This is equivalent to one out of every 10 doctor positions going unfilled or going to someone who hasn’t yet completed medical school. We do not stand for that in healthcare, and it should be equally unacceptable for education. 

Every child deserves a qualified teacher, making teacher recruitment essential.

Despite this, the federal government is moving in the opposite direction. The pandemic-era funding to support school districts has expired, and the current administration has canceled $600 million in educator preparation grants and proposed eliminating $2.2 billion in grants that support educator recruitment, retention, and professional development.

This is troubling. Although numerous policies and reforms have been attempted to improve student outcomes, from increased spending per pupil to a longer school day, ample research confirms that to student learning outcomes than any other aspect of schooling.

Ample research has proven that boosting student learning depends on . That includes those who are not only trained and certified, but are innovative, enthusiastic and continually adhere to recommended best practices.

Furthermore, recruiting more teachers is one of the most cost-effective strategies, by far, for improving learning, according to a . For every tax dollar spent on school improvement, teacher recruitment has a higher return on investment in terms of student learning gains than almost anything else. 

Given this finding, anyone who cares about good government, efficient spending and smart policymaking should be advocating for and investing in teacher recruitment initiatives.

Effective teacher recruitment is also good for the economy. One well-trained teacher will influence thousands of students over the course of their career.  

Students who have more effective teachers are  to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in higher-income neighborhoods and save more for retirement. All of this results in GDP growth and more tax revenue. 

Additionally,  that the U.S. will be less economically competitive in the 21st century without a stronger teacher workforce, particularly in math and science.

Even as the federal government ignores the problem, state governments and education nonprofits are recognizing the educational and economic payoffs to teacher recruitment and are advocating for resources and legislation that recruit more teachers.

More than 30 states have invested in financial incentives to recruit teachers, with and leading the way with the most sizable investments. 

Nine state departments of education have partnered with  to launch a statewide teacher recruitment system. TEACH rebrands the teaching profession by dispelling myths and misperceptions and assists prospective teachers in overcoming barriers to entry, such as navigating the training and certification process, finding financial aid and passing certification exams. 

In 17 states,  attracts diverse talent into teaching by giving college students an opportunity to explore the profession through its Teaching Fellowship. Many college students are considering teaching but want more exposure before making a commitment. 

Through a paid, nine-week summer program, Breakthrough’s teaching fellows complete 100-plus hours of training, teaching and mentorship — building real classroom skills and leadership confidence. Breakthrough then partners with graduate schools, other certification programs and TEACH to ensure fellows have clear, supported routes into teaching careers.

These approaches recognize that there are tens of thousands of young people who consider teaching but are stopped by misperception barriers or practical hurdles. The only way we can address the teacher shortage is by proactively identifying these individuals and supporting their path into the field.

This is what the U.S. military does to recruit. This is what Fortune 500 companies do. This is what we need to do for the teaching profession.

Amid the federal rollbacks and growing demand for more teachers, philanthropy can play a significant role here in supporting efforts to recruit teachers. By investing in recruiting teachers — who will go on to inspire and engage their students — we are investing in the educational and economic future of our country in more ways than one.

Since 2020, the Hawaiʻi education department has offered the largest bonuses in the nation to special education teachers to address staff shortages. But the state has seen limited improvements in filling special education teacher positions, according to recent data from the department and the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The HawaiÊ»i Department of Education introduced bonuses — also known as pay differentials — for teachers working in special education and other hard-to-fill positions in 2020. It’s a strategy that has become popular in other parts of the country. In 2025, 85 districts offered financial incentives for special education teachers, up from 63 in 2022, according to a .

Hawaiʻi continues to offer the largest bonuses to its special education teachers, with local educators receiving $10,000 annual salary increases. On the mainland, Atlanta Public Schools in Georgia provides a $3,000 bonus to special education teachers, while Jackson Public Schools in Mississippi offers $5,000 pay bumps over three years, according to the national report.

In some parts of Hawaiʻi, special education teachers also qualify for hard-to-staff bonuses, further boosting their pay. All Hawaiʻi educators working in schools that are geographically isolated or significantly struggle with vacancies receive pay bumps ranging from $3,000 to $8,000, meaning that special education teachers in these schools can earn up to $13,000 to $18,000 in annual bonuses.

But a  on teacher pay commissioned by the DOE shows the bonuses did not fix the shortage. Statewide, the percentage of licensed special education teachers has increased since the bonuses began, but schools still face many unfilled positions.

Vacancy rates for special education teachers fell in 2020, the first year the bonuses were introduced, then rose steadily during the pandemic. Those rates have since improved but remain roughly at or above pre-pandemic levels for most schools in the state.

The only improvements to special education vacancies were in the Nānākuli-Waiʻanae and Hāna-Lānaʻi-Molokai complexes, where teachers earned the maximum $18,000 annual salary boost. In those schools, vacancy rates for special education teachers fell from 14% to 5% over the past seven years.

The proportion of unlicensed special education teachers in those schools also fell from 14% to 6% since 2019, according to the salary study.

Statewide, special education vacancies have made up a smaller proportion of unfilled teacher positions since the bonuses began. In 2024, special education positions accounted for 20% of total teacher vacancies, compared to 30% before the pandemic. 

As another school year ends, superintendents across the United States are staring down an autumn staffing crisis, with 1 in 8 teaching positions either vacant or filled by an underqualified educator.

States that are struggling with post-pandemic teacher shortages have spent millions to lure replacements and retain veterans with hiring bonuses and bumps in salaries. But hiring gaps remain, so some states also are trying another tactic: changing their standards.

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The changes in teacher training and licensing come amid widespread turmoil in public schools: Tax revenue is being siphoned toward private school vouchers in many states; some classrooms are being scrutinized for banned books, displays or teaching lessons that trip into diversity, equity and inclusion territory; and students who went through pandemic-era shutdowns are struggling both with sitting still and with learning the material.

Some surveys show that fewer than a fifth of teachers are happy in their jobs.

“Teaching is not seen as an attractive profession right now,” said Drew Gitomer, an expert on teaching assessment at Rutgers Graduate School of Education.

“COVID exacerbated things, and teachers are caught in the middle of political battles — over curriculum, book bans, even personal attacks,” he said. “It’s not a healthy work environment, and that drives people away.”

Last year, Illinois allowing teacher candidates to begin student teaching before passing content-area exams. It was an effort to reduce barriers for underrepresented groups, the measure’s sponsor said.

A bill under consideration this year over whether to factor pupils’ test scores into teacher evaluations, a break from a 15-year-old mandate.

In New Jersey, a formally removes the Praxis Core exam — traditionally used as an entry-level screening tool for aspiring teachers — from certification requirements.

And in Nevada — one of the states hit hardest by teacher shortages — a bill would for incoming educators. The bill would allow teachers credentialed in other states to begin working in Nevada classrooms while awaiting formal approval.

It also would remove extra steps for teachers switching grade levels and would waive application fees for recent substitute teachers.

Linda Darling-Hammond, founding president and chief knowledge officer of the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said teacher shortages hit hardest in schools serving low-income students and students of color, where instability often leads to larger class sizes, canceled courses or a revolving door of substitute teachers.

“When you walk into a school facing shortages, you see instability,” she said. “Students may be taught by people who don’t know what to do, who leave quickly, and who often rely more on discipline than engagement.”

The root cause? Teacher attrition.

“Nine out of 10 vacancies every year are because of attrition — and two-thirds of that is not retirement,” Darling-Hammond said. “Support in the beginning matters. Teachers who come in and get a mentor stay longer. If you’re just thrown in to sink or swim, the odds of leaving are much greater.”

States have long struggled to attract teachers, and credentialing changes aren’t unusual. But some education advocates fear long-term repercussions.

Melissa Tooley, director of K-12 educator quality at the left-leaning think tank New America, said most states now offer alternative and fast-track teacher certification pathways, many of which allow candidates to start teaching with little or no pedagogical training in how to teach.

“We’re churning through people who might have potential, but we’re not setting them up for success,” she said. “A lot of what states are doing is short term. It’s about filling seats, not necessarily building a sustainable or high-quality workforce.”

More than 40 states require aspiring teachers to take the costly Praxis Subject test for the subject they want to teach, which some experts argue excludes strong candidates and duplicates other assessments.

“You were excluding people who might be good teachers but didn’t do well on that specific test,” said Rutgers’ Gitomer, who has researched the test’s effects on recruitment.

However, he added, dropping tests doesn’t necessarily help.

Several states — , , , and — have dropped a licensure requirement known as edTPA since 2022, but there’s little evidence the move has helped ease teacher shortages, Gitomer said. (The acronym stands for Educative Teacher Performance Assessment and involves a portfolio that includes testing and videos of classroom performance.)

“The state eliminated edTPA but didn’t replace it with a specific alternative,” he said.

“Instead, it gave full discretion back to individual institutions to develop or adopt their own performance assessments,” he said. “When we talked to institutions, it became pretty clear they didn’t think removing edTPA would be a major driver in addressing the shortage — and they haven’t seen evidence that it has been.”

How best to credential

Tooley said state credentialing systems must navigate a delicate balance: ensuring there are enough teachers, maintaining instructional quality and increasing workforce diversity.

“There’s this triangle — three pieces that need to be in place — and I think there are real tensions when it comes to how states are designing their certification policies,” she said.

And Gitomer described a fragmented national landscape, where some states are tightening teacher entry standards while others are dramatically loosening them — even allowing non-degreed individuals to teach.

“Some states are trying to raise standards; others are relaxing them to the point where you may not even need a college degree,” he said.

Indiana now all pre-K through grade 6 and special education teachers to complete 80 hours of training on the “science of reading,” a method that includes phonics, and pass an exam by 2027. State Sen. Jean Leising, a Republican, has cutting the requirement in half, calling it “an excessive burden with little actual benefit” in a news release.

In Texas, a bill aims by the 2029-30 school year. The legislation would set a gradual cap on the percentage of uncertified teachers districts can employ in core curriculum classes — starting at 20% in 2026-27 and decreasing to 5% in 2029-30.

According to the Texas Education Agency,lacked a state teaching certificate or permit.

Yet some states stand out for how they’re changing their requirements, Tooley said.

She pointed to Washington, which has designed a encouraging paraprofessionals, often known as teacher’s aides, to become classroom teachers. Also known as paraeducators, they’re a group with classroom experience, community ties and higher retention likelihood.

There, school districts are required to offer foundational training — ranging from 14 to 28 hours — directly to paraeducators.

In West Virginia, a new law now allows districts to count full-time working in one or two classrooms toward meeting the required number of aides or paraprofessionals in K-3 classrooms.

Tooley noted that and are experimenting with “menu-style” licensing flexibility — allowing candidates to demonstrate qualification through various combinations of GPA and test scores, rather than rigid cutoffs.

“These are people already in schools, often from the same cultural or linguistic backgrounds as students,” Tooley said. “They’re more likely to succeed and to stay.”

