The teacher shortage had a good run in the press, but alas all good media cycles must come to an end. Have we actually looped around to a teacher surplus?
Of course not.
The numbers still tell of high turnover, driven by resignations and retirements, while too few college students are lining up to replace them. Locally, districts across the country are reporting shortages, filling gaps with virtual substitutes, under-qualified and under-credentialed teachers, and paraprofessionals taking over classrooms. Other places are sweetening the pot for new recruits with sign-on bonuses, dedicated housing, and mentorship programs in an effort to get good teachers in front of students.
So, if you’re anything like me, you might be wondering just what is going on over at the opinion pages of The74, an education magazine cozy with the pro reform/school choice movement, and its recent headline, “With More Teachers & Fewer Students, Districts Are Set up for Financial Trouble.”
The piece, written by Chad Aldeman, an analyst formerly of the school choice strategy firm Bellweather Education, hones in on falling student enrollments and data showing an increase in the number of teachers hired by public schools (more on that in a minute) to make the case that schools are headed for trouble, even as their teacher-student ratios fall.
To be fair, student enrollment is dropping. Public schools lost around a million students from 2019 to 2020, and while numbers are stabilizing, some states, like California, have lost 5 percent of its student population since the pandemic began. Driven by learning loss and—yes—teacher shortages, some students have left for private schools, which have seen enrollment bumps, or for homeschooling. Others are missing altogether.
Meanwhile, National Center for Education Statistics data from the 2021-22 school year shows the number of overall teachers in the U.S. has actually ticked up slightly the last few years. Some experts attribute this aberrant stat to the windfall of cash schools received in the wake of the pandemic, which allowed them to keep hiring. But federal stats do weird things with their number counts, e.g. counting two half time employees as one full time teacher for statistical purposes.
What we know about how the teacher shortage looks in practice is much different than that single NCES stat might lead you to believe.
Districts are having a hard time sourcing qualified teachers, particularly in math, science and English as a second language (noted, but buried in The74’s piece). Curiously, or not, The74 didn’t mention another NCES stat from the same time period that showed nearly half of all public schools were operating without a full teaching staff; 18 percent of public schools had one teaching vacancy; 27 percent had multiple vacancies. In light of that, counting two half time employees as one teacher and declaring a teaching surplus looks a little silly. Also, as the piece graciously concedes, “It’s possible that a district was understaffed in 2016-17 and remained so in 2021-22.”
Still, if you massage the stats just so, and take a teacher surplus at face value, you end up with a lower student-teacher ratio, since there are fewer students in the system these days. While this sounds like a dream to most people, I suppose it could be spun as dreadful and spendthrift if you see education only in terms of dollars and cents and not the nation’s children trying to learn against the odds while overtaxed teachers manage huge workloads.
The piece goes on to question whether lower student-teacher ratios are even a good thing—no, I’m not kidding—linking to a Chalkbeat research analysis that contained a few caveats but came to the not-very-surprising conclusion that, “Smaller does seem better when it comes to class size.”
The next line swoons over how expensive these lower student-teacher ratios can be—which just means they cost more than overcrowded classrooms in underfunded schools. The point, I suppose, is that schools could be in financial trouble when emergency pandemic funding tapers off and we revert to some underfunded status quo. I hardly need to point out how cynical it is to assume things must always be this way.
Articles like this are particularly insidious, blaming public schools for losing students, relying too much on emergency funding in a pandemic and for ending up with lower student teacher ratios in the process.
The point is to complain, to criticize, to question the value of public education at every turn and seed harmful and reductive talking points that can be hyperlinked by anyone looking to make similar points backed vaguely by “data.”
Already these and similar moral panics have seeped into the mainstream press, distorting the true causes of the teaching crisis.
Case in point: a new piece from opinion writer Jessica Grose at the New York Times on teachers struggling to hold students accountable in the face of bad district policies that are resigned to passing too many students along when no learning is taking place.
I have no doubt the teachers she quotes are seriously frustrated with learning gaps and students not completing work—and lack of teacher autonomy for holding them accountable. There’s a good story somewhere in there.
But Grose doesn’t just blame a broken system and poor policies, she bandies about a host of imaginary hobgoblins, including grade inflation (which I’ve argued is hardly as serious as its detractors make it out to be) and giving students 50s instead of 0s for missing work (zeros are often demoralizing for students and can hinder future learning) without even the context I just provided, save for a teacher who did the NYT’s job for them by arguing both sides in the same breath.
Grose’s piece is at least written under the guise of protecting public school teachers, but does so at the cost of eroding trust in the public education system itself. Now don’t get me wrong, many writers and journalists cover public schools critically because there’s plenty to be actually critical about, but it’s generally more substantive than “grade inflation.” I’m sure Grose would agree that public education can be both flawed and valuable, but you’d never know it from reading this piece.
Thus the reform talking points that originate in opinion pieces in The74 migrate to the opinion sections of major newspapers and, eventually, are laundered by the general press and taken as fact. But teachers are hardly leaving jobs they once loved over their districts’ policies over zeros or student-teacher ratios that are too low. The big issues like teacher pay get conflated with grade inflation. Public education can’t do anything right.
And just like that, homeschooling doesn’t look so bad. Is there a voucher for that?
📚 Independent Reading
New York Times: More from Jessica Grose on stemming the teacher shortage: “So the first thing I think we can do about it is make the cost of getting a teaching degree less onerous. I talked to the School of Education at Michigan State, and their program was going from a five-year program to a four-year program. They figured out a way to integrate that into the fourth year of college. And so that’s really going to cut the cost for future teachers. And there’s a number of levers that can be pulled financially to encourage more college graduates into this profession.”
EdSurge: A longterm paraprofessional shares his trying experience as a substitute teacher after New York’s DOE began allowing them to cover classes on their own. Faced with little support and little advance warning on when he’d be covering classes, he struggled to teach to the best of his ability. His solutions for improving substitute teaching include, “offering comprehensive training and ongoing professional development; increasing pay and benefits for substitute teachers; and putting a support system in place to foster a substitute teacher’s ability to develop stronger bonds with students and colleagues.”
Axios: “Public school teachers have long made less money than other professionals, but last year the gap hit its widest level since 1960, according to a new analysis of federal data..”