Grow Your Own: Creating New Pathways for Teachers and Leaders

Background

The teacher shortage is a growing problem impacting communities, school districts, and teacher preparation programs. An initial report in 2016 (Sutcher et al., 2016) predicted that the supply of teachers would be in a general decline through 2025, while the projected demand of teachers would steadily increase throughout that same time period. This would result in a shortage of teachers that would quadruple in five years (2012-2013 to 2017-18), causing over 110,000 teacher vacancies nationally (Sutcher et al., 2016). The Economic Policy Institute investigated this teacher shortage trend and produced three reports on the teacher labor market. The first report (Garcia & Weiss, 2019a) revealed that the teacher shortage was actually worse than was originally predicted in 2016. This shortage would not only create a detrimental impact on public schools, but also impact current teachers in the system, families with children attending those schools and the economy of the school community. This impact, while felt in all public education schools, will be more pronounced in high-poverty schools. Garcia and Weiss (2019a) posited that with the demand for highly-qualified teachers increasing, teachers can often have their pick of schools, and are recruited by high-income school districts that can offer better benefits and working conditions. School districts offer incentives and signing bonuses to recruit highly-qualified teachers to their district. Schools in low-income areas simply cannot compete for those potential teachers that are lured by higher salaries, more professional development opportunities, district and school-level support, and lower class sizes.

Schools face challenges not only with fewer teachers, but also retaining the teachers they currently employ. In the second report of the series, The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market,Garcia and Weiss (2019b) described the exodus from teaching that many districts are facing, with 13.8% of teachers either leaving their current school position, or leaving the teaching profession. Garcia and Weiss (2019b) also report that lack of training and early career support contribute to higher attrition rates in teachers. Ingersoll (2001, 2003) wrote that as many as 45% of beginning teachers leave their teaching jobs within the first five years of being hired. In Tennessee, nine out of ten teachers continued teaching in Tennessee, but eight of ten were retained in the same school as the previous year (Collins & Schaff, 2020).

Collins and Schaff (2020) also reported that teachers of color were retained in the classrooms at lower rates than white teachers, and they tend to teach in places with higher teacher turnover, further impacting students in poverty and in low performing schools. In Tennessee, 13% of teachers identified as teachers of color, while teaching in school districts that often have more than 50% of their students identify as people of color. Additionally, 23% of all students in Tennessee schools have no teachers of color. This data is similar to national data from 2017-2018 provided by the U.S. Department of Education that reported that public schools had 18.5% teachers of color, with 47.2% students of color (U.S. Department of Education, 2020). In teacher preparation programs, 80% of education majors are white, compared to more than 50% of PK-12 students are students of color (American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, 2018).

Adding to this bleak situation, there are fewer college students choosing to pursue teaching as a career. Garcia and Weiss (2019b) reported that in a seven-year period (2008-2009 to 2015-2016) there was a 15.4% drop in the number of education degrees earned nationally, while there was a staggering 27.4% drop in the number of students who completed a teacher preparation program that led to certification. The beginning declines in the number of students seeking an education degree has actually been traced back to the last twenty years (American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, 2018).