Low pay

A 2024 by the EdWeek Research Center found that public school teachers are increasingly reporting declines in mental health, job satisfaction and classroom stability. Seventy percent of teachers recommended student mental health interventions, and nearly half said schools lack enough counselors, psychologists and social workers.

As mental well-being has worsened, the share of public school teachers who are very satisfied with their jobs has also declined by 2 percentage points from the previous year, to 18%, according to the , which was conducted by the EdWeek Research Center on behalf of Merrimack College.

While teacher wellness supports remain limited, educators say improvements in pay and student discipline are the most needed changes.

To entice passionate but burned out educators from leaving the workforce, several states have raised minimum teacher pay. Arkansas , and South Carolina this year, giving it a boost to $48,500 next school year. South Dakota enacted a $45,000 minimum with yearly increases, and penalties . Connecticut advanced a bill setting a $63,450 salary floor, while and others are eyeing further increases.

At the federal level, the  seeks to establish a national $60,000 minimum salary for teachers at a qualifying school to boost recruitment and retention across the country. The bill, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat, remains in committee.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Texas teachers may be increasingly fed up with their job, but they’re still staying in school.

State data shows Texas public school educators continue to return to the classroom at somewhat similar rates as years past, despite multiple surveys showing the large majority of them have contemplated quitting the profession.

While teacher turnover has slightly increased over the past decade, state data show there hasn’t been a large exodus of experienced teachers. In fact, the average years of experience for Texas public school teachers hasn’t notably changed since 2014-15, nor has the share of first-year teachers hired by districts.

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The numbers run counter to years of warnings that Texas teachers are primed to bolt en masse out of frustration with the job. At the same time, Texas does still face widespread issues with morale, as well as big challenges in finding certified teachers and filling several types of positions, including special education educators and bilingual teachers.

Steady hands in schools

While much has changed in Texas classrooms over the decade, students continue to be educated by mostly veteran teachers. The average tenure for Texas teachers has held steady during that stretch, ranging from 10.9 to 11.2 years of experience.

The state did see a slight dip in the share of first-year teachers — who, on average, have less positive impact on student achievement than other educators — during the late 2010s, then a slight uptick over the past few years. Still, novice teachers account for fewer than 1-in-10 Texas educators.

A small rise in turnover

Teacher turnover, a measure of how many educators don’t return to teach in the same district each year, has ticked higher since the pandemic. While it once hovered near 16 percent, it’s reached roughly 20 percent over the past two years.

Ultimately, a 4 percentage point difference equates to about 15,000 more teachers who aren’t returning to a classroom in their district. However, state data shows teachers of all experience levels are leaving at similar rates.

Still stressed

Teachers might be sticking with their jobs, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.

A 2024 by the Charles Butt Foundation, an Austin-based education advocacy nonprofit, found nearly four-fifths of educators surveyed had seriously considered quitting the profession in the past year. Pay, quality of campus leadership and a sense of feeling valued ranked among the biggest factors in whether teachers had considered quitting.

Separate polls by two of the largest Texas educator unions — the and — also showed about two-thirds of teachers had considered leaving the profession.

Texas education leaders also are worried about the state’s ability to retain teachers and hire tough-to-fill positions. A state panel convened by the Texas Education Agency examined the issues and made numerous recommendations in 2023, though have been put into action.

As teachers leave Texas schools, district leaders are increasingly , who generally leave the profession sooner than certified teachers.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

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 â€Æà·Ą±ő” 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.” 

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.

 â€œWe’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: “It’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.”

For example, teachers in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty are almost three times more likely to be early in their career, with less than three years of experience. And students in these districts are 16 times more likely to learn from a teacher with temporary or emergency credentials than their peers in Michigan’s wealthiest school districts.

“The teacher shortage crisis that we hear a lot about here in Michigan is far worse for our students with the greatest needs,” said Jen DeNeal, director of policy and research at EdTrust-Midwest and lead author of the report. 

DeNeal noted that research shows that novice, not fully credentialed teachers are generally less effective in the classroom.

While the national teacher shortage in certain subjects has been as an intractable issue that’s worsened since the pandemic, the EdTrust study released last month uniquely zooms in on district-level data and demonstrates the scope of the problem.

“Having gaps is, of course, not a surprise,” said Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. “Having gaps of this magnitude is pretty stark.”

DeNeal and her team at EdTrust, which advocates for educational equity with a focus on children who have been traditionally underserved, spent two years analyzing educator workforce data from public and non-public sources, conducting focus groups and reviewing previous research.

They used Michigan’s a state funding formula passed in 2023 that includes an index for concentrations of poverty, to divide school districts into six bands. Band one includes districts with fewer than 20% of students living in concentrated poverty while band six includes districts where 85% to 100% of students live in these conditions. 

Researchers then looked at how highly qualified teachers — defined as those who were fully certified with more than three years of experience teaching in their certification or more refined speciality areas — were distributed across these districts.

They found that in the 2022-23 school year, more than 16% of teachers in high-poverty districts were teaching a subject or grade not listed on their license — that’s twice the state average. These districts accounted for more than a third of all out-of-field educators in the state, despite only employing 13.5% of Michigan teachers. 

While out-of-field teachers are typically a stop-gap resource preferable to a revolving door of substitutes, they may lack the content knowledge and skills needed to effectively teach, and students who learn from them tend to have in that subject. Those with emergency credentials are also able to fill teacher vacancies when more qualified ones aren’t available, though they’re more likely to be rated as when compared to other new teachers.

Hansen noted that being trained and fully licensed makes a teacher more likely to provide quality instruction in the classroom, but “it’s no guarantee.” And while these findings do likely point to a “more effective teacher workforce in these more affluent settings, and 
 a less effective workforce in the high-needs settings, it’s probably not the case that it’s going to be 16 times more effective.”

Yet, “of all these different factors and characteristics that they’re highlighting in this report, experience is the number one that’s documented to show an impact across multiple studies and multiple grades,” he added.

Persistent vacancies may be particularly hard to fill in Michigan, where teacher attrition is slightly worse than the national average, and teacher turnover is far higher for students living in poverty. For example Black students, who account for only 18% of the statewide student enrollment, make up 45% of where teachers were most likely to leave.

In districts where a majority of children are Black, students were nearly four times more likely to learn from an out-of-field teacher, four times more likely to learn from a teacher with emergency credentials and nearly twice as likely to learn from a beginning teacher than in districts serving primarily white students.

In focus groups, teachers pointed to a number of factors contributing to the shortage, including the pandemic, discipline challenges and chronic absenteeism. They also reported that their classrooms are overfilled, they have less one-on-one time with students and less planning time because they’re being called on to substitute teach. One issue, though, came up again and again: pay.

“We’re not competitive regionally and we’re not terribly competitive nationally,” DeNeal said.

Between Michigan’s inflation-adjusted teacher salary fell more than 20%, representing the second-largest teacher salary decline in the country. First-year teachers in Michigan earned, on average, about $39,000 a year, rendering it 39th nationally and last among Great Lake states. And researchers found that teachers in the wealthiest district are paid, on average, about $4,000 more annually than those in the poorest districts.

This is exactly the opposite of what the pay structure should look like, according to Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institute of Research and the University of Washington. He argued that teachers in more challenging environments should be paid more than their peers to compensate for the additional hurdles.

“I don’t think this is an issue where we need a lot of research to know that this problem exists and to know at least what some of the potential solutions are,” he said. “This is an issue where the politics I think make it challenging to implement at least some of the solutions.”

DeNeal said that although these challenges are “troubling and extremely persistent, they are not insurmountable.”

The report put forward five recommendations, based on teacher focus groups and previous research: prioritize fair and equitable funding; improve state education data systems to increase transparency; provide greater support for school administrators; focus on making teaching an attractive and competitive career and increase access to high-quality professional development for teachers.

Thomas Morgan, spokesperson for the Michigan Education Association, emphasized the importance of incorporating teacher voice in the solutions.

“When you want to know what to do to fix our schools,” he said, “the first people you should talk to are people working on the front lines: those teachers working in our schools. They see things, they live it, they breathe it and they should be consulted.”

Everywhere you look, it appears that the U.S. teaching profession is in a state of crisis. While the severity varies by state, the nation continues to see in teacher education program enrollment and perceptions of teaching as a prestigious career. From my regular interactions with students, it’s clear that negative messages about the profession are deeply ingrained in their minds. So where are these messages coming from? Why aren’t young people interested in teaching? While these are complex questions without simple answers, TikTok, the ultimate message spreader, offers us a window into one part of the puzzle.

Over half of Americans aged 18-34 . However, the fate of the app is now uncertain. On Sunday, TikTok shut down as a nationwide ban was set to go into effect. On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order granting a 75-day extension, allowing the Chinese company more time to consider selling. Whatever the future holds, it’s crucial to reflect on what it taught us about the field of education.

TikTok has been a paradoxical tool for education: both damaging and useful. For every report about the app’s negative effects on teaching and learning (e.g., mental health concerns and “destructive challenges”), there are reports of the app’s benefits (e.g., open-source instructional strategies and community engagement). When I began researching teachers’ use of TikTok, I was struck by how videos tagged with the hashtag epitomized this duality.

#TeacherQuitTok, with over 400 million views, serves as a digital repository of teachers’ resignation stories. Scrolling through these videos reveals raw emotion and unfiltered truths. Teachers across the U.S. share their journeys of leaving the profession, often capturing poignant moments packing up classrooms, bidding farewell to students, or speaking directly to the camera through tears. These videos combine personal footage with text overlays, music, and storytelling to underscore the gravity of resignations and expose systemic challenges that push educators to the brink.

Teachers’ reasons for quitting echo decades of : unmanageable workloads, insufficient pay, deteriorating mental health and a lack of support. One teacher shares, “I quit my teaching job in the middle of the year because of the daily stress. I developed anxiety and fell into a depression. I had to take meds just to cope.” Her story is far from unique. Many educators on TikTok describe similar struggles, reflecting a profession under immense strain.

In a sense, #TeacherQuitTok has become a digital picket line, allowing teachers to bypass traditional exit interviews and speak directly to the public. The sheer volume of posts transforms individual resignations into a collective statement: The U.S. teaching profession is unsustainable under current conditions.

While some may dismiss these posts as venting, I argue that #TeacherQuitTok plays a vital role in shaping public discourse about the profession. TikTok’s algorithm amplifies these stories, enabling some to reach millions of viewers. For instance, one viral video of a teacher resigning has garnered over 13 million views––an unprecedented audience for a workplace grievance.

This amplification is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it reinforces the perception that teaching is a profession riddled with stress and systemic obstacles, potentially deterring young people from pursuing it. On the other hand, it validates educators’ struggles, fosters solidarity, and pressures policymakers to address the systemic issues driving teachers away. For researchers, social media platforms like TikTok provide valuable data to gauge public sentiment about teaching and identify critical areas for reform.

