaching as a failure to attract and retain the best talent (think of alternative certification or loan forgiveness policies). Another approach sees the failure to support and develop talent within the workforce as the primary challenge. I call these “inside-out” initiatives (think of NBPTS or career ladders). 

These two approaches are not inherently in conflict, but they take different stances on the relative importance of teacher quality versus quantity. The “outside-in” approaches lean heavily on teacher quantity first (through recruiting to high-need settings, say) and then assume policies will follow that enable school systems to be more selective to ensure teacher quality. The “inside-out” approach reverses that prioritization, focusing on developing quality within the workforce first (through demonstrating mastery through NBPTS certification, for example) and assuming that elevated role will attract new supplies of teacher candidates. 

With limitations on both funding and public attention, these two approaches often find themselves in conflict within the education policy space. Moreover, these diverging approaches have attracted different sets of advocates and public champions over time (for example, think of philanthropic megadonors often representing the “outside-in” approach and teacher unions as representing the “inside-out” approach). These groups frequently engage in conflict over teachers’ role (or blame) for past failures and offer contrasting views towards school improvement. Conflicts like these are at the heart of why teaching has earned the ignominious label of “.”&�Բ�����;

Strategically deploying different strategies, based on school context

Despite these conflicts, both policy approaches offer good ideas that have been borne out in the evidence, though they also come with limitations. And neither set offers enough to ensure a sufficient supply of effective teachers accessible for all students, a . If only we could deploy these policies in complementary ways, then we can make headway on some of the real staffing challenges facing schools. 

What this looks like in practice is that we develop a systematic plan about workforce management that is sensitive to workforce needs on the ground. The most important context here—the one conspicuously omitted from A Nation at Risk—is school settings that serve high-need student populations. We must recognize that these schools have a unique difficulty attracting and retaining quality teachers. Consequently, these schools spend disproportionate amounts of money and time recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding new teachers. Even if they could invest in building teacher quality, the high levels of turnover lower the expected return on that investment. In other words, these schools have a problem with teacher quantity first.

I propose that policymakers and school leaders prioritize efforts that build and sustain teacher quantity in these settings; in other words, the “outside-in” options are those most readily applicable. For example, monetary bonuses for teachers or generous service scholarships conditioned on working in high-need settings would be an excellent way to shore up the workforce. This does not mean that we ignore quality in these schools entirely, but we should only look to building quality once policies prioritizing a robust supply of qualified teachers are firmly in place, avoiding the unfortunate (but too common) scenario in which disadvantaged schools are seen as mere training grounds for novices before moving to greener pastures. Thus, the quality-developing “inside-out” reforms come second.

Outside of these high-need settings, where teacher supply is not nearly such a pressing need, these schools should emphasize building teacher quality first. Thus, the “inside-out” options come to the foreground. Further, as they develop and sustain these approaches, they can in turn offer a supply of high-quality teachers to support higher-need settings.

The state of the teacher pipeline continues to challenge schools

The state of public schools now is, on the surface, very different from that in 1983. We have just recently witnessed schools shutting down for months on end to limit the spread of COVID. Schools have also become new battlegrounds in culture wars. 

These developments have impacted the teacher workforce. First, teachers became frontline workers aiding children’s learning recovery, and increased burnout and elevated turnover in the wake of the pandemic. Second, the culture wars appear to have had on teachers. These challenges are layered on top of a teacher pipeline that was already weakened before the pandemic hit, prompting some experts to warn of a “” forming in the teacher labor market. 

The pipeline into teaching is objectively worse than any point in recent memory, with nearly of teacher training programs in 2020-21, a decline of over 40% from the (284,000 completers). These teacher graduates are now serving a student body that is more than than it was in 1970. The growing cost of college is also a widely perceived barrier for entry into profession, especially for who are have fewer financial resources and are more burdened by debts to get through school. Yet, are on the decline, offering little hope for a resurgent teacher pipeline. 

Under the surface, though, I also observe parallels between then and now. In 1983, like today, student achievement was tapering off after a period of high growth, and there was growing dissatisfaction with the . Also, student enrollments were dropping, as some families began opting for non-public school options. It was clear then, as it seems now, that our public schools are far from returning to that level of performance in our recent past.

Another fascinating parallel comes from a 2022 study by . Looking at historical trends in teacher prestige, interest in the profession, teacher preparation, and teacher satisfaction, the authors conclude that the teacher workforce is now near or at historic lows. In fact, the last time we were in this position was in the early 1980s, right before A Nation at Risk. Afterwards, there was a quick upsurge in public support for and interest in the teaching profession, though the authors could not pinpoint exactly what the catalyst was back then. Perhaps part of this turnaround was new messaging about the nobility of the teaching profession (championed by those reforming from the “inside out”). Perhaps part of the new interest in teaching was due to easier access into the profession and visible pay reform efforts (thanks to the “outside-in” reformers). 

Regardless of the source, what it suggests to me is that a much-improved prognosis for the teacher workforce and pipeline may not be far around the corner. We don’t need to think of new solutions. We just need to deploy the ones we have with more strategy and purpose.

����Ӱ�� is partnering with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the ‘A Nation At Risk’ report. Hoover’s spotlights insights and analysis from experts, educators and policymakers as to what evidence shows about the broader impact of 40 years of education reform and how America’s school system has (and hasn’t) changed since the groundbreaking 1983 report. (See our full series)

In response, states instituted a variety of short-term waivers allowing candidates to teach without fulfilling their normal requirements. Those policies helped candidates who would have otherwise been prevented from teaching, while aiding school leaders in filling open positions.

Were teachers worse for this lack of training? 

New research from and suggests maybe not. In both states, teachers who entered the profession without completing the full requirements performed no worse than their normally trained peers.

Starting June 2020, Massachusetts began temporarily letting anyone with a bachelor’s degree teach. According to by a team of researchers at Boston University, roughly 5,800 individuals received one of these emergency licenses. 

Like other first-year teachers, those granted emergency credentials were disproportionately assigned to work with children with disabilities, English learners and low-income students. And, in fact, they had more such children in their classrooms. Even so, their students saw in math and reading as children taught by regularly licensed educators. Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors.

When the Boston University team asked principals and administrators why they hired emergency-certified teachers, they reported using them to fill shortage areas, especially in special education. 

The teachers working under these licenses also helped diversify the state’s classrooms, as they were about twice as likely as other beginning educators to be Black, Hispanic or Asian.

New Jersey’s waiver policy was similar. Candidates could earn a temporary credential before passing the normal licensure exams or completing a teacher preparation program. The licenses were good for one year, at which point candidates would need to go back, pass the tests and complete their training. Still, found similar outcomes as in Massachusetts: Teachers without the normal training and testing were at least as effective in reading and math as other novices. 

One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. ����’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training. 

Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers. 

The better question now is why these temporary waivers aren’t being made permanent. The New Jersey policy after one year, and Massachusetts is trying to its version out this year. But with such promising results, policymakers might want to reconsider.  

