The Teacher Shortage
Spending on public education, adjusted for inflation, has increased over the last several decades. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, we spent, as a country, $15,810 per student in 2019. Compare this to about $6,000 per person in 1970. Still, we face a dramatic teaching shortage. I see this first hand in Virginia, where 4.8 percent of teaching positions were vacant at the start of the school year. (The figure hovered around <1 percent in years prior to the pandemic.)
One reason for the shortage is that interest in teaching has plummeted. In 2019, colleges and universities awarded about 90,000 degrees in education. This is a big drop off from the 200,000 that were given out in the early 1970s. We need to attract more young Americans to the profession, and that means we ought to make the job of a teacher as prestigious as a lawyer or doctor.
It’s a great goal, but it is a goal that requires higher salaries. When we look at inflation adjusted numbers, we see that the average public school teacher made $49,386 in 1960, while the average public school teacher America made $66,397 in 2022. Before diving into the issue, my initial instinct was that we should reward the highest performing teachers with much higher salaries. In the business world, we reward hard work and excellence, so why not in the classroom? Why not pay more money to those who perform the best?
I loved this idea. But then I spoke with my brother in law, a kindergarten teacher, and my sister, a second grade teacher.
They raised the important question: how on earth do we measure excellence in the teaching profession? Should we pay teachers based on how well their students learn? In theory, it sounds good to base teacher evaluation on student learning. But the only way to assess this is through tests in the beginning of the year and tests at the end of the year. But with high stakes testing, teachers may be more tempted to teach to the test and spend less time helping students on critical thinking and other important subjects like history, art, and music. Also, teachers may be unfairly penalized for factors beyond their control. What happens if their students don’t sleep well on the day of the test? What happens if they are sick?
Meanwhile, holistic evaluations of teachers come with their own set of challenges. Take the idea of student feedback. For elementary and middle school teachers, it isn’t practical to expect that children can evaluate their teachers. As for high school teachers, it’s likely that those who give better grades may receive more favorable evaluations. Likewise, teacher evaluations based on parent feedback can be influenced by personal biases and emotions. Principal observations come with their own problems, as principals and vice principals do not have the time to observe every aspect of a teacher's performance. Infrequent observations make it very hard to assess a teacher's performance comprehensively.
If we don’t have a great way of distinguishing the best teachers from the average teachers or the average to the less than average, it will be hard to pay big bucks to the very best without lowering morale. Morale matters because, as my brother-in-law pointed out, devising a system structured around financial incentives can create a toxic school environment and a competitive atmosphere among teachers.
To deal with the teaching shortage, we need to encourage young Americans to enter the profession. Raising salaries would help, but, since it’s hard to evaluate the best teacher and pay those teachers the most money, it will be very costly to pay all teachers much more. Still, I think we should do this. Teachers have very hard jobs and they deserve to earn more. But there is another way to deal with the shortage and make the teaching profession more appealing: teaching apprenticeship programs.
Historically, the main avenue to become a teacher has involved spending tens of thousands of dollars to attend a four year college and then even more money to get a teaching degree. We should turn the status quo upside down and devise a system where students (even high school students) can start working as apprentices in the classroom. Apprenticeships are common in fields like welding and plumbing and carpentry. But until recently, the federal government didn't recognize teaching apprenticeships. Thankfully, the Biden administration changed that.
Tennessee was the first state to get the stamp of approval from the Department of Labor. Now, a total of 16 states have registered apprenticeship programs. I’m particularly excited about my home state of Virginia, which awarded $143,000 in grants to nine universities to develop teacher apprentice residency programs in partnership with nearby school divisions. In an era of teacher shortage, apprenticeship programs will put many more people in schools as aides and as substitute teachers. It’s a win-win.
I dream of a world in which my niece and nephew will have the opportunity to work in classrooms starting in their late teens. While they won’t earn much money (let’s say $10/hour), over the course of a few years, Julia and Alex, by working in actual classrooms, will develop skills and understanding in how to teach elementary schoolers or, if they want, middle and high schoolers. This approach to training teachers is a better financial deal. While $10/hour isn’t a lot of money for an eighteen-year-old, it’s better than having to spend tens of thousands of dollars taking classes. I’m not suggesting that students in a vocational program won’t take any classes or saying that education degrees don’t matter. Apprentices take classes, but they won’t have to take as many.
In order to become a teacher, my sister needed a college degree and then a teaching degree. So she spent four years at a small college in Iowa and more time at Teachers College in New York City. But if we embrace the vocational model for elementary school teachers, my sister’s children will have more opportunities to become teachers without having to go into debt. This will make teaching a much more appealing profession.