In this case, the popularity of #TeacherQuitTok is a clarion call for urgent action. These stories underscore that teacher well-being is inexorably linked to the quality of education students receive. Schools cannot function without teachers, and if the profession continues to erode, the consequences for students and communities will be severe. To create an environment where teachers can thrive, schools must address foundational issues such as manageable workloads, competitive salaries, and mental health support.

Whatever happens to TikTok, let’s not forget the lessons it taught. Teachers are voting with their feet and sharing their decisions online. Whether it’s on TikTok or another app, teachers are no longer leaving quietly. By sharing their resignations online, they expose the challenges of the profession to the next generation. At a time when recruitment is plummeting, the country cannot afford for young people to be disillusioned before they even begin. Reforming the profession is no longer optional; it is essential for safeguarding the future of our education system.

On a per-student basis, that means public school staffing levels once again climbed to new all-time highs.

The NCES numbers are expressed in terms of full-time equivalents (FTEs), which are adjusted based on the number of hours worked by part-time staff. The FTE numbers are the most accurate  measure of total staff time available, but they take time to collect. Separately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects raw headcount numbers on the total number of employees in a given industry or sector. Those data come out faster, and the latest numbers that public schools have continued hiring this year.

Despite all the continued attention to supposed , the truth is that schools employ more educators than ever. At the same time that student enrollments fell by 1.3 million (a decline of 2.5%) over the last five years, schools added the equivalent of 55,000 teachers.

As a result, 45 states and the District of Columbia have effectively lowered their student-to-teacher ratio over the last five years. In most places, the changes are small, but 13 states — Colorado, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, California, New Mexico, Virginia, Illinois, Mississippi, Indiana, Utah, Oregon and Louisiana — reduced their ratios by more than one student per teacher. Only Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Alaska and Florida had more students per teachers last year than they did going into the pandemic. (We’re currently working on updating our map showing the same trends at the district level.)

But it’s not just teachers: Over the last five years, schools have added 171,000 full-time staff members in a variety of roles. If you walked into a school today, you’d find more paraprofessionals and administrators. Schools also have more guidance counselors, psychologists and support service staff, which NCES defines as employees “who nurture, but do not instruct students” and includes “attendance officers; staff providing health, speech pathology, audiology or social services; and supervisors of the preceding staff; coaches, athletic advisers and athletic trainers.”

Only three categories of school employees — administrative support staff, librarians and media support staff — did not see an increase over this five-year time period. The largest of these is administrative support staff, people whose primary responsibilities are to assist principals or department chairs. The number of librarians and media support staff also fell, part of a over the last few decades as fewer schools employ fewer full-time people in their libraries.

This may feel like dĂ©jĂ  vu all over again to readers who have followed these trends closely since the pandemic. But with districts using the last of their COVID relief funds late last year, it will soon become clear whether they can sustain the investments they’ve been making. There’s no sign of the peak yet, but the fiscal cliff is getting closer.

Some panelists argued the move — long a goal of conservatives —  would be disastrous while others testified it would be largely symbolic. 

“The elimination of the Department Of Education would do significant harm to the teacher shortage and particularly for our students with disabilities,” testified Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor at the University of Missouri whose team runs one of the only on teacher shortages. 

“The Department Of Education is largely responsible for making sure we follow the laws and to divest funds, and if we don’t have a Department of Education to oversee what we’re doing 
 we’re going to have a free-for-all in terms of who we’re going to put in the classroom,” Nguyen added.

Fellow panelist Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution had another take: “I don’t think that eliminating the Department of Education would do much.”

While he’s concerned it might jeopardize the collection of data and funding of research, ultimately Hanushek said the department is largely responsible for dispersing funds, a role another department could take on. 

“I think it’s largely a political statement,” he added.

Jessica Levin, litigation director at the disagreed. “The DOE is not just a pass-through [of funds],” she said. “The DOE has expertise in the complicated distribution of those funds and the enforcement of the civil rights guarantees that go along with them.”

She added that “eliminating it would be not just on a practical level extremely harmful but part of an attack on institutions that protect civil rights in this country,” making it a “dangerous proposal both on a practical and symbolic level.”

Both state and federal governments are responsible for ensuring that the rights of students with disabilities are met through the The law, initially passed in 1974 but amended and renamed in 1990, proposed that federal funding would cover 40% of the average costs of special education, a directive that has yet to be met in the 50 years since. Experts noted that when special education isn’t fully funded, district leaders are forced to reallocate money from elsewhere, ultimately harming all students.

The federal held Friday’s briefing to better understand the impact of teacher shortages on students with disabilities nationwide. A final report on their findings is anticipated in fall 2025, Stephen Gilchrist, the lead commissioner on the report, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ before the briefing.

“Having been involved with some of this in my own home state of South Carolina, we’ve seen many issues where students who were entitled to these federal accommodations were not receiving them at all in school districts,” Gilchrist said, a dilemma he noted is only worsened by teacher shortages.

An appointee from Trump’s first presidency, Gilchrist expressed optimism that the incoming administration will help lawmakers “think differently about how 
 we deliver education to students in America 
 without there being such a bureaucratic process.”

His observations and the debate at the briefing over the education department’s fate comes amid a firestorm over a series of controversial Trump appointees this week. Trump has yet to name his education secretary and it’s unclear whether what critics see makes the department’s possible demise more likely.

Friday’s briefing focused on a persistent problem in K-12 education — the shortage of special education teachers — that was exacerbated by COVID. As of October 2023, of public schools said they were not fully staffed in special education, and 51% reported having to move teachers around to fill a variety of vacancies. 

In 2024, 72% of public schools with special education vacancies struggled to fill the position with a fully certified teacher, according to Brittany Patrick, senior policy analyst on education at the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

That being said, there is a lack of specific and reliable data, according to Nguyen, who noted that while almost every state has indicated shortages, there’s no information on the magnitude. “Knowing there’s a shortage is not particularly helpful if we don’t know the extent of the problem,” he said.

In the face of these vacancies, some states have issued thousands of provisional and emergency licenses, filled positions with substitute teachers, lowered teaching requirements, or sent the National Guard into classrooms, all of which means students are being instructed by under-qualified teachers, Nguyen argued.

Panelists across the spectrum noted the particularly challenging circumstances in which special education teachers currently work, marked by low pay, large caseloads and class sizes, inadequate support and political divisiveness — all of which appear to be driving them out of the classroom. At the same time, there is a dearth of new educators in the pipelines. 

Together this means that special education students don’t receive the services they’re entitled to, “a pervasive issue, exacerbated by decreased professionalization and the mental health effects of COVID,” said Amanda Levin Mazin, senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Even pre-pandemic, a number of these students were falling

When New Jersey students head back to classrooms this week, many will return to schools with too few teachers.

The state has for years faced , with particularly troubling vacancies in subjects like math, science, special education, and instruction for English language learners. And those vacancies persist despite legislators’ efforts to and steer more students toward careers in education.

Sean Spiller, president of the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, said schools are seeing the impact of the shortages.

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“We’re seeing class sizes increase. We’re seeing courses not being offered, and we’re seeing that the educators who are still remaining in the profession are being overburdened in terms of how to pick up some of the work because of unfilled classrooms. It’s a big concern,” Spiller said.

The exact degree of the shortages remains unknown despite recent efforts to quantify New Jersey’s educator workforce, but the number of would-be teachers has fallen precipitously over the last decade.

New Jersey’s teacher workforce has remained stable over the last decade at roughly 118,000 educators, according to drafted by Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.

Researchers examined 11 years worth of data and found that for every teacher that left the profession in the 2022-2023 school year, the state issued just 1.1 provisional teaching certificates, compared to 2.9 certifications in the 2013-2014 school year. Less than a quarter of those pursuing education degrees in the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school years eventually became teachers, and only 43% earned a degree in education, the study says.

The study warns that a ratio approaching one departure for one new teacher could quickly lead to more severe shortages because at least 10% of teachers leave the profession within their first three years.

Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Newark) is a former education chair who has remained active in the space following her ascent through the ranks of leadership (she’s the Senate’s majority leader). Ruiz said the state should do away with its residency requirement for teachers, at least while the shortages remain dire.

“No one under any circumstance is saying ‘not New Jersey first,’” she said. “We always want to be New Jersey first, but when there isn’t enough New Jersey, as policymakers, administrators, and government entities, we should be responsible enough to say we need human capital in these spaces. Our students deserve better.”

Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth), the current education chairman, agreed lifting the residency restriction would help bridge schools’ staffing gaps.

The Senate in May approved a bill that would for three years in a unanimous vote, but the measure has not advanced in the Assembly, where it has the backing of Assemblywoman Pam Lampitt, the lower chamber’s education chairwoman. A similar bill in the last legislative session.

Gopal said he was considering legilsation to boost teacher compensation but said the legislation is still in very early stages.

A separate bill that would rework the state’s funding formula is expected to be introduced in mid-September, but Gopal cautioned that bill would likely see significant changes as it moves through committees to floor votes.

A reworked formula should include provisions to extend school budget timelines to prevent last-minute staff cuts and allow districts to better plan their budgets, Ruiz said.

Rolling back a Christie-era policy that doubled the state’s student teaching requirement from a semester to a full school year could also boost the state’s educator workforce, Spiller said.

“We had the best schools in the nation before. We have the best schools now. Why did we double the length of time? That is something that we could bring back in line to what it was before and not cost any money,” he said.

Policymakers said the state must also address teacher departures to stabilize the workforce. The Heldrich Center’s report found that while departures remained roughly level save for spikes during the pandemic, the share of teachers who left of their own accord — and not for budgetary reasons — has spiked over the 11-year period.

Gopal pointed to the increased politicization as schools, noting workforce trends had reversed somewhat after Republican attacks over school gender policy and library collections ebbed.

Gov. Chris Christie’s administration, which spurred school cuts amid the Great Recession and warred with teachers unions over health benefits and pensions, also slimmed the teaching candidate pool, Spiller said.

“From the vitriol that we heard before to the fundamental changes to the systems that we see financially now, that has led to less people engaging in the process to become a teacher, and certainly less people choosing to continue moving forward to become an actual teacher,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

Why that specific dollar amount? Harris was thinking along economic lines, and she sold the policy as one that would erase the teacher wage gap, as documented over the years by the Economic Policy Institute. As of the report, with data through 2022, the institute estimated that educators earn 26% less in weekly wages than other workers with similar academic credentials.

Never mind some of the with the institute’s calculations, like the fact that it uses weekly wages and teachers don’t work the same number of weeks as other employees. Is the economic argument for raising teacher salaries a good one?

It’s not as iron-clad as you might think.

Consider a recent policy change in Arkansas. In 2023, the state raised the minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000 and guaranteed raises of at least $2,000.