The results are, in fact, part of a pendulum swing in teacher preparation. A decade ago, states were trying to raise the bar. The supply of had risen steadily throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and there was a regular of teacher candidates. There were regional and subject-area shortages, of course, but in general, school districts could be choosy about whom they hired. 

Given this backdrop, policymakers of all stripes came together to focus on quality over quantity. 

National leaders like then-Secretary of Education and American Federation of Teachers President pushed for higher barriers to entering the profession. At the same time, the national accrediting bodies charged with overseeing teacher preparation programs pushed of quality. And states adopted tougher licensing exams. 

Did these policies work? That’s a mixed bag at best. 

There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children. 

What’s undoubtedly true is that making it harder to become a teacher reduced the supply. Researchers found that the adoption of reduced the supply by 14%, disproportionately hitting minority candidates in less selective or minority-concentrated universities. Another new finds that in 21 states and D.C., shifting to the Praxis Core as their licensure test in 2013-14 led to a 12.5% decrease in teacher preparation completions.

In other words, making it harder to become a teacher will reduce the supply but offers that those who meet the bar will actually be effective in the classroom. The recent COVID-related waivers should cause policymakers to re-evaluate whether barriers into the teaching profession actually serve a meaningful purpose, or if they’re keeping potentially talented educators out of the classroom. 

At the same time, an analysis by ����Ӱ�� of Minnesota’s teacher licensing records found that during the 2022-23 academic year, more than 1,500 licensed special educators — comprising 16% of teachers credentialed to work with students with disabilities — chose to work in regular classrooms. 

And more than a fourth of teachers working with students with disabilities — 27%, or nearly 3,000 — lacked any special education credential. Licensed to teach language arts, social studies, music, health and other general education subjects, in many cases their schools have a state waiver to place them with students with disabilities.

The one-two punch leaves thousands of the state’s most vulnerable children — among those hit hardest by the pandemic losses — without qualified teachers at a crucial juncture. Many received little or none of the specialized instruction they are legally entitled to during COVID’s school disruptions. They have not bounced back to their dismal pre-pandemic achievement rates of at grade level.

“Kids with disabilities are never the top priority,” says Wendy Tucker, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Learner Equity, which researches and promotes quality in special education. “They just keep getting pushed down the list.”&�Բ�����;

Even in normal times, federal civil rights laws require school systems to make up services children with disabilities don’t receive for whatever reason. But as is the case in many places, the reality in Minnesota is that districts are closing specialized programs or moving kids into makeshift settings. 

To push districts to prioritize a particularly vulnerable subset of children, U.S. civil rights laws don’t allow school systems to use a shortage of qualified educators to justify denying students with learning differences the services they need to succeed. Disability advocates have long complained that the practice of assigning available but unqualified educators to special education classrooms is illegal because it is a key barrier to students making academic progress. 

����’s easy to understand why administrators are exhausted meeting the bare-bones goal of having students safe and supervised, Tucker acknowledges, but for kids it’s the start of a very slippery slope: “����’s a vicious cycle. Low expectations are met, because the supports weren’t there, because there were low expectations.”

Minnesota licensing officials refused to comment on ����Ӱ��’s findings about the number of special education teachers choosing not to work in the area or the high rate of jobs being filled by educators lacking special education credentials. When asked about the number of special education teachers who leave their jobs for general education classrooms, Yelena Bailey, executive director of the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board, said in an email that the board does not have that information: “We do not have attrition rate data due to limitations of our data system. We hope to hire someone in the coming months who can help put this together manually.”

In a , the board has calculated annual attrition rates for teachers overall since 2017, when a new licensing system went into effect. The data shows that nearly a third of all new teachers hired since then leave within five years — better than the national average — and includes, where known, their reasons for quitting. 

The report does not include information on special educators who leave. Nor does the licensing board tally actual vacancies overall, instead reporting the percentage of districts that say they have hard-to-fill openings by subject area. In lieu of the number of people schools would have to hire to be fully staffed, it uses the number of educators in all fields with waivers to work outside their licensure area and those with entry-level credentials who are working toward permanent licensure as a proxy. 

When broken down by area of expertise, special education of specialties taught by teachers without appropriate, permanent licenses. Last year, there were 2,000. 

A lack of hard numbers outside of the assignment data examined by ����Ӱ�� makes it impossible to know how many of Minnesota’s 153,000 pre-K-12 children receiving special ed services aren’t being taught by a qualified educator. Minnesota education advocates have pressed — unsuccessfully so far — for laws requiring better data collection.

But news stories and anecdotal accounts from family advocates suggest that the number is at crisis levels. At the start of the year, the state’s largest system, the Anoka-Hennepin School District, announced it was at least temporarily closing an entire specialized school for some of its most profoundly disabled students. Last year, it had 53 special educators working in general education classrooms, according to licensing records.

Minneapolis Public Schools last year canceled some in-person instruction, moving many disabled pupils back online for summer services — despite the fact that the extra instruction was needed to make up for ineffective distance learning. Last year, it had 54 teachers licensed to teach in special education that weren’t. The district started this year with disproportionately clustered in its most impoverished schools.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook with parents saying, ‘My kid doesn’t have a teacher, or they have a long-term sub or their school is trying to pull something together using the available people in the building,’ ” says Maren Christenson, executive director of the Multicultural Autism Action Network, a nonprofit serving Somali and Oromo families in Minnesota. 

“We were in a crisis before the pandemic,” she says. “����’s really disingenuous of school districts to say they are taken by surprise. We’ve known this was coming for a long time.”

‘����’s not just a pipeline issue’

Inattention to the high rate at which special education teachers quit for easier teaching jobs, say disability advocates, combined with a stop-gap approach to filling the resulting vacancies, make a reckoning about the quality of special education long overdue. Research shows that given proper instruction, most children with disabilities can achieve at grade level. Yet particularly in the wake of the pandemic’s school closures, when many special ed students were deprived entirely of services, it’s not clear they’ll have the chance.

According to a small but showing what could keep special educators on the job, a handful of key factors propel many into general education. that 20% of new Washington state teachers who earned both a special education and a regular classroom credential chose not to take a job teaching students with disabilities at all. Other research has found that special educators are than other teachers to leave teaching altogether and 72% more likely to leave a job for one in another school.

Whether the departures are from special ed or from teaching altogether, advocacy groups say the turnover perpetuates the problem, as increased shortages translate to higher caseloads for those who remain, in turn making the job less sustainable. With more jobs to fill, administrators also are more likely to tap teachers who are willing to take them but who lack appropriate licenses.

Dan Goldhaber, vice president of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, has studied the special educator workforce. The high number of special educators working outside the field documented by ����Ӱ��’s analysis echoes his own research, he says. 

“These are not new issues,” says Goldhaber, noting that the ongoing lack of special educators differs from shortfalls in other areas such as science, math, engineering and technology. “In special education, it’s not just a pipeline issue, it’s an attrition issue.”

