CLASSROOM CRISIS — As kids across the country gear up to head back to school in the coming weeks, they’re about to confront one big problem: There aren’t enough teachers. Nowhere close to enough. Schools are facing a shortage of 300,000 teachers and staff across the U.S., according to the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. State and local leaders are scrambling to find creative ways to address the problem . In Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has said teaching requirements are “too rigid,” the state is issuing temporary teaching certificates to veterans. Arizona is no longer requiring bachelor’s degrees for teachers. In one South Carolina county, new teachers are being offered $10,000 signing bonuses. In rural Texas, some districts will only send kids to school for four days a week. To get a grasp on how serious and widespread this problem really is, Nightly talked with Christopher Morphew , dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. This conversation has been edited. What’s driving the shortage? First and foremost, it’s a pipeline issue, and this is part of the reason that there’s not going to be a solution that we can come up with overnight. We’ve seen teacher ed enrollments dip nationally over the last 10 years, a 35 percent decline . There are a couple of states that have grown their teacher ed population, but around 45-plus have seen teacher enrollment drops, with some states seeing upward of 70 percent drops. It’s been a long time coming. Then the question is, of course, why aren’t people enrolling in teacher ed programs? I think that’s a recognition on the part of students who might otherwise be interested in teacher ed, that salaries aren’t great, that working conditions aren’t great, that there are some real barriers to entry in staying in the profession. Schools themselves have become battlegrounds in some ways for politics. The profession has become more challenging, and as a result, less desirable to potential candidates. How did the pandemic add to this problem? Oh, it didn’t help. When you take an impossible job and make it even harder, I don’t think it’s a surprise that some people think to themselves, “Maybe I would rather be doing something else.” Like any professional field, there were people teaching who had other interests and other skill sets and dreams. I think the pandemic forced their hands — gave them a chance to think about the opportunity, to think about pursuing those dreams. I think teachers across the country are sort of reassessing — in an era where they were asked to do even more — whether this was a job for them, or if they would rather be doing something different. So if they were near retirement, or if they were lucky enough to be part of a two-income household or if they had other skill sets, I think the pandemic was a catalyst for them exploring other opportunities as a result. How bad is this? It depends on where you are, but, I think, really bad. Someone just forwarded me a press release from Baltimore city here in Maryland, providing some background — telling stakeholders and parents what to expect. Does this mean we won’t have enough teachers at school on the first day? Why will some schools not have enough teachers? I think it’s going to be pretty bad in some of the most challenging areas to teach where they’ve historically had a harder time attracting new candidates, and where attrition rates are higher — that means cities and that also means in rural areas. Those are going to be the two ends of the curve here. But this is just one piece of this. I was talking to a district official in another city a couple of days ago, and I was asking about their vacancies and she said, “Well, we’ve got the number down to under 30.” And I said, “Oh, that’s great.” This was a fairly large district. And then she said, “yes, but the fact of the matter is we’ve seen teachers teaching outside their areas of certification. We’ve seen that number increase from a couple of dozen, three or four years ago, to over 200 this year.” So there’s the shortage, which is perhaps the most acute problem, but the chronic problem is teachers who are teaching outside the area where they’re certified to teach. How do you fix this underlying problem? There’s a supply-side piece to this, and I think there’s probably a demand-side piece to this. On the supply side, what we have now is a number of significant barriers to entering a profession that is very challenging. We have to be thinking about: How do we make this job as attractive as possible to high-ability people? That requires looking at financial barriers to entry. Can we reasonably expect someone to take out $50,000 in loans for a job that pays $40,000? Can we reasonably expect somebody to take on this job who has not been trained in mental health, when we know that some significant percentage of their students are going to require mental health support, and their school will very likely not have a nurse, a counselor or a school psychologist? So thinking about the job and asking ourselves the hard question, which is, why would someone of high ability take this job? The answer can’t be what we’ve always fallen back on, which is: They’ll do it for the kids. That’s not working anymore. On the demand side, we need to be thinking about issues related to the politicization of the field. We need to think about work conditions. We need to think about ways where we can enhance demand for this position. School districts have a role here. State policymakers have a role here. Schools of education, absolutely, have a role to think more creatively about the kinds of programs we’re offering and the preparation we’re providing teacher ed candidates. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at mward@politico.com or on Twitter at @MyahWard.
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