According to a from researchers at the University of Arkansas, the average teacher saw a salary increase of 6.5%. This cost the state $183 million, and much of the money flowed to poor, rural parts of the state that previously offered the lowest pay.

What happened to teacher behavior? The researchers found decidedly mixed results. They found that the additional money reduced the rate at which teachers left the profession overall — but those who got bigger raises became more likely to leave. There were also no clear patterns by experience level and no statistically significant changes in movement toward places with teacher shortages, despite the large financial investment in those areas.

The researchers offered several potential explanations for the negative results. It’s possible the law, which was passed in March, took effect too late in the academic calendar to influence teacher behavior in the subsequent school year, and that the money will have a bigger impact going forward. Or perhaps the salary increases just weren’t large enough.

But maybe the Arkansas results shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, when the National Center for Education Statistics teachers their most important reason for leaving, only 9% said they wanted or needed a higher salary. Pay trailed retirement, other life reasons (such as personal health or caring for a loved one) and the pursuit of other career options (many of which were other roles within education).

In other words, the economic argument around the teacher pay gap has some holes. It also assumes  that teachers could close the financial gap if they left the classroom and pursued another job, but that’s not the choice most educators actually face.

In fact, two looked into this question and concluded that most former teachers don’t earn as much as they did while they were in the classroom. Some do, especially the most highly rated educators and those working in STEM subjects, so there’s an economic argument for paying more money to the best teachers to get them to stay, and to help . But the majority of people who leave teaching end up doing worse, financially speaking.

On the flip side, people who enter teaching tend to see salary increases over whatever they were earning the year before — think of teaching assistants or substitutes moving into full-time positions, or the large number of people who return to the profession after some time away. For them, a full-time teaching job offers a big step up in pay.  

Salary is perhaps the easiest lever for policymakers to pull to influence teacher recruitment and retention decisions, but there are others. For example, educators are also looking for opportunities for professional advancement, autonomy, control over their work and the ability to balance their work and personal lives. A recent study out of Illinois found that teachers there continue to problems with working conditions, defined in terms of classroom disruptions, student responsibility and safety; improving such non-financial aspects of the job could be another way to make teaching more attractive.

Ironically, the political and focused on teacher wage gaps may also be contributing to a sense that teachers are paid less than they actually are. People tend to underestimate how much teachers actually earn, and that could discourage would-be educators from considering the profession in the first place. Simple, clear messages about the financial benefits of teaching may help recruit more people, as in the case of a recent experiment around tutors.

As a reminder, the most recent shows that the average public school teacher earned $66,397, and those in California, Massachusetts and New York routinely made $90,000 or more.

There might be moral or political reasons to support raising salaries for all teachers, but in strictly economic terms, the strongest arguments revolve around raising pay for highly effective teachers in STEM subjects, and as an incentive to fill particular shortage areas.

About 500 educators will be receiving up to $8,000 in bonuses this month, but some school leaders aren’t convinced it will be enough to solve Hawaii’s shortage of career technical education teachers. 

CTE teachers lead courses ranging from broadcast media to engineering in middle and high schools across the state. The classes, which emphasize hands-on learning and projects, provide students with skills and training they can use in their careers. 

While CTE isn’t new to Hawaii, it’s  in recent years, especially under the leadership of Department of Education Superintendent Keith Hayashi. But as schools expand their CTE offerings, the teacher workforce may be unable to keep up due to low pay and barriers to licensing.

The DOE said it doesn’t collect data on the CTE teacher shortage, but approximately 25 positions remain unfilled for the 2024-25 school year. , the Hawaii State Teachers Association said it received estimates from DOE that half of CTE classes in Hawaii schools are taught by teachers who don’t have a corresponding license in the subject area. 

Hawaii licenses educators to teach CTE classes in six areas: arts and communication, business, health services, industrial and engineering technology, public and human services and natural resources. 

The DOE is now providing one-time bonuses to CTE teachers that range from $2,500 to $8,000 based on individual qualifications. Lawmakers also passed a bill this year that would ease teacher licensing requirements and allow those with a high school diploma and relevant work and education experience to qualify for a CTE teacher license.

Kimberly Saula, vice principal at Farrington High School, said she’s hopeful these initiatives will grow Hawaii’s CTE teacher workforce. But, she added, many CTE teachers have years of experience in fields like healthcare or auto mechanics, and it’s challenging to convince these professionals to make the move to the classroom. 

“It’s difficult to make teaching high school students appealing,” Saula said. 

“The Shortage Is Huge”

Keala Swain worked in tourism and hotel management for 10 years before coming to Waimea High School on Kauai. Swain, who now teaches CTE classes in computer science and information technology, said he loves working with students and sharing the knowledge he gained from the technology courses he took in college.    

But, he said, leaving his career in the hotel industry required him to take a pay cut of roughly $20,000 in his first year as a teacher. 

Because CTE courses can require specialized knowledge in fields like architectural design or nursing, schools try to recruit industry professionals to teach their classes. But switching to teaching can result in a significant drop in workers’ salaries. 

“The shortage is huge,” Waimea High School Principal Mahina Anguay said, adding that she recently lost a CTE teacher to a job at the Navy base that could likely pay twice his teacher salary. 

The lengthy process for licensing may also deter those considering a CTE teaching job. 

The pathway to receiving a teacher license in CTE can vary depending on a person’s educational background and work experience, said Erin Yagi, who oversees Leeward Community College’s CTE licensure program. 

Individuals need to show relevant experience or coursework in the CTE licensing field they’re pursuing and take approximately three to four semesters of coursework preparing them for teaching, Yagi said. Many people seeking their CTE licenses are working adults who need to balance their coursework with other responsibilities, she added.

“It is challenging to be a full-time employee and go through a program,” Yagi said. 

LCC is one of three programs in Hawaii that can prepare teachers for CTE licensure. Last school year, the college recommended 10 students for licensure. 

Some Hawaii schools are feeling the direct consequences of the teacher shortage. 

Baldwin High School Principal Keoni Wilhelm said he hopes his Wailuku campus will become a wall-to-wall academy by 2025, meaning that all students will be on a college or career-focused pathway with classes and internships preparing them for jobs in culinary arts, business and more. 

But Wilhelm said it’s been difficult to recruit teachers as the school expands its CTE offerings. For example, he said, Baldwin previously had a healthcare pathway and took advantage of its close proximity to Maui Memorial Medical Center. But when the health diagnostic teacher left in 2021, the school had to dissolve the pathway and hasn’t been able to find a replacement since. 

“It’s not for a lack of trying to recruit,” Wilhelm said. 

Potential Reforms On The Way

When DOE announced it would issue bonuses for CTE teachers this spring, Swain was caught off-guard. He hadn’t expected the extra money, he said, although he appreciates the extra $4,000 he’s receiving this month. 

But he’s not sure if the bonuses of up to $8,000 will be enough to attract more people to teaching.

This isn’t the first time DOE has used monetary incentives to address the state’s ongoing teacher shortage. In 2020, the  for educators who taught special education or Hawaiian immersion classes or were in schools located in hard-to-staff areas. 

Special education teachers received the largest bonus of $10,000 each year. For the first two years after the bonuses began, the recruitment and retention of special education teachers improved.  

But Andrea Eshelman, deputy executive director and chief negotiator of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, is skeptical of DOE’s strategy to address the CTE teacher shortage. Currently, the bonuses are only one-time payments for individuals who taught CTE classes in the 2023-24 school year. 

In the , legislators appropriated $2.5 million to continue CTE bonuses in the 2024-25 school year, but Gov. Josh Green has yet to sign the bill.

Most teachers aren’t willing to change their jobs based on the uncertain possibility of receiving a salary boost in the future, Eshelman said. 

“Do we think it’s going to move people? Perhaps,” she said. “But for now, they were told it’s just a one-time thing.”

Legislators also passed a bill this session that could make it easier for industry workers to transition to teaching. 

Currently, prospective teachers need at least an associate’s degree to earn a CTE license. Under , those with a high school diploma and relevant education and experience in their respective industry could also be considered for a CTE license. 

Not all trades require a college degree, and the change in requirements could provide more opportunities for more industry workers to become teachers, said Felicia Villalobos, executive director of the Hawaii Teacher Standards Board. 

If the bill becomes law, she said, individuals would still need to take classes on the principles of education and teaching in order to receive a CTE license. HTSB would also need to define what level of industry experience and training could qualify an individual for licensure.  

Green has until July 10 to veto bills or sign them into law.

At Waimea High School, building and construction teacher Dante Casillas said it took him about 18 months of classes and teaching observations to receive his CTE license. Teaching CTE classes for the past two years has been rewarding, he said, adding that his students are leaving a legacy on the school by building risers and picnic tables that their classmates and the community can use. 

“Having that kind of impact and be able to say, ‘I did this,’ that’s a cool thing for everybody,” Casillas said. “The kids are just proud of their work.”

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

This was originally published on .

When the only preschool teacher left Harold Kaveolook School in Kaktovik, a village of around 250 people on the northern coast of Alaska, Chelsea Brower was in charge. It was January and she had been the preschool aide for about a year-and-a-half.

“Being with the kids and trying to be their teacher is what really made me realize I want to be their teacher — and it also made me realize I need to become certified to be their teacher,” she said.

The only problem was that universities that offered the requisite courses were hundreds of miles away, and she wanted to stay in her hometown with her students.

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Fortunately for Brower, the regional Arctic Slope Community Foundation has been working with other tribal groups, the state and federal Departments of Labor and the University of Alaska at Anchorage to develop an apprenticeship program that aims to grow the teacher pipeline in Alaska. The program was approved by the University of Alaska Board of Regents last week and solidified the first apprenticeship programs for teacher licensure in Alaska.

The tribal, state and university partnership unlocks millions of dollars in grant funding to educate and support the apprentices. It is all possible because the DOL made teaching an apprenticeable trade in 2022.

Now Brower can keep her job with the students in her community while she gets her education paid for. She is one of dozens of apprentices that will begin their coursework remotely with UAA this fall.

Brower is Inupiaq and said she hopes to build cultural values in the school.

“The students are seeing more people that look like them inside their school, and I’m hoping that it gets more people to want to become certified to be teachers for the different grade levels,” she said. “That would be good, because we have our language and we could incorporate it more into the school. And (the students) will learn more from the teachers from home than teachers from out of state.”

The news comes as the state grapples with an unprecedented .

Tonia Dousay, dean of the UAA School of Education, said apprenticeships have been common in other industries for a long time, but it was only in 2022 that the state began accepting registered apprenticeships as a pathway to teacher certification.

“Nationwide, we’re watching the registered apprenticeships for educators movement. This fall, we will welcome our first cohort of apprentice teachers from around the state,” she said. “This takes our degree and makes it the required training for a registered apprenticeship through the U.S. Department of Labor.”

The program targets paraprofessionals, people without teaching credentials who already work in the state’s schools, like Brower.