Minneapolis teacher Tameika Williams made it through one of the pipeline-priming programs officials are counting on to ease the shortage only to find the work impossible, she said. She belongs to the Minnesota chapter of Educators for Excellence, whose leaders have heard enough stories like hers to form a task force on working conditions in special ed. 

A Black woman who grew up without any teachers who looked like her or a sense of belonging in school, Williams said she never envisioned herself as an educator. She was employed by a community organization that supported families when the principal of one of the schools she worked in remarked that Williams had an affinity for connecting with youth with disabilities. A program at a local university would help her get a graduate degree and teaching credential for free. 

As she was earning a master’s, Williams started teaching special ed in Minneapolis Public Schools, working entirely with students of color. She says she logged twice as many hours as she was supposed to. 

After four years, however, Williams was done. When she told her principal she was quitting, he proposed she stay as the teacher in charge of a career-training program that gives students an early jump on becoming educators themselves through early college courses. Her classes now include both students with and without disabilities, but she does not have to deal with the daunting workload she had as a special educator.

The administrator she reported to before she changed jobs, Williams said, had criticized her for insisting on teaching history, saying none of her students were college bound. Williams persisted, though. Understanding the multi-generational impact of inadequate education on students of color and children with disabilities — material she was not exposed to until college — was what, Williams said, finally convinced her to get a teaching credential.  

She still harbors ambivalence about the fact that some of her current students with IEPs are considering becoming special education teachers. On the one hand, more educators living with disabilities themselves would boost children receiving special education, now often not educated to be college- or career-ready. On the other, she’s not confident that they, too, won’t be pressured to dumb down the curriculum.  

“I’m not gonna lie, I have some conflicting values still around encouraging young Black kids to become teachers,” she says. “I have the rooted belief that all kids are capable.”

Stories like Williams’s are common everywhere, say teachers. The Illinois chapter of the educator advocacy organization Teach Plus has collected information from members who say special education requires radical change to be a sustainable job. 

After seven years in a special education classroom in Chicago Public Schools, Bridget Rood said she was of knowing that she wasn’t preparing the students in her program, which existed to help them make the transition to adulthood, well for life after school.  

“I was depressed, I was dysregulated,” she says. “I didn’t feel fulfilled at all. I don’t think I had one student in those seven years who [went on to job training or more education].”

A Teach Plus fellowship gave Rood both a break and, as she a colleagues conducted , a sense of how pervasive feelings like hers were. Sixty-two percent of special educators they surveyed ranked an acceptable workload as the first- or second-most important thing to them. In addition to teaching, the special educators Teach Plus consulted said they strained to find time to do paperwork, talk to families, create behavior intervention plans and their own curriculum on the fly while also managing support staff. 

After her fellowship, Rood went to work for a more affluent district on Chicago’s north side, Niles Township High School District 219. More resources means she does not have to scrounge to find curriculum or other instructional resources. She is still responsible for paperwork, but a departmental secretary takes care of a huge number of repetitive, time-consuming tasks, such as making sure the right people are scheduled to attend the meetings where students’ plans are discussed, completing the boilerplate sections of those plans and collecting data for progress reports.

“It is literal night and day,” she says. “����’s also made me realize — without tooting my own horn — that I am good at what I do and I do make a difference.”

‘This person has a harder job’

Again, this comes as little surprise to national researchers. Because of the paperwork involved in each student’s legally required Individualized Education Program, or IEP, special educators must work more hours than other teachers — almost always for the same pay. Recently, administrators in Hawaii, Detroit and Atlanta have had dramatic success filling vacancies with new hires and licensed special educators already on the payroll but not in classrooms serving disabled kids by offering annual incentives of $10,000, $15,000 and $3,000, respectively.

Only one Minnesota district, St. Paul Public Schools, has tried the approach. Its offer of a $10,000 hiring bonus filled its 70 openings for the 2023-24 school year in a few weeks. 

Historically, school systems are reluctant to consider paying some teachers more than others based on anything but education and experience, says Chad Aldeman, a 74 contributor and researcher who tracks the education labor market. 

“Historically, unions have opposed offering special incentives for teachers who work in shortage areas or hard-to-staff schools,” he says. “We as a country have treated teachers universally and not said, ‘This person has a harder job.’”

Yet while there is evidence that large financial incentives can be an effective way of filling special education vacancies, new on Hawaii’s foray into differentiated pay found that it may not significantly impact their retention.   

Teach Plus’s report also flags teacher training and early career mentorship as factors that educators say would keep them from floundering as they learn the job. Colleges of education vary in how much classroom exposure would-be special education teachers get, with hands-on preparation ranging from a few weeks student teaching under a general education teacher to year-long residencies with a skilled special educator. 

In terms of mentorship, the Illinois survey found that support for some new teachers consisted of brief check-ins — sometimes consisting of phone calls during the evening commute — with veteran colleagues. In Minneapolis, Williams said she spent her first year on a team with no one more experienced than her. 

Many states that have confronted special educator shortages chiefly by trying to increase the supply of new teachers. Minnesota advocates have applauded slowly but steadily growing scholarships for teacher candidates who agree to get their special education certification. But they are critical of how officials have expended their energy, complaining that the needs of kids with disabilities have taken a back seat to politics. 

In 2016, in the wake of a decade of lawsuits, legal reforms, and an audit pronouncing the licensing system irretrievably broken, state lawmakers passed a wholesale overhaul, creating a new agency — the current board — to oversee it. One of its mandates was to make it more straightforward for teachers of color and nontraditional candidates to enter the classroom. To that end, lawmakers created a system where, depending on their education and experience, potential teachers could start work on a temporary credential and go on to earn a permanent one. 

The new system, which went into effect in 2017, was successful, allowing 2,000 special educators to start work. But last year, based on lobbying from the state’s traditional colleges of education and the teachers union that also represents their faculty — who have played a major role on the appointed licensure board — lawmakers agreed to begin reversing the changes. Next year, board leaders say they plan to seek further contractions.

The irony, say advocates, is that the special educator pipeline is narrowing dramatically even as scant attention is being paid to what equips a new special educator to do a very hard job well, and what might keep them in it. 

“What we need to do is really work backward and figure out what creates a high-quality special ed teacher,” says Josh Crosson, executive director of EdAllies, an advocacy group that has been pushing for teacher licensing reforms in Minnesota for more than a decade. “What schools are they [working in]? Are there trends within those schools? What preparation programs are those schools recruiting from? ? Mentorship models? Residency models? 

“We don’t have any of that data. We’re really just guessing.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence, the Center for Learner Equity and ����Ӱ��. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joyce Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence and ����Ӱ��. The Mind Trust provides financial support to Teach Plus and ����Ӱ��. The Nellie Mae Education Foundation provides financial support for Educators for Excellence and ����Ӱ��.

Wyoming is vast and sparsely populated. Its only public four-year university is located in Laramie, in the southeast corner of the sharply rectangular state. Those factors can make educator training complicated, explained Laurel Ballard, director of innovation and digital learning at the Wyoming Department of Education. Would-be teachers often are turned off from the profession because of the cost or commuting required for training programs.