Paradigm shift

Leaders from regional, tribally-affiliated groups worked together to build the apprenticeship program in Alaska with an aim to create a local teacher pipeline in the communities they serve, which are largely remote districts that are the trickiest to staff. Bristol Bay Regional Career and Technical Education Program, Sealaska Heritage Institute and Arctic Slope Community Foundation are sponsor groups for apprentices in their respective regions.

Steve Noonkesser, who works with BBRCTE and is a former superintendent, said the groups worked with the U.S. Department of Labor in Anchorage to become apprenticeship sponsors. That opens up federal funding and grant opportunities to track their apprentices’ progress on different skills, called competencies in the apprenticeship world.

“When you do a federal apprenticeship, you learn skills, and you basically check off competencies as you work through it — whether you’re an electrician or a plumber or a welder or, in this case, a teacher,” Noonkesser said.

The state’s Board of Education and Early Development has also and passed a resolution supporting them, but no state regulations about how to become a teacher have changed.

Since state law dictates that one must have a bachelor’s degree to become a certified teacher, the groups partnered with UAA and School of Education dean Dousay to create a pathway to a bachelor’s degree for the apprentices.

The sponsors, like Noonkesser, work with DOL to keep track of the competencies and on the job learning hours; UAA keeps track of the degree progress and academic hours.

Noonkesser said that there are additional hurdles to getting the degree for people who live in remote parts of Alaska, including financial challenges, difficulty in access and the often low quality of internet that may prevent potential students from taking online courses on their own. For those reasons, he said the apprenticeship coursework is delivered differently and with a different context: culture and place-based connection to community.

“We’re really heavily emphasizing that, because that we think has a huge bearing on recruiting teachers and teacher retention. You know, staying in the community and keeping teachers longer, because the turnover rates in Alaska have become just astronomical,” he said, pointing to districts hiring ever increasing numbers of teachers from overseas because they “just can’t hire enough teachers from Alaska.”

“We think that this program will help not only retain teachers more, but it will connect the teachers that are in our schools much better with the kids they’re serving,” he said.

In his region, he said, 80-95% of the students are Alaska Native compared to only about 8-12% of the educators.

BBCTEP’s first cohort, he said, is predominantly Alaska Native paraeducators who are from the region. And he said he expects the learning will run both ways between them and their mentors. “Our apprentices, a lot of them are from the community. Many of them have as many as 10 or 15 or 20 years of experience in the schools — as a parent, professional, as a classroom aide — and are very much connected to community, place and culture. And a lot of our mentors are very good teachers, but they’re from somewhere else, and so we kind of are feeling like both have a lot to learn,” he said.

Kristy Ford, SHI’s education director who oversees the program in Southeast, said it opens up more opportunities because it allows apprentices to work through three tiers of certification, starting with a child care development specialist certificate, then moving to associate’s and bachelor’s degrees.

“It gives everybody an access point,” she said. “It’s a paradigm shift in my opinion. We’ve been doing the same thing with our universities over and over and over, and we’re getting the results that we have: It’s a rotating door in a lot of our schools. And so by having individuals who live in the community who are aunties, uncles, parents, guardians of the kids in those schools — I think is going to be a game changer.”

Ford said the program is the first of its kind in the state.

Community, place and culture

Patuk Glenn, executive director of ASCF, said she they are sponsoring apprentices because they want to see increased engagement and better scores from their students in the North Slope and Arctic regions.

“I think it can all be pointed back to our children, especially in rural Alaska, whose test scores are not making the mark,” she said. “If you look at the AK Star Report for 2023 there are 92% of our children in our Arctic Slope region that are not proficient in the state assessment. That is a serious issue, and over the years we’ve tried to address that in so many different ways.”

She said she wants to see scores go up so that kids have better chances later in life.

Ryan Cope, grant director for ASCF, said that is why the program was developed with the understanding that educators have a responsibility to make education speak to students. In the Arctic, he said that means giving teachers a strong pedagogical foundation, so they can incorporate their place-based and Indigenous knowledge.

“Quite frankly, it’s about meeting them halfway and having more teachers in the classroom understand who these kids are, where they come from, and what they do in the community. (Teachers) that really can kind of identify with them, and, in a lot of cases, having educators that look like them, speak like them, that know their language. These are very important things that I think that we have all wanted to see.”

Cope said the state’s teacher certification process has not yielded enough of those educators, which is why the apprenticeship program is necessary. ASCF has also added the Inuit Circumpolar Council standards to its curriculum. In the Bristol Bay and Southeast regions cultural values are also incorporated.

Cheryl Anderson, an administrator with ASCF, added that there’s another shift as well: Alaska Native educators were not always encouraged to return to their home communities to teach, she said.

“My parents, they wanted to go and teach back in their village on Kodiak Island, but they were discouraged to do so, saying they were told that they didn’t want anybody back from there to go back and teach in their community,” she said, adding that her parents ended up teaching in Anchorage instead.

“For the state of Alaska to now be really open and accepting to having people in their own communities 
 I’m happy to see that. I’m glad I could see it in my time, in my parents’ time.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

WASHINGTON — The only reason John Arthur is able to be a public school teacher is because his wife makes much more money than he does.

Arthur —  the 2021 Utah Teacher of the Year  — testified on Thursday at a hearing in the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on the challenges facing public school teachers.

Arthur, who is also a member of the National Education Association and holds National Board Certification, pointed to pay as the main reason for both teachers leaving the profession and parents not wanting their children to become teachers.

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“The No. 1 solution to addressing the issues we face must be increasing teachers’ salaries,” said Arthur, who teaches at Meadowlark Elementary School in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Gemayel Keyes, a teacher at Gilbert Spruance Elementary School in Philadelphia, told the committee that even as an educator, he still has an additional part-time job.

The special education teacher spent most of his career in education as a paraprofessional. At the time he moved into that role, the starting annual salary was $16,000 and the maximum was $30,000.

“It’s still pretty much the same,” he said.

Minimum teacher salary 

Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, in March 2023 that would set an of $60,000 for public elementary and secondary school teachers.

“We understand that the children, young people of this country, are our future and there is, in fact 
 nothing more important that we can do to provide a quality education to all of our young people, and yet, for decades, public school teachers have been overworked, underpaid, understaffed, and maybe most importantly, underappreciated,” Sanders said in his opening remarks.

“Compared to many other occupations, our public school teachers are more likely to experience high levels of anxiety, stress and burnout, which was only exacerbated by the pandemic,” he said.

Sanders said 44% of public school teachers are quitting their profession within five years, citing “the extremely low pay teachers receive” as one of the primary reasons for a massive U.S. teacher shortage.

For the 2023-24 school year, a whopping 86% of K-12 public schools in the country documented challenges in hiring teachers, according to an October report from the .

Maryland sets $60,000 minimum  

But a minimum annual teacher salary of $60,000 is not far off for every state.

In Maryland, the raises the starting salary for teachers to $60,000 a year by July 2026.

William E. Kirwan, vice chair of Maryland’s Accountability and Implementation Board, said the multi-year comprehensive plan, passed in 2021 in the Maryland General Assembly, “addresses all aspects of children’s education from birth to high school completion, including most especially, the recruitment, retention and compensation of high quality teachers.”

Kirwan said the “Blueprint’s principle for teacher compensation is that, as professionals, teachers should be compensated at the same level as other professionals requiring similar levels of education, such as architects and CPAs.”

An “allocation issue”  

Sen. Bill Cassidy, ranking member of the committee, dubbed Democrats’ solution of creating a federal minimum salary for teachers as a “laudable goal.”

But he noted that “the federal government dictating how states spend their money does not address the root cause of why teachers are struggling to teach in the classroom.”

“More mandates and funding cannot be the only answer we come up with. We must examine broken policies that got us here and find solutions to improve,” the Louisiana Republican said.

Nicole Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, a parents’ rights group, argued that “schools don’t have a resource issue” but rather an “allocation issue.”

“There’s a saying: ‘Don’t tell me where your priorities are, show me where you spend your money, and I’ll tell you what they are.’ Education leaders routinely choose to spend money on programs and personnel that don’t directly benefit students,” said Neily.

Neily pointed to a 2021 report from the , which found that “standardized test results show that achievement gaps are growing wider over time in districts with (chief diversity officers).” Such staff members commonly encourage efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion in schools.

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said “higher pay does not ease the burden we place on teachers or add hours to their day.”

“By all means, raise teacher pay, but do not assume that it will solve teacher shortages or keep good teachers in the classroom. Poor training, deteriorating classroom conditions, shoddy curriculum and spiraling demands have made an already challenging job nearly impossible to do well and sustainably,” he added.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. North Dakota Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Amy Dalrymple for questions: info@northdakotamonitor.com. Follow North Dakota Monitor on and .

The New Hampshire Senate passed a bill Wednesday that would allow school districts to hire part-time teachers – without the need for a State Board of Education credential.

would allow teachers working fewer than 30 hours a week who pass a criminal background check to be hired and teach without the credential. But the bill would prohibit teachers whose New Hampshire education credential has been revoked from teaching under the new category. And it would require them to adhere to the state code of conduct and code of ethics for teachers.

Supporters say the bill would address persistent teacher shortages in the state and allow for school administrators to find more innovative solutions.

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“This goes back to whether or not you trust your local school board to hire and retain people who work in that system and (are) able to provide a service to the school,” said Sen. Tim Lang, a Sanbornton Republican, speaking at a Senate Education Committee meeting earlier this month. “Who may not be a certified teacher but teaches a great business accounting class 
 or an art teacher, or a P.E. teacher – bringing in a football coach to teach P.E.”

Rep. Rick Ladd, a Haverhill Republican and chairman of the House Education Committee, said the bill could allow professors at community colleges to also teach high school classes without running into certification barriers. Invoking his experience as a former school principal, Ladd said the bill would add welcome flexibility for school superintendents.

“If this bill came forward to me, I would be very pleased, because I would be able to put people in in these teacher shortage areas,” he said.

But educators, teachers unions, and Democrats have spoken against the bill, arguing that a reduction in certification would lead to a decline in teaching quality and student achievement.

“If they’re not certified, they’re not real teachers,” said Rep. Corinne Cascadden, a Berlin Democrat and former school superintendent, testifying against the bill in the Senate Education Committee in April. “
You wouldn’t go to your dentist and expect someone who just wants to do your root canal. You want them to be trained.”

The National Education Association of New Hampshire, the state’s largest teachers union, offered Texas as a cautionary tale: After the state passed a law in 2015 allowing schools to become “innovation districts” and drop teacher licensing requirements, researchers say the state has seen a stark rise in unlicensed teachers. This year, more than half of Texas educators are not certified, according to research by Minda Lopez and James P. Van Overschelde of Texas State University.

And the New Hampshire NEA cited a 2015 report by the U.S. Department of Education that suggests that teachers without certifications are less likely to stay in the profession. A department survey of educators who began teaching in 2007 found that 85.4 percent of licensed teachers were still teaching in 2011, but only 69.8 percent of unlicensed teachers.

The bill comes as concern about teacher shortages has persisted. In November, a yearlong legislative study committee produced a pair of reports that noted dwindling enrollment in educator preparation programs in the state, and pointed to low pay – the average teacher salary is $40,478 – and burnout as two factors. The number of educator credential renewals has hit record highs in recent years, according to data from the Department of Education, but teachers unions say those numbers are inflated by the fact that many educators hold multiple certifications.

New Hampshire currently allows some teaching without a credential, with limits. The state administrative rules for schools allow an educator “with sufficient content knowledge as determined by the school principal” to teach in a program area without being certified. The rules state that the work must be less than 50 percent of the educator’s weekly work time.

The Senate’s bill is broader than the version passed by the House in March. The House’s version limited the part-time designation to teachers working up to 20 hours a week. And it required that part-time teachers have a bachelor’s degree or higher in a field related to the subject they are going to teach and at least five years of occupational experience.

The Senate amended the bill to remove those requirements. Senate Republicans argued that doing so would allow for artists, musicians, and other professionals to work as part-time teachers without needing degrees.

Sen. Suzanne Prentiss, a Lebanon Democrat, said she wasn’t opposed to specialty members of the community who have backgrounds in local arts and culture being brought into the school system. But Prentiss said the bill’s language allowing teachers to work up to 30 hours per week would mean part-time teachers could be doing nearly a whole job. That, Prentiss argued, should require certification.

“It seems to me that we have gone just too far,” Prentiss said on the floor. “It’s one thing to bring in a specialty educator from the community. It’s another thing to be creating almost what I see as a secondary system that could start to break apart the fundamental profession of teaching in the state of New Hampshire.”

The amended bill will go back to the House on May 30, which will vote to approve or reject the changes or send the bill to a “committee of conference” with the Senate to resolve differences.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

COLUMBIA — Education majors at South Carolina colleges can get additional scholarship aid starting this fall under a bill Gov. Henry McMaster signed into law Monday.

, which passed both the House and Senate unanimously, is meant to encourage more students to become teachers amid an ever-worsening teacher shortage, supporters said.

It extends to education majors the same boost in lottery-backed scholarships that state law has offered students majoring in math and science since 2007.

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Students receiving the money must agree to teach at a public school in the state for as many years as they received the scholarship, which can be a maximum of four years.

“I’m thrilled to death,” said Senate Education Chairman Greg Hembree, the bill’s main sponsor. “It was one of those no-brainer pieces of legislation to assist with trying to retain teachers.”

, public K-12 schools in the state had 1,315 open positions for teachers, librarians, counselors, psychologists and speech therapists, according to the mid-year update from the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention & Advancement.

The scholarships will be available this coming school year to college sophomores, juniors and seniors who went to high school in South Carolina and are already receiving , which are awarded to students who meet academic criteria. The money is meant to cover students’ remaining tuition after other scholarships are applied.

recipients can get up to $2,500 more on top of the $5,000 they already receive, and recipients can get up to $3,300 added to their $7,500. The money will come from lottery profits.

If the number of students studying education in the state remains consistent this coming year, students will receive an additional $8 million in scholarships, the state Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office .

That number should increase if the program accomplishes its goal in enticing more students toward the teaching profession, Hembree said.

Although offering scholarships won’t solve the teacher shortage, it might draw in a few more students on the fence about pursuing education by offering more money for doing so, said the Little River Republican.

“What I’m thinking about is the one (student) who’s on the border, thinking, ‘Maybe this, maybe that,’” Hembree said.

Along with encouraging high school students to pursue teaching, the program will likely keep teachers in the profession by reducing how much student loan debt they have to pay, said Patrick Kelly, a lobbyist for the Palmetto State Teachers Association.

“We think this is one of the best actions taken by the General Assembly this session to help with teacher recruitment,” said Kelly, who also teaches advanced government courses at Blythewood High School.

Lawmakers also the minimum teacher salary in the state from $42,500 to $47,000 in the coming year in part of the effort to reduce the teacher shortage. The budget process is not yet finished, but the House and Senate have agreed to the teacher salary numbers.

Other efforts

meant to address a shortage of teachers did not make it to the finish line this year.

One would have allowed teachers more time to back out of contracts. Another would have accounted for experience outside of the classroom in determining a teacher’s pay.

“Those would’ve really moved the needle,” Kelly said.

Advocates have been pushing for more flexibility in teacher contracts for years. Teachers must sign their contracts by mid-May, usually weeks before their local school board sets their pay. If a teacher breaks their contract after signing, they lose their certification for a year, beginning whenever the State Board of Education hears their case.

The bill proposed this year would have allowed teachers to bow out of their contracts within 10 days of seeing their salaries. Anyone who withdrew from their contract between then and six months would also face reduced penalties.

That could help teachers get back in the classroom more quickly if they need to leave the district for another reason, such as dealing with a family emergency or moving alongside a spouse, advocates have said.

The House passed the bill, but the Senate did not take it up.

Because teacher pay is decided based on how many years someone has been teaching, accounting for real-world experience in a field could draw in more teachers by making it more appealing for people to consider teaching when switching fields, Kelly said.

Both the House and Senate passed their own versions of that proposal but failed to create a committee to work out the differences before the end of session.

“I’m really disappointed to see that not make it to the finish line,” Kelly said.

Another of Hembree’s bills that would have allowed people with at least five years of experience in their field to teach without getting certified did not become law this year.

That bill faced significantly more opposition than other proposals, with Kelly and some lawmakers raising questions over whether people would have adequate training to handle classrooms full of students.

The proposal is not likely to bring in many people, but it could help fill some of the classrooms with all-virtual teachers or long-term substitutes, Hembree said. He plans to reintroduce it next year.

“It’s a game of inches,” Hembree said. “You just keep coming back and try again.”

Gov. Henry McMaster signed more than 50 bills into law this week. Others he signed:

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

LINCOLN — Nebraska student teachers could receive 100% tuition waivers beginning in 2025 through a legislative proposal under consideration this session.

, proposed by State Sen. Kathleen Kauth of Omaha, would support students at the University of Nebraska and Nebraska State College System seeking a degree related to teaching, during the semester or semesters they are student teaching.

“Encouraging and supporting prospective teachers will help us rebuild our teacher population,” Kauth told the Education Committee at a Feb. 13 hearing on the bill.

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Teacher shortage

The program is proposed to run for six school years, through 2030-31, and is to cost about $15 million in lost tuition revenue.

This would be offset by annual appropriations of up to $3 million, which Kristen Hassebrook, a lobbyist for NU, said would ensure the cost is not passed on to other students or programs.

Paul Turman, chancellor of the state college system of Peru, Chadron and Wayne State Colleges, said some school districts, such as Omaha Public Schools, provide stipends to student teachers, but the practice is not widespread and is less likely in rural districts.

“Any type of legislation that begins to address ways to help incentivize student teachers in their final year of experiences is very warranted,” Turman said.

Todd Tripple of Millard Public Schools, which is in Kauth’s district, said student teachers’ final year is “invaluable” yet includes overlooked financial burdens.

‘Teaching is enough’

Winona Mitchell, a low-income, first-generation college student studying secondary education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said she works three jobs, similar to other students, but she said this isn’t feasible with student teaching.

“The workload of student teaching adds another layer of stress requiring a pre-service teacher to be thoughtful of their savings to pay their bills,” Mitchell said, testifying on behalf of the Nebraska State Education Association.

Deb Rasmussen of Lincoln, a teacher for 40 years and current president of the Lincoln Education Association, said when she was a student teacher in 1982, schools didn’t worry about finding teaching candidates because everyone wanted to do it.

“As an educator, teaching is enough,” Rasmussen said. “You can’t function with three other jobs because you’re trying to pay tuition.”

‘Part of the solution’

Kauth said that the state will not always be in a “teacher drought” and that state resources must be used sparingly. If LB 953 is still needed in six years, she said, legislators can consider  extending it at that point.

“It’s my hope that this will give prospective teachers a bit of breathing room while they’re completing their education,” Kauth said. “We want to encourage them to stay in the teaching program with the hope that they would be offered jobs once their student teaching is complete.”

Colby Coash, of the Nebraska Association of School Boards, said the Education Committee is looking at more than a dozen bills on teacher shortages but that LB 953 stands out.

“This bill really bubbled up to one of the top that we thought would make a big impact for this issue,” Coash said. “Hopefully this one can be part of the solution, which we all know we need to find.”

No one testified in opposition. The committee took no immediate action.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on and .

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: . 

COLUMBIA — As South Carolina schools continue to grapple with teacher shortages, one legislator is calling for fellow lawmakers to spend more time inside schools.

, said he will introduce a bill next month that would require legislators to substitute teach or volunteer at K-12 schools at least five times a year to see first-hand the problems plaguing teachers and students.

Chief among those is an ongoing shortage of teachers. South Carolina schools started the school year with nearly 1,400 teaching vacancies plus more than 200 jobs unfilled for librarians, counselors, psychologists and speech therapists. That’s a 9% increase from the year before and an all-time high, according to the supply-and-demand report released Monday by the state Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention & Advancement.

“Things are continuing to get worse,” said Patrick Kelly, a lobbyist for the Palmetto State Teachers Association, a teachers’ advocacy group. “I mean, 1,600 vacant positions is an absolutely staggering number.”

Bringing 170 legislators into schools five times a year wouldn’t fill those vacancies. But it would at least show that lawmakers are paying attention, said Kelly, who also teaches U.S. history at Blythewood High School in Richland Two.

“This is not going to solve the teacher shortage. It won’t even solve the substitute teacher shortage in this state,” Kelly said. “But it certainly has symbolic value.”

The point isn’t to solve anything, Johnson said.

And he recognizes his proposal stands little chance. He will push to at least get a hearing.

He wants to spark conversation about what really happens in schools.

“We’ve seen lawmakers come out and say they support teachers, and they want us to do what’s best for teachers. They want to invest in students. They care about students,” said Johnson, who sits on the House Education Committee. “But none of them are actually in the school.”

Johnson decided to lead by example. The father of three started substituting in August in Richland County School District One, which includes schools in downtown Columbia. He noticed things he wouldn’t have otherwise, he said, and he wants other lawmakers to have the same experience.

For example, Johnson said he realized teachers of children with disabilities have more responsibilities but receive the same pay as their colleagues who aren’t in special education classrooms.

In South Carolina, teachers are paid according to their years of experience in the classroom and their degree. The state sets the floor for every step. Most districts pay more by supplementing state aid with local property taxes. This year, the for first-year teachers with a bachelor’s degree is $42,500 — a $10,500 increase since 2018.

Johnson proposes increasing the minimum starting salary for special education teachers to $52,000.