“All of our districts are struggling with finding teachers and counselors,” she said. 

Now, to combat the problem, her state is rolling out a program designed to eliminate key barriers to becoming an educator — and doing so with the help of a network of more than a dozen other states at the vanguard of what many consider a . 

Wyoming and its peers in the are applying a decades-old, on-the-job training model long associated with trades like plumbing or welding to educator preparation. They say the technique has the potential to make becoming a teacher more affordable and hands-on.

“I think it’s going to change the face of what teacher prep looks like,” Ballard said. “We’ve seen [apprenticeships] work really well in other industries. So I don’t know why education would be any different.”

The strategy is brand shiny new. Though the federal government has run a skilled apprenticeship program for 85 years, teaching was only of approved professions in 2021.

But rather than attempt to navigate uncharted turf on their own, officials from 14 states and counting have banded together to share tips and tricks from the field. The network launched in August and is led by David Donaldson, one of the architects behind Tennessee’s teacher apprenticeship program, which was the nation’s first federally approved model.

“The group’s made up of the implementers, the people who actually get things done,” Donaldson said. “Everybody is learning from one another. I hope people avoid the mistakes I’ve made [in Tennessee] because I’ve made plenty. We say we want people to start at second base, not home plate.”

Teachers, on average, make compared to similar college graduates, meaning those without access to generational wealth may have difficulty paying back student loans. That’s one of several reasons the nation’s teaching force, which skews white and female, of its students. A broken teacher pipeline also helps explain the educator shortages aggravated by COVID, experts say. 

Apprenticeship advocates believe the new model has the capability to knock down many of those barriers, especially those associated with cost.

“We are going to create a world … where an aspiring educator can become a teacher for free and get paid to do so,” said Donaldson.

Once a month, the network meets over Zoom. During each session, two states give a brief presentation about how their model works and the challenges they’ve overcome in bringing it to life. 

For Ballard and her Wyoming colleagues, it’s a chance to glean lessons they can bring home. A recent presentation from West Virginia, for example, helped her team imagine a teacher preparation pathway that begins during students’ junior year of high school, she said.

“We took copious notes so that we can apply a lot of what they’ve done. … I don’t want to recreate the wheel,” Ballard said.

Laurie Matzke, in North Dakota, feels similarly. The assistant state superintendent works in a 77-person office — the country’s smallest state education agency, she said — so she appreciates any help from out-of-state colleagues.

“To participate in those calls and hear firsthand from other states how they’re moving forward to create their teacher apprenticeship program, that has just been an invaluable experience,” she said.

The U.S. Department of Labor currently recognizes the teacher apprenticeship programs of 16 states, including 10 that participate in Donaldson’s network: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. Several other states in the network are in the process of applying for state or federal approval.

West Virginia was the second state with a federally approved teaching apprenticeship program after Tennessee. There, 250 high school juniors across the state this spring will take part in a that gives them a jumpstart on college with dual enrollment courses in their last two years of high school as well as paid student teaching opportunities. The credits they earn allow the apprentices to start college as sophomores, where they complete two full years of undergraduate coursework in tandem with more student teaching. Finally, to culminate the apprenticeship, they return to their home K-12 district when they are college seniors for a salaried position as a full-time teacher under a veteran educator’s tutelage. At the end of that year, they receive their bachelor’s degree and their teacher certification.

The program will open the door for more West Virginia students to stick around and help future generations of students, predicts Carla Warren, director of educator development at the West Virginia Department of Education.

“����’s a very rural, family-oriented state [and] these individuals want to stay,” she said. That’s important, she pointed out, because those who grew up there are the ones who best understand the issues their communities face, such as opioid abuse and rural poverty.

“This pathway has the potential to level the playing field for our students and allow our best and brightest to say, ‘Hey, I think I want to be a teacher and I can afford to be a teacher in West Virginia,’” the education official added.

“Coming from a community that is so impoverished and rural, it helps a lot,” said Teanna Stubbs, a senior at Mount View High School in McDowell County, West Virginia who grew up in a low-income family. 

The student this year began a vocational track that, like the forthcoming apprenticeship program, gives her an early start on college credits and student teaching. Colleges are already offering her scholarships for next year, she said. When she completes her studies, she intends to return to McDowell County to work with youth.

“I’ve lived here my entire life. I’ve seen how impactful it is to have somebody who’s willing to come in and help the community,” Stubbs said. “A lot of times, the kids here end up struggling because they have nobody to go to. … I just want to change the lives of kids who grew up like me.”

West Virginia, like many other states in the network, has cobbled together several funding sources to offset the costs for students, minimizing debt and compensating them for student teaching. Being an approved apprenticeship program unlocks both state and federal dollars, Warren explained, and her office has also sought out philanthropic funding.

How to build financially sustainable models is a recurring conversation topic at the monthly meet ups, Donaldson said. 

The most common problem states face is “funding, 100%,” he said.

At least four states in the network have ensured tuition, books and licensure exams are fully funded, Donaldson said, meaning no out-of-pocket costs for candidates. At the same time, students can earn a salary for their student teaching roughly equivalent to that of a paraprofessional, around $20,000. In West Virginia, the price tag is a bit higher. Warren estimates apprentices who begin in high school would pay roughly $11,000 per year of higher education, offset by a roughly $32,000 salary in the clinical year before finally earning a teaching certificate.

Some officials, like Matzke in North Dakota, have used COVID relief dollars to foot the bill for grow-your-own programs that, rather than recruiting high schoolers, provide paraprofessionals with the continuing education needed to become full-time teachers. But as stimulus cash dries up in the coming years, states will have to find other funding streams for ongoing programs.

Still, Donaldson is confident that leaders will be up to the task so long as they continue to lean on and learn from each other. It costs nothing to join his network, and every month since its launch, new states have joined, quickly swelling from seven to 14.

“I definitely see this spreading,” Donaldson said. “It’s become a movement.”

Working in a region of rural Arkansas long plagued by teacher shortages, Eveon Rivers seems like the perfect candidate to lead a classroom. With 18 years of pre-K teaching experience, she knows how to work with young people. And a self-described “Greek mythology person,” she has a passion for high school history — the subject she wants to teach.

She’s missing just one qualification: a bachelor’s degree. 

Now, a program that aims to combat rural teacher shortages by upskilling qualified school staff is helping her actualize her dreams — at a bargain price. Rivers pays $75 per month and has only three more semesters left before she graduates and can get her teaching certification.

“Who can beat a BA for $1,800?” said the veteran educator. “That’s a no-brainer.”

Across large swaths of Arkansas, the problem of persistent teacher shortages predated the pandemic, but has “become more apparent” over the last few years, said Karli Saracini, the state’s assistant commissioner of educator effectiveness. In many districts, especially in the southeast Delta region, over 10% of teaching roles are now held by unlicensed educators, according to state data. 

Joe Ross, president of California-based Reach University, believes the solution lies close at hand. Nationwide, over a million paraprofessionals work side-by-side with lead teachers, he points out, and many have the know-how to step into greater responsibility. His school’s model, he said, helps eliminate financial and geographic barriers for those educators so they can gain the credentials necessary to lead a classroom.

“The degree is fully job-embedded from the very first day to the very last day,” Ross explained, meaning candidates continue earning a salary in their existing jobs all the way through the program. Thanks to Pell grants and funding the school receives as an apprenticeship provider, no student pays more than $900 per year, he said, and the program is free for participating districts.

To be eligible, candidates must be employed in a partner school system. They complete half of their degree through on-the-job work, including workplace-based assignments, such as observing and reflecting on the techniques of a veteran teacher, and practicum-style courses that award credit directly for their efforts in the classroom. The other half of the degree comes through online seminars held after work hours and on weekends designed to help the future teachers apply theory to what they’re learning on the ground.

Reach University already serves over 250 learners in Arkansas and roughly 1,000 nationwide.  Now, the program is poised to grow even further. In September, the U.S. Department of Education granted Reach University more than to place some 650 fully certified teachers into high-needs Arkansas classrooms over the next five years. And in late September, Reach received another from the education department to grow its teacher training efforts in Louisiana and is a partner in a separate in that state received by Tulane University. Outside Arkansas and Louisiana, Reach also serves educators in Alabama and California.

In Arkansas, at least . In 2020-21, more than in the state did not employ a single Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Asian teacher of record, despite some 40% of students holding those racial identities.

“It can change the teacher force by truly opening doors that are currently shut for way too many people,” said David Donaldson, managing partner for the National Center for Grow Your Own educator pipeline programs. There’s recently been a “massive increase” in school officials’ interest in such programs nationwide, he said. But Reach, founded in 2006, is one of the organizations with the most effective and accessible models, he believes.

“To see them spread across the country, they’re really doing good work.”

Some 90% of Reach graduates in Arkansas will be re-hired in the same district after they complete the program, according to the . ����’s a boon in the eyes of Carolyn Theard-Griggs, dean of the National College of Education at Chicago-based National Louis University.

“People have a tendency to stay in schools longer if they’re near their home base,” she observed. 

The expansion is much needed, said Saracini, of the Arkansas state education department. Too many otherwise-qualified staff get boxed into lower-paying positions like classroom aides because they can’t afford to go back and study for a degree.

“The people who would make some of our best teachers are some of those paraprofessionals, but they just can’t break that employment and lose those benefits,” she explained. When they do land full-time teaching gigs, however, their pay can more than double.

Furthermore, the training model, Ross argues, mints educators with stronger teaching skills than traditional programs that often graduate and certify candidates after just a semester of student teaching. Reach educators have at least two years working in the classroom under their belts by the time they complete their degrees.

“That will create better teachers,” said the university president. “It will create a rank of graduates who are respected for having this degree.”

Rivers, who will graduate at the end of 2023, agrees.

“I have all this experience. I feel like I’ll be a seasoned teacher,” she said. Her district outside Little Rock, she added, has a job awaiting her when she becomes licensed.

“I want to be a cool history teacher. I want to make it fun for the kids. … I want to dress up, do the props.”&�Բ�����;

For now, on her paraprofessional salary, Rivers has to deliver UberEats and Grubhub in the evenings to make ends meet. On nights her delivery work and course schedule overlap, she sometimes uses a phone stand in her car to join class.

“I like the leeway where I can tune in on my phone,” she said. “����’s so accessible.”

Many of the Arkansas school systems facing the most dire need for licensed teachers, Saracini explained, are also areas where higher education is the least accessible, with no nearby options for four-year degrees. Reach fills in the gap, expanding “in some of our most-needed areas,” she said, by offering a model where candidates can build on their community college credits without needing to commute.

Years ago, Rivers was able to complete her associate’s degree while working pre-K, but lacks her bachelor’s. She had previously worked toward a BA, but was forced to stop when her financial aid dried up. 

When she found out about Reach, it was her “saving grace,” she said. “����’s affordable, it’s flexible and the professors are good.”

Now, she talks about the program to anyone who will listen.

“I tell a lot of people about it,” she said. “A lot of people have been in the school system a long time and a lot of people are just starting. So, if you’re going to be there, why not further your education?”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and the Stand Together Trust provide financial support to Reach University and ����Ӱ��.

Nearly every state lost a large proportion of teaching candidates between , according to a Center for American Progress report — and the pandemic has further strained traditional colleges and universities programs, many of which face and were forced to . 

Programs like the University of Michigan’s Masters of Teaching are feeling the effects. Their middle and high school cohort is down to about 28 students for the Fall 2022 semester from the usual 45. In Oklahoma, which had over , will end its elementary teacher preparation after its final three students graduate. 

“We have had basically at least an orange flag that’s been waving for the past 10 — and in urban and rural areas, well over 20 years — to say we’re not doing enough to recruit teachers,” said Kendra Hearn, associate dean for educator preparation programs at the University of Michigan. “…Everything has just been exacerbated by COVID.”

Experts believe a combination of economic and social factors are contributing to the decline: High stress working conditions, restrictions and political influence on what can be taught and low wages. In some parts of the country, the acute teacher shortage has been in part attributed to too few teaching candidates in the pipeline. Declining community college enrollment and transfer rates, a common pathway for low-income, Black and brown teachers, have also affected pipelines. 

The storm has given rise to many — run by nonprofit and for-profit organizations, sometimes in collaboration with universities — that are typically less costly and lengthy. 

Simultaneously, public perception of teachers during the pandemic have been overwhelmingly negative, intensifying disinterest in the profession. 

“Unfortunately, we had a very narrow window of public understanding of teacher’s work that closed rather quickly after the COVID realities started to become more commonplace,” Jacqueline Rodriguez, vice president of research for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, told ����Ӱ��.  “So there was a groundswell of interest and support and empathy for teachers’ work. And then that faded rather quickly.”

Carole Basile, dean of Arizona State University’s teacher’s college, agrees, observing the emotional toll of the current climate is steep. She believes it will take much more than recruitment efforts to bolster pipelines and make the profession desirable and sustainable.  It may also take a cultural shift in how Americans see and invest in public education. 

“We can’t keep preparing them, even if we change our preparation program, to be more flexible and accessible if we don’t also help schools to change to keep them,” said Basile. “It’s a pipeline issue, but then it’s also ‘we’ve got to change schools.’ It’s not okay that teachers sit in their cars crying in October.”

The enrollment lags are impacting historically hard-to-staff subject areas in particular: Interest in special education, STEM and foreign language is . Over the last decade, degrees and certifications conferred in each area are down by 4%, 27% and 44% respectively, adding to concerns about localized teacher shortages.

Top of mind for many contemplating the career amid a recession is compensation. Teachers’ weekly wages have remained relatively flat for 25 years; and educators earn about 24% than peer grads, according to an August Economic Policy Institute report that looks at wages through 2021. 

“People want a great return on investment in terms of a career and how their career will compensate them relative to the cost and especially any debt that they incur… Unfortunately, teaching is perceived as a low prestige, low paying profession,” Hearn said. “Prospective teachers are having to go into quite a bit of debt … that’s  a huge pain point for people who are interested.”

Some teaching candidates are discontinuing their programs under financial stress, according to Mary Burbank, the University of Utah’s associate dean for teacher education. It was her first time witnessing the trend in her nearly three decades with the University.

“Instead of continuing their academic program, even with additional financial support, they could not afford to do that. [They’d] consider degree-only or alternative routes because the family needed support,” she said.

In the fall of 2020 and 2021, about said the pandemic caused enrollment drops by 11% or more among undergraduates. 

The pipeline in Oklahoma, which has some of the lowest average teaching salaries in the nation, is further limited by pandemic-era challenges.  

“There are multiple distractions and disruptions thrusting Oklahoma educators in a whirlwind of pressures, dystopian narratives, and harassment from groups that know little if nothing about what it means to be a professional educator,” Shelbie Witte, head of Oklahoma State University’s school of teaching and learning, told ����Ӱ�� by email. “Does this impact the state’s teacher pipeline and retention? 100%.”&�Բ�����;

Historic declines in community college enrollment, particularly among students of color, inflame a sense of urgency to strengthen pipelines. Nearly 40% of students who eventually study education at 4-year universities ; at schools like Arizona State University, with transfers comprising  more than half of enrolled students.  

Making pathways to the profession more accessible, without sacrificing quality

Yet there are attempts to build up pipelines — states sponsoring or limiting certification; undergraduates flooding introduction to teaching courses; and district partnerships to find possible candidates as early as high school. 

At the request of rural districts and candidates seeking better access, Oklahoma State University recently launched an online program for elementary education. Arizona State University similarly made their pandemic-era hybrid options permanent, for rural and working students who need more flexibility to persist through graduation. 

ASU has seen consistently strong enrollment, with the 2,841 students enrolled this fall being about 150 more than in Fall 2019. There, the threat of going into substantial debt is less pressing, thanks to the state’s Teacher Academy, a program that covers tuition and fees at participating universities.

The school has been on the forefront of innovations to teaching – piloting a with the state’s largest district to reduce shortages and help new teachers feel belonging. 

The school’s northern neighbor, the University of Utah, had similarly stable enrollment numbers this fall. 

The state’s unique culture could be helping the situation — teaching is seen as a worthwhile, popular profession, Utah’s Burbank said. Their program works with five school districts to identify prospective teachers in high school, offering tuition support for a 2+2 program with a community college and the University. 

They’ve seen growing interest in the field, even among non-education majors: This fall, 60 students are enrolled in the University’s Introduction to Teaching course — interest has grown stronger over the years. 

“Honestly I was very surprised to see that,” she said, “I asked them why are you here and there is a spirit of wanting to make a difference.”

In , scholar Leslie T. Fenwick, tapping seldom-seen transcripts from a series of 1971 U.S. Senate hearings on the topic, writes that the loss of Black educators post-Brown was “the most significant brain drain from the U.S. public education system that the nation has ever seen. It was so pervasive and destabilizing that, even more than half-century later, the nation’s public schools still have not recovered.”

While Black students now represent about 15 percent of K-12 enrollment, just 7 percent of teachers and 11 percent of principals are Black. Research shows that this dearth of Black educators has consequences: One 2018 study, for instance, found that Black students who had by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college. Those who had two were 32 percent more likely.

What’s more, Fenwick says, current threats over issues such as Critical Race Theory are cut from the same cloth as the threats that Black educators faced post-Brown.

74 contributor Greg Toppo spoke with Fenwick, an education policy professor and dean emerita of the School of Education at Howard University, about the Senate hearings, the backlash to Brown and ways to bring Black teachers back into the classroom.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Can you take us back to the moment when you first learned about this history?

Leslie T. Fenwick: I learned this history on my own as part of my disgust with a Politics of Education class that I was taking as a doctoral student. The professor decided that the class on the politics of education would not discuss Brown! Instead, we were going to start at a different point, the [the 1971 decision that upheld busing to achieve integrated schools]. And I remember being outraged by that. If there’s any place where we should be unpacking Brown, it should be in that class. Additionally, the faculty member opened the class with this roster of statistics reflecting disparities in education between Blacks and whites, but I was concerned that there was no framing for these statistics, and that without the framing, there was kind of a tacit reinforcement of some racist assumptions about Blacks and intellectual and academic underachievement. So after class I marched to the library, almost in protest, saying to myself that I was going to bring back some statistics and facts to inform this faculty member about education disparities and also to make the case for why we should be discussing Brown. And as I’m looking for resources in the library — I’m literally in the stacks because this is before the Internet — I come across these on the displacement of Black principals. And I start reading them. And that’s where I learned about this history. I carried those transcripts around for quite some time, looking for someone to write the book that I ended up writing.

Those 1971 Senate hearings feel like a hidden history. Why are they not more widely known?

These [Senate hearing] transcripts have been cited at least 100 times in work by scholars and journalists, but no one has written in depth about the most prominent focus of the transcripts, which was Black educators’ superior academic credentials and professional experiences, and how they were replaced by lesser-qualified whites. I wasn’t expecting to find that. … This is the thrust of the hearings. And yet in all the work that cites the hearings, there’s not a focus on these Black educators’ exceptional academic credentials.

You paraphrase testimony from the hearings, writing that as school desegregation slowly played out post-Brown, “White principals and teachers became its direct beneficiaries, while Black educators were its primary prey.” Reading that, I wondered, “Who were the hunters?”

We’re talking about life in the 17 dual-system states, although outside of those states, there are jurisdictions that also have . And we see, even in the North, this is happening too. But en masse, it’s happening in the 17 racially segregated states, from Delaware down to Florida, over to Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, etc. And the hunters become governors, mayors, state legislatures — not individual legislators, but legislatures — and also locally elected officials: mayors, but also school superintendents and school boards. Remember, this is a time still after Brown of a lot of racial constriction. The customs of racism and Jim Crow are alive and well, which means that Blacks experience difficulty and barriers to voting. So that means local officials, school board members, superintendents in the states and jurisdictions where they are elected — and certainly state legislatures and governors [are involved]. And so without full voting rights extended to Blacks, those controlling the state and local levers of power and policy are almost all white and mainly committed to maintaining the segregationist hold on schools. And these are the individuals and entities that facilitate, through the use of state budgets and the use of state codes and statutes, the firing, dismissal and demotion of Black principals and teachers.

You write that Thurgood Marshall in 1955 noted that Black educators’ jobs needed to be protected. Did he and the legal team go into Brown with this possibility on their minds?

There was a that led up to Brown that were about disparities in paying Black and white teachers. Again, Black teachers with more credentials would make less money in the 17 dual-system states than white teachers with certificates. Thurgood Marshall and many of his team litigated those cases … Marshall and his team knew Black educator displacement was likely to happen. Remember, prior to Brown they’re going to Southern and border states, and they’re litigating all the cases around pay inequalities and voter registration. They knew the parameters of Jim Crow very well. In fact, early on, Marshall establishes the of the NAACP to provide funding for legal support to the Black principals and teachers whom he thought would be illegally targeted and lose their jobs as a result of white backlash to Brown.

Do you give Marshall’s legal team any culpability for being naive in their strategy?

I don’t hold the Brown decision, nor the men who were the geniuses behind that decision, culpable. But what I do hold culpable is white resistance and the ability of local and state leaders to, in a swoop, use state statutes and budgets to support their segregationist agenda in the face of Brown, which would become the law of the land. Brown was right: There is no place in an American democracy for segregation. There is no reason Black citizens should not be able to access tax-supported institutions. There is no reason we should have, in this great country, racially segregated customs and laws. Brown was a great and brilliant decision. But there was powerful backlash to the decision that continued for at least 25 years. Sadly, I think it’s still continuing. In fact, the current death threats against superintendents who have initiated race equity initiatives, the physical intimidation of school board members, the threats against teachers and to burn books — when I was writing Jim Crow’s Pink Slip and then looking at the current news, it’s the same script, and that really shocks me.

You’ve anticipated my next question: Reading your book, I felt like the conversations we’re seeing now about CRT and pushing students away from subjects that make them uncomfortable are a direct result of this history. Can you reflect on that?

I wrote the book to push against this myth that there are not enough Black teachers, because after Brown, Blacks fled the profession to pursue fields and careers that were previously unavailable. Well, the history doesn’t say that, nor do U.S. Labor Department statistics show that. And we’re still living with this history: Of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers, about 7 percent are Black. About 11 percent of the nation’s 93,000 principals are Black. And less than 3 percent of the nation’s almost 14,000 superintendents are Black. And so I ask myself, and I ask the reader: Where would we be if these generations of Black educators, who were more credentialed than their white peers who replaced them, who had a personal commitment to end anti-Black racism, who had put their lives on the line to lead voter-rights campaigns in their communities, who were committed to a representative democracy — what if they hadn’t been fired? What if they had been in place during a critical time in our nation’s history and were part of building integrated schools? Where might we be as a nation now?

As you write, they weren’t just teaching, they were also politically active.

Many of these principals and teachers were establishing voting-rights campaigns in their locales. They were establishing NAACP chapters. This was their activism. And in other literature, they’re called community activists and community leaders. But more specifically, their community activism was devoted to helping Blacks get registered to vote and working with the NAACP on lots of equality issues. And so they were threats. These Black educators were cornerstones of political activism even in the face of threats to their own lives.

So in 2022, if the dearth of Black teachers isn’t a recruitment issue, what’s the solution?

When the Nixon administration was pressured about this as a result of the Senate hearings in the ‘70s, the response of the administration was not pro-integration. They designated $3.2 million to the retraining of Black educators for integrated schools. Well, Black educators didn’t need retraining. On a near one-to-one basis, they were more credentialed than the white educators who replaced them. So, the Nixon administration’s retraining investment is literally used to usher Black principals and teachers out of the profession. I go into great, great detail and cite the federal documents that show how they were ushered out of the field. So we need a counter-investment, and particularly in institutions that produce large percentages or numbers of Black and other educators of color. I always say that even in 2022, HBCUs, which are 3 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities, are producing 50 percent of the nation’s Black teachers — and two HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions), one in Texas and one in Florida, produce 90 percent of the nation’s Latinx teachers. So we do need some financial investment in the institutions that are producing teachers of color. And we need to examine, I think, any other structural barriers preventing Black and other teachers of color from entering the profession, either as teacher education students or novice teachers.

It strikes me that it’s such a vicious cycle: If you’re a Black student and don’t see Black teachers, your incentive to do this work, to see yourself in this job, just gets reduced. And that feeds into an ongoing cycle.

We know that academic and social benefits accrue to African-American, Hispanic/Latinx students when they’re in highly diverse-staffed schools. They’re less likely to be expelled, less likely to be misplaced in special education, more likely to graduate high school, more likely to apply for college, have reading and math achievement that’s excellent in certain grades. And so we are losing out on some academic achievement, not just for Black and brown students, but possibly for all students. I say in the book, over and over again, that all children benefit from having diverse models of intellectual authority.

See previous 74 Interviews: professor Daryl Scott on teaching the history of race in America; author Amanda Ripley on losing trust in schools; professor Seth Gershenson on the importance of teacher diversity; author Paul Tough on higher education myths; and the full archive of 74 interviews.

Mapping the vacancies nationally, a recently published and crafted by three education researchers offers the latest, though incomplete, snapshot of reported teacher shortages. 

The data suggest the pandemic has exacerbated shortages in specific teaching areas and some states that have faced persistent and well-documented shortages for years, creating a patchwork of different education realities in the United States that vary from district to district and across state lines. 

Of the nine where vacancy rates are highest, Mississippi faced the highest vacancy rates, with 68 missing teachers per 10,000 students for the 2021-22 school year. In contrast, Utah’s vacancy rate was less than 1 per  10,000 students. The report does not yet compare these rates over time, because of differences in state data reporting and urgency to understand the most up-to-date vacancies.  

The report also identified another critical issue: Currently there are 163,650 “underqualified” educators — about 5% of the force nationally  — teaching without certification or outside of their subject area.  More state-level data is available for this group, showing the number of “underqualified” teachers  in some states exceeds 20,000, which has risen in the last several years.

“There are substantial vacant teacher positions in the United States. And for some states, this is much higher than for other states…. It’s just a question of how severe it is,” said Tuan Nguyen, lead author on the working paper and education researcher at Kansas State University. “The pandemic has just exacerbated the situation that was already starting to build up…just made it worse for some states.”

Nationally, an estimated 36,504 full-time teacher positions are unfilled, with the number potentially as high as 52,800, the report found.  

The vacancy estimates from Nguyen and co-authors Chanh Lam and Paul Bruno are significantly lower than the 300,000 reported by the National Education Association and (the higher estimate includes non-teaching staff such as bus drivers and school counselors). They join a host of academics attempting to make sense of shortages in the absence of , which would put vacancies, which vary school to school and district to district, into context. 

Published with the Annenberg Institute for Education Reform at Brown University, the report raises concerns about teacher education program pipelines; staffing historically hard-to-staff positions in rural areas, STEM and special education; and the lack of accurate data. 

Their work marks the first time vacancy numbers have been documented for all 50 states and Washington, D.C. as reports flow in about districts shifting to , or calling in the and to teach. 

“A lot of the things that they’re doing right now seem to be a little, quick band-aid to stop the bleeding. But it’s not going to solve this long term issue, particularly for states that have persistent shortages like Kansas, Florida and Mississippi,” Nguyen told the 74.

The highest raw numbers of open teaching positions are concentrated in the south and lower Atlantic, where about 22,000 positions are open, triple the picture in midwestern states. Alabama, which had over 3,000 vacancies in 2021-22, sits in stark contrast to Illinois, where 1,703 positions were left unfilled. 

Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi also experienced high raw number of vacancies in the 2021-22 school year, each missing at least 3,000 teachers. 

Nguyen described vacancies and staffing challenges as “ubiquitous,” but constituting a huge range. Beyond the nine states facing highest vacancy rates, another 19 have modest shortages, between 0 and 12 vacant positions per 10,000 students.  Nine others face moderate shortages, missing between 12 and 15 educators comparatively. 13 states did not share complete data and could not be compared, the researchers found.

Estimates are conservative. Not all districts provided vacancy data to their state agency. And while some states include “underqualified” teachers in their definitions of vacancy, Nguyen and coauthors only considered unfilled positions in their final tally, relying on state and federal education data along with news stories. 

Factors driving vacancies

Thousands of open posts does not mean that teachers left the classroom in droves during the pandemic, researchers at Rand, Kansas State University and Brown University told ����Ӱ��. 

Rather, three trends are unfolding simultaneously: teacher preparation programs face declining enrollment; respect for and interest in teaching has plummeted; and most districts beyond pre-pandemic numbers with federal relief aid. 

“It’s only in this year two, and really, in year three [of the pandemic] that we’ve seen an uptick in turnover, but nothing like a mass exodus, the attrition that we were concerned about,” Nguyen said.  “The teacher supply pipeline seems to be stagnating or decreasing over time. Over the last 10 years or so there has been a substantial .”

Concerns about public disrespect, low wages and legislation restricting classroom content may help explain some of the pipeline challenges and high vacancies particularly in southern states, Nguyen hypothesized.

“There’s also been increased attention to what it means to be a teacher…particularly about what teachers can or cannot teach in the state; whether or not social emotional learning is an important issue that we need to teach; how teachers may not teach anything about racism in America,” Nguyen said.

“It’s like, hey, there are these multitude of factors that are overlapping each other,” he said, “and they seem to be concentrated in the South.”&�Բ�����;

Teachers, administrators and child advocates say they’re impressed with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal to improve education by shoring up the employee pipeline and releasing in additional aid to schools, but they’re unsure if her approach will bring lasting change.

In , delivered Jan. 5 amid a surge in the ongoing pandemic, Hochul shared her plan to address a broad range of issues, from public safety to affordable housing. 

She also stressed the importance of educational opportunities for adults and safe, open schools for children, saying, “The role of a teacher is irreplaceable in a child’s life and as the past two years have hammered home, they’re irreplaceable in a parent’s life, too.”&�Բ�����;

Hochul, sworn in as the state’s first female governor in August after Andrew Cuomo left the post in disgrace, is running for a full term. Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday , while another in the June Democratic primary, New York Attorney General Letitia James, dropped out last month. The , also released Tuesday, now show Hochul leading by more than 30 points her remaining Democratic rivals, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Long Island state Rep. Tom Suozzi.

While her political fate has yet to be determined, educators and advocates say they’re witnessing a shift in tone from Cuomo to a leader who has a more cordial relationship with city and state power players. But it’s unclear how or when her vision for public schools might become reality. More will become known when Hochul Tuesday.

Randi Levine, policy director for Advocates for Children of New York, which works to improve education for low-income students, said Hochul’s priorities are in line with her own, especially as it relates to added funding. But she’d like to know more.

“As is the case with a lot of these proposals, we are eager to see the details,” she said.

to attract more teachers and school workers — this includes waiving the income cap for some retirees and expanding alternative certification programs — and encourage paraprofessionals to boost their skills, among myriad other initiatives.

Her plan was informed by the state’s which is expected to worsen: New York needs approximately over the next 10 years to make up for the loss, according to the state teachers union.

Hochul earlier announced the state would phase-in full funding of Foundation Aid to New York school districts — the money comes after a decades-long legal battle — by the 2023-24 academic year. Foundation Aid takes into account school district wealth and student needs in crafting a more equitable funding distribution and will add to school coffers through the next three years.

Darlene Cameron is principal at The STAR Academy PS-63, a small, pre-K through fifth grade campus in Manhattan’s East Village where 75 percent of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, a key indicator of poverty. Her students, like many others throughout the state and nation, have suffered mightily during the pandemic. 

Schools across the country continue to face closure as the Omicron variant surges, further disrupting learning.

Cameron supports the strengthening of the education workforce but isn’t sure how — and when — the results will be seen on her campus, which is in desperate need of literacy experts to help students with comprehension, dyslexia and trouble with writing.

“Right now, all schools are supposed to have one literacy coach for kindergarten, first and second grade,” she said. “Mine is on extended health leave. We are in mid-January and I’ve had no literacy support all year long yet my superintendent expects me to have students make two years’ worth of progress in one year.”

Sharon Collins, a math teacher at New Heights Academy Charter School in Harlem, said she, too, would like to see additional funding for more staff, including mental health workers, another key part of Hochul’s plan. The governor proposed state-provided mental health grants to schools and matching funds for those that make good on using federal dollars for this same purpose.

“Schools have never had enough counselors and now we have students who are really in need and in crisis, dealing with the loss of family members and with being out of school for such a long time,” said Collins, a member of Math for America, a nonprofit that supports New York City’s strongest math and science teachers.

The Foundation Aid comes at the same time New York state is receiving  in federal COVID relief monies meant to support summer and afterschool programming, the hiring of added staff, upgrades to ventilation and professional development among other expenditures. 

But even as the state is flush with cash, educators worry schools won’t get what they need. 

Jodi Friedman, assistant principal at Cameron’s campus, is concerned about teacher retention, adding Hochul might consider improving working conditions and compensation if she aims to keep existing employees.

Teachers, Friedman said, are exhausted, overworked and underappreciated, burned out from a pandemic which has forced many to work longer hours as they struggle with distance learning demands and chronic absenteeism among their students — all while trying to maintain their own health. 

“This idea of giving everything of yourself to help others can’t continue,” she said. “����’s not sustainable.”

And while the pandemic has been a recent challenge, schools have, for years, taken on problems that should be addressed elsewhere, she said: What schools really need are robust social services to help families off campus.

“If schools are the only way children get food, health care or heat, that is a problem,” Friedman said. “Teachers aren’t just teaching, but taking on … all of the ills of society.”

Jasmine Gripper, executive director of Alliance for Quality Education, a statewide labor-backed advocacy group, said for all Hochul’s talk of recruiting more staff, the governor overlooked a key element. 

“One of the things missing was an intention on diversity,” Gripper said, adding New York has done a poor job of recruiting and retaining teachers of color, a problem that could be remedied through “grow-your-own” initiatives, stronger relationships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and in the certification process.

Still, she was heartened by the governor’s overall commitment to the state’s school system: Her organization was key in pushing for the release of Foundation Aid.

“The state is continuing to maintain its promise,” she said. “So that is really encouraging.”