Putting lawmakers in schools to see the normal routines could go a long way in helping them understand the challenges teachers face, said Sherry East, president of the South Carolina Education Association.

“There is power in seeing what happens in a day-to-day school day,” said East, who is also a Rock Hill science teacher.

As far as actually filling the growing number of vacancies, pay is a major issue, East and Kelly said.

The state Department of Education is asking for $136 million in next year’s budget to raise teacher salaries by $1,500, bringing the first-year minimum to $44,000, according to state budget documents.

Last year, legislators gave school districts enough money to though how much of a raise teachers saw depended on the district. Gov. Henry McMaster has called for all teachers to be making at least $50,000 by 2026.

On top of the $2,500 boost in the salary steps, the education department is requesting $15 million to give signing bonuses to teachers in elementary, middle and special education classrooms, as well as teachers working at high-poverty schools.

Plus, the department is looking for $5 million to try out a program that would pay teachers in struggling schools and hard-to-fill subjects more when their students do better. The money would hinge on data showing student progress while learning from that teacher. this year, but that request wasn’t funded.

The budget documents did not include specifics on how much more teachers could earn or how they’d qualify, and an agency spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“While no educator answers the calling to become an educator solely for financial gain, we must better align our compensation opportunities to attract, retain and recognize those who succeed in the hardest roles,” the budget request reads.

But pay is only part of the problem, Kelly and East said.

Teachers told a state task force last year they had too many duties, not enough time to accomplish them, a lack of respect and students acting out.

While legislation can’t fix all those issues, there are steps lawmakers could take to help, Kelly and East said.

For example, Kelly pointed to the task force’s recommendation that the Legislature fund a career ladder that would allow teachers to advance in their careers without needing to become administrators. And East suggested establishing alternative schools to help support students in elementary grades who lash out at their teachers.

Still, getting legislators in schools is a good start, both teachers said.

“Any policy that increases the number of caring, dedicated adults in schools is a positive in my book,” Kelly said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

Five years ago, California embarked on an ambitious plan to bring computer science to all K-12 students, bolstering the state economy and opening doors to promising careers — especially for low-income students and students of color.

But a lack of qualified teachers has stalled these efforts, and left California — a global hub for the technological industry — ranked  of states nationally in the percentage of high schools offering computer science classes. 

“I truly believe that California’s future is dependent on preparing students for the tech-driven global economy. You see where the world is going, and it’s urgent that we make this happen,” said Allison Scott, chief executive officer of the Kapor Foundation, an Oakland-based organization that advocates for equity in the technology sector.

Scott was among those at a  in Oakland this week aimed at expanding computer science education nationally. While some states — such as Arkansas, Maryland and South Carolina — are well on their way to offering computer science to all students, California lags far behind. According to a , only 40% of California high schools offer computer science classes, well below the national average of 53%. 

California’s low-income students, rural students and students of color were significantly less likely to have access to computer science classes, putting them at a disadvantage in the job market,  by the Kapor Center and Computer Science for California.

Slow signs of progress 

The state has made some progress in the past few years, since adopting its sweeping  and  in 2018. More students are taking and passing the Advanced Placement computer science exams, and schools are gradually adding computer science curriculum either as a stand-alone class or integrated into math, science or other courses. The University of California now accepts computer science as satisfying a third or fourth year of math or science, instead of just as an elective. And some districts, such as Oakland Unified and San Francisco Unified, have greatly expanded their computer science offerings, thanks in part to a grant from the Salesforce Foundation.

To help solve the computer science teacher shortage, Gov. Gavin Newsom this month signed , which creates a commission that will look at ways to streamline the process to become a computer science teacher. The current process is so arduous, some say, it’s keeping high-quality teachers from the classroom, especially in rural and low-income areas.

Currently, there are three ways to teach computer science in California. One is to earn a career and technical education credential, which requires work experience but no post-graduate coursework. Another is to hold a math, business or industrial technology credential. The third is to obtain a credential in any subject and then add an extra 20 units of computer science. Because of confusion over requirements, funding and curriculum, schools have a hard time finding the right teachers to teach specific classes.

“The goal is to ensure we have well-prepared computer science teachers for all students, so they can engage in the world around them. We’re making progress, but we have a ways to go,” said Julie Flapan, director of the Computer Science Equity Project at UCLA. The new law should help eliminate that confusion, possibly leading to the creation of a computer science credential.

Due in part to the lack of teachers,  all California high schools to offer computer science stalled in the Senate this year. It’s also a reason California is among the states that doesn’t require computer science to graduate, although State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said Wednesday that he might propose such legislation next year.

A lack of teachers isn’t the only roadblock to expanding computer science. School administrators and counselors also must prioritize the subject, Flapan said, making sure it’s offered and that students in underrepresented groups understand the benefits and have access to classes.

Computer science has evolved to include more than basic coding. A good class now includes lessons on artificial intelligence, media literacy, data science, ethics and biased algorithms, so “students know how to think critically to solve problems using technology,” Flapan said.

Easier paths to teach computer science

Becoming a computer science teacher can be a long and expensive process, but San Francisco State University has found a way to make the pathway more enticing. Using grant money from the National Science Foundation, the university is offering online courses for teachers who want to gain the extra 20 units in computer science, enabling them to teach at the high school level.

Since it launched the program in 2018, San Francisco State has trained more than 150 computer science teachers and is helping other universities start similar programs. Every year it’s flooded with applications from throughout California, said Hao Yue, assistant chair of the computer science department at San Francisco State and a leader of the computer science education program.

Some of the participants are current teachers who want to broaden their qualifications, in some cases for a bump in pay, while others are referred by their districts. The university is trying to broaden the pool further by luring undergraduates.

“When you’re majoring in computer science, all you hear about is becoming a software engineer. They don’t know that teaching is an option. But some of them love working with kids, love teaching, and we’re able to help them become teachers,” Yue said.

Two years ago, Newsom  to help teachers of other subjects obtain their 20 extra units of computer science. The state Department of Education has also made  to train teachers, counselors and administrators in computer science.

UC Berkeley also runs a free program to help teachers qualify to teach computer science. Funded in part through a grant from Google, the program gives teachers the credits they need to teach computer science, as well as guidance on how to make computer science more accessible to students of color, students with disabilities and low-income students.

Shana V. White, director of computer science equity at the Kapor Center, said making computer science available to students who are underrepresented in the technology field must be a priority as California rolls out its program.

“We know that if you focus on the most marginalized, the most vulnerable students, everyone benefits,” White said. “That’s true everywhere, but especially in tech.” 

Ever since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957, America has been struggling to recruit and retain STEM teachers in its public middle and high schools.

In the 2017-2018 school year, . At the middle school level, there were about .

The situation has been getting or so. For instance, in the 2011-2012 school year, 19% of public schools were unable to fill a teaching position for biology or life sciences. By the 2020-2021 school year, that number had grown to 31%. The situation was similar for other subjects, going from 19% to 32% for mathematics, and 26% to 47% for physical sciences, such as physics, geology and engineering.

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Science shortages were a problem even before Sputnik, but the launch served as a wake-up call. Three months afterward, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stated during his that federal action was necessary to educate more science and mathematics teachers.

As a – and also as a – I have examined the STEM teacher shortage from multiple vantage points. In a September 2023 policy paper, a colleague and I recommend that in order to solve America’s STEM educator shortage, elected officials and education leaders should .

We think endowed chairs have the potential to retain and attract more STEM educators at the K-12 level, but it requires a willingness to rethink the ways that schools employ STEM educators.

What’s behind the gap?

Two factors contribute to so many unfilled vacancies in STEM education:

1. There are fewer college students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in education that ever before.

Between 1959-1976, bachelor’s degrees in education were the in the United States, and they accounted for about 20% of all degrees. Between 1975-2021, the percentage of students majoring in education .

2. STEM graduates can earn more money outside of education.

When STEM majors go into a STEM career, . When STEM graduates become a math, computer science or science teacher, they will earn, on average, .

This salary gap between STEM professionals and STEM educators is what is known as the STEM teacher “.”

According to a national survey of teacher salaries in 2017-18, , regardless of years of experience.

But this only tells a portion of the STEM teacher salary story. In 2021, – about $660 less than the $2,009 earned weekly by other college graduates.

Prior efforts to close the gap

Since developing a strong STEM workforce is vital to the nation’s security and economic well-being, several U.S. presidents have used their position to advance a STEM education agenda.

For example, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, Eisenhower
and Congress that the nation needed to focus on what takes place in the classroom space – not just outer space.

The Senate and House passed the , and Eisenhower signed it into law on Sept. 2, 1958.

This set in motion a for American colleges and K-12 schools for decades to come.

Fifty-three years later, President Barack Obama utilized his to advance the national STEM agenda. “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he said. “And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.”

Through the leadership of 100Kin10, now named , the initiative .

But the was to narrow the gap, not end it.

A shortage of STEM teachers remains. According to a survey of 53 states and territories, 39 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands had , STEM disciplines included, as of Feb 9, 2023. One additional reason for the current shortage is that public schools – 233,000 instructors – between 2019-2021, which included STEM teachers.

Currently, President Joe Biden is , the Department of Education has dedicated , and the National Science Foundation is .

The endowed chair as a potential solution

Federal investments in programs and fellowships to produce more STEM teachers are good. But those alone will not be enough to retain and attract the quality STEM educators we need.

That’s why a colleague and I for K-12 educators.

Traditionally, an endowed chair is a funded through annual spending from a university’s endowment fund.

The interest earned on the endowment will partially or fully fund the salary of the position for as long as the university exists. Endowed chairs are .

The benefit of an endowed chair is that it will be paid for decades to come by the interest on investment. In our paper, we suggest that K-12 schools could use endowed chairs to support a K-12 STEM teacher’s salary, benefits and professional development, all the while saving money for the district and state.

If structured right, the interest on the endowment will pay a teacher’s salary and benefits, something the district would subsequently not have to pay. The endowment can be used to purchase STEM supplies. The money saved by the district can be used to invest in another teacher. The money could come from private individuals, corporations or foundations.

An endowed chair could also provide funding for teachers and students to have access to state-of-the-art learning technology. As part of the endowed chair contract, a teacher can participate in a fully paid externship at a STEM-focused public or private sector company during the summer months. The goal would be to bring to the classroom the experiences and insights the teacher learned from the externship.

An endowed STEM chair salary may never outpace what educators could earn if they entered the private market. But it can potentially help elevate their position and, perhaps, enable educators to make a salary that would be higher than what it would otherwise be.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Virginia schools will be able to hire more support staff positions, something educators say is desperately needed amid a continued teacher shortage.

State lawmakers last month approved an amended budget that will direct  toward these school support positions. The appropriations help boost the ratio of allotted support staff per teacher. The funding ratio increased from 21 support positions per 1,000 pupils to 24 per 1,000 pupils — though the older standard was 26 support positions, according to a July  by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.

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This funding has been capped for over a decade, following a  in the Great Recession-era budget that was never adjusted. The cap reduction resulted in a $331 million reduction in state education funding last year, according to JLARC.

Some positions limited by the cap include administrative, clerical and operations staff, as well as technology and instructional professionals, according to the  Many education groups say the cap has resulted in the loss of thousands of support staff, even as enrollment grew.

The state’s  provide the foundation for public education, including minimum staffing needs. The standards typically undercalculate how much staff is actually needed, according to JLARC. Elimination of the support cap was a near-term recommendation in the report.

Virginia school divisions receive less K-12 funding per student than the national average, according to JLARC. Other states receive just under $2,000 more per student.

Chad Stewart, the Virginia Education Association’s policy analyst, said the support staff cap was supposed to be temporary.

“An entire generation of kids have gone through their K-12 experience in the state of Virginia with far less support staff for helping their schools function and making sure that teachers weren’t overwhelmed with all these additional duties, and could focus on teaching,” Stewart said.

When there is an inadequate amount of support staff in schools, teachers or other support staff have to fill multiple positions, according to Stewart.

“It takes them [teachers] away from the duties they’re trained to do, which is supporting students in different ways,” Stewart said.

Guidance counselors in particular have fulfilled multiple support positions, such as monitoring cafeterias or doing clerical work in the office, according to Stewart. A  took effect July 1 to ensure counselors spend at least 80% of their time doing direct counseling of students.

Teacher Karl Knoche has worked at Virginia Beach City Public Schools since 2007. He has taught government and economics at First Colonial High School since 2014.

“All the support staff at my school does a great job of helping teachers and students, and I feel that I can go to them with any problems,” Knoche stated in an email.

Knoche has extra duties such as monitoring students between classes, during lunch and before school, which can be “time consuming,” he stated.

Teachers seem to have more responsibilities outside of the classroom than when he first started teaching, according to Knoche.

“We have been fortunate at my school to be fairly well staffed,” Knoche stated. “We have had issues with having enough custodians, but that isn’t due to the lack of jobs, but the lack of interest in the jobs.”

Virginia leaders have grappled with teaching vacancies in recent years. The General Assembly committed to increasing compensation with 5% pay increases over three consecutive fiscal years starting in 2022, according to .

However, the pay increases may not address low or no compensation in previous years, coupled with inflation the past two years, the report stated. Additionally, not every school division could fund the full 5% increases because their locality does not provide enough matching funds “for employees not recognized through the SOQ formula.”

Virginia ranks No. 22 for teacher pay, which is an average salary of about $61,000, according to the .

The state had over 3,500 unfilled teaching positions in the 2022-23 school year. Elementary school teachers accounted for the most vacancies, followed by special education, according to  from the Virginia Department of Education. Special education positions had the highest percentage of unfilled positions, at 5.8%, followed by world language and then elementary school teachers.

The VDOE announced a  in 2022 to improve teacher recruitment and retention. The goals are to make it easier for qualified teachers to be hired, consider more candidates eligible to fulfill open positions and reinforce strategies that maintain a thriving workplace, such as programs focused on teacher retention.

The use of appropriated funds will vary by district, but the intent is that local school divisions will use funds for support staff positions, according to a VDOE email response.

The governor and lawmakers have removed close to “three-quarters of the support positions cap” in the past two sessions, the VDOE stated.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill into law Thursday allowing retired teachers to return to classrooms for up to two years without giving up their pensions in a bid to address the state’s shortage of educators.

will allow districts to hire teachers and other staff during the 2023-2024 school year as long as they have been retired for at least 180 days. Districts can hire retired educators for a single year and extend their contracts for one more year.

Retired teachers would receive their pension allowance and a salary during the duration of their contract. Murphy signed a similar law last year.

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New Jersey’s shortage of teachers is long-standing and has historically been most severe in special education, science, and instruction for non-native English speakers.

“You’ve always seen a need to try and secure more people into those spaces, and of course that was compounded with COVID,” said Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), the bill’s prime sponsor. “A lot of retirees who perhaps would have stayed in districts longer, for personal reasons, went off.”

The state reported shortages of bilingual education, ESL, world language, math, and science teachers in all grade levels and preschool to the U.S. Department of Education for the 2023-2024 school year.

The despite a recent law requiring the state Department of Education to issue annual reports on teacher staffing. The deadline for the department to release this year’s report passed months ago.

After Murphy signed the law last year allowing retired teachers to return to school, delays in forwarding program rules to districts prevented some from hiring retirees in time for the 2022-2023 school year.

Lawmakers are weighing other methods to tackle the shortages, including one that could end, or at least suspend, .

“This is only one answer. We should be truly focused on eliminating the residency requirement. If not forever, at least on a temporary basis,” Ruiz said. “We are missing the opportunity of hiring human power that will help districts that are in shortages that they now cannot even entertain.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

Gov. Tim Walz on Wednesday asked a group of Savage 4th graders attending summer school a question:

“How many of you think you’d like to be teachers someday?”

No one raised their hands.

“Awe, c’mon — it’s so fun!” Walz said. A few students tentatively put their hands in the air.

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The unenthusiastic response was emblematic of why Walz was there to briefly teach the students about science and the food chain — to highlight Minnesota’s teacher shortage and difficulty recruiting new workers for the profession.

Walz is entering a pivotal period for his education legacy. The former Mankato West High School geography teacher and assistant football coach seemed well positioned to elevate Minnesota’s K-12 education system, which has struggled to close wide opportunity gaps even as the student population has become increasingly diverse.

Instead, he spent the bulk of his first term dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and the public safety crisis that accompanied it, both of which may have contributed to flagging student achievement.

Less than half of in math, and about half of students are proficient in reading following years when many students spent little time in their classrooms. And the racial opportunity gaps remain among the nation’s worst. Last year, nearly 60% of white students were proficient in reading, while about 30% of Black and Hispanic students were proficient.

Now, many school districts are dealing with a new crisis: A shortage of teachers and staff. Walz’s office said there are about 225,000 education jobs in Minnesota, of which over 13,000 — roughly 6% — are vacant. Nine out of 10 Minnesota school districts said they have been significantly impacted by the teacher shortage, according to a

The Minnesota Legislature during the session boosted K-12 education funding by nearly $2.3 billion — a 10% increase from the previous biennium.

Lawmakers committed more than $88 million on a particularly pressing need: programs to increase the number of teachers of color in Minnesota.

About 6% of Minnesota teachers are people of color, according by the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board, even though about 38% percent of students are Black, Indigenous, Latino and Asian American.

Walz on Wednesday said Minnesota hasn’t done enough to attract teachers of color.

“I think we need to make it the case that this is a profession where you’re welcome,” Walz said at a media briefing after the class with the 4th graders. “And I think we need to make the case that this is a profession where you can sustain your family and it’s a place where we need you to make a difference.”

Research shows that increasing the number of teachers of color can

During the 4th grade class, the students asked Walz a few questions: How was your day? Do you have any pets? And, do you get a lot of paperwork?

At the end of the lesson, Walz gave all the students a challenge coin engraved with a picture of Minnesota, telling the students they’re often given to members of the military or navy when someone does a good job.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on and .

Missouri’s school districts are struggling not just with a teacher shortage but a scarcity of bus drivers, custodians and other essential personnel.

In the 2022-2023 school year, teachers with inadequate teaching certification taught over 8% of Missouri public school classes, .

The crisis has led larger school districts to consider adopting four-day school weeks to address teacher retention and recruitment problems.

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Sen. Rusty Black, R-Chillicothe, has been working on one way to address the problem for four years. And last week, the governor signed a bill into law, set to take effect Aug. 28, that will allow retired public-school staff to work full-time for a district for up to four years without losing retirement benefits.

“It’s not like on Aug. 29 everything’s gonna be fine
 but it is going to have an impact to help schools continue to get along somehow until there’s a better solution or they can find people to come back to schools and work again,” Black told The Independent.

Prior to Black’s legislation, teachers and non-certificated staff could work full-time for only two years post-retirement without losing benefits.

The bill includes a provision to help prevent too many staff  from taking early retirement, limiting school districts to 30 retired teachers working full time.

Black said the four-year timeframe seemed like the best fit because it allows a student to attend college and earn a teaching credential in that time. Some school districts sponsor college tuition for some students in a “grow your own teacher” program, where students commit to teaching in the district post-graduation.

Black’s legislation also addresses non-certificated positions, like bus drivers and janitors. Retired school employees can work in positions that don’t require a teaching certificate for more hours. Previously, they were capped at earning 60% of the minimum teacher’s salary, which would amount to $15,000 for those without a master’s degree.

They will now be allowed to earn 133% of the Social Security earning’s limit for those not at full retirement age, or about $28,250, until June 30 of 2028. On that date, the limit will decrease to 100% of the earning’s exemption, which is currently $21,240.

Black figured it would be easier for districts to call retired teachers — who are not intimidated by the school environment — back into the classroom part-time than find an entirely new workforce.

“Schools that are having a heck of a time finding somebody to come in and fill some hard-to-fill jobs, it’s a little bit easier to get (retired educators) to come in the door and be successful because they’ve already lived it,” he said.

Springfield Public Schools, Missouri’s largest school district, met with Black early in the legislative session, the district’s legislative consultant Jason Zamkus said at the latest board meeting.

Zamkus said Black’s original bill — which capped earnings at $21,240, rather than the $28,250 that lawmakers landed on — wouldn’t have given enough of a boost for retired teachers’ earning potential.

“I set a meeting with Sen. Black and worked with (the Public School Retirement System) to try to up that in a way that was both fiscally responsible so that it wouldn’t upset the balance of the retirement system statewide but it would also have the desired result of actually drawing people back into the work of public education,” Zamkus told Springfield’s school board.

Black said the five-year sunset should give actuaries with the Public School Retirement System time to calculate the best number.

Black said retired educators who served in roles such as bus drivers introduced him to this issue when he was a representative. They told him they would lose their retirement benefits if they drove for the entire school year.

“With the old system, they could drive the school bus up until sometime in April and then they had to quit driving,” Black said.”If they didn’t, they would end up losing their retirement; they would get penalized.”

Black is a retired agriculture educator and often took on non-certificated roles, like driving the bus or coaching football.

He has filed this legislation repeatedly during his time serving in the Missouri House, even striking deals in 2021 and 2022 that didn’t pan out.

Zamkus said this legislative session was “probably one of the best legislative sessions for public education,” largely because of the number of bills he deemed harmful that didn’t pass.

with a myriad of bills that were combined in committee. GOP infighting in the Senate took floor time from his legislation, killing it as the session ended.

Lewis supports Black’s legislation but foresees more work addressing the teacher shortage.

“Teacher recruitment and retention is still one of the biggest areas that we need to work on,” he told The Independent.

Black said he doesn’t think his legislation will “fix all the problems” but he hopes it makes a difference.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .