An Empty Pipeline
Teachers are Leaving and No One is Training to Replace Them
I’ve written over and over again about the urgency of the teacher shortage.
The pandemic has exacerbated conditions that have resulted in teachers fleeing the field. Low pay, lack of respect, excessive demands, and blame for a range of social ills all contribute to teachers not wanting to say in teaching. Turns out, young people have noticed that teaching isn’t such a great deal in terms of a career, so they’re just not training for it.
A story out of Oklahoma suggests some schools of education don’t have enough students to justify holding classes.
KOCO reports:
With teacher shortages already hammering school districts, local colleges said that they don’t even have enough students who want to be teachers to keep the programs going.
Oklahoma City University is no longer turning out elementary teachers. The university was left with no choice but to suspend its early childhood and elementary education program in the spring of 2022 because of the low enrollment.
The director of teacher education at OCU has an explanation:
"More than anything, economics plays into it, right? Students don't want to take on debt into a profession that when I get a four-year degree that I'm going to have to pay loans when I barely make enough to live and that's where we are with the education profession," she said.
"The pipeline is unfortunately slowing to a trickle. We have very, very few students entering the traditional programs which is very disheartening.”
While the story out of Oklahoma is disheartening, a pair of stories out of Tennessee offer some insight into why teachers are leaving and perhaps why there’s a shortage of students clamoring to get into the education profession.
First, former teacher Gabe Hart discusses the economics of teaching:
While Tennessee lawmakers are expressing concern over investing too much money in schools, one educator is practically begging Gov. Bill Lee to just throw wads of cash at teachers.
Former teacher Gabe Hart has a column in Tennessee Lookout that expresses his frustration at the current situation as it relates to teacher pay in Tennessee.
Here’s a bit of what he has to say relative to teacher salaries:
In December, in an attempt to recruit more corrections officers, Lee gave new officers a 37% raise which put the starting salary for a TDOC officer at $44,500. First year teachers in Metro Nashville Public Schools will make $46,000 during their first year, and MNPS is one of the highest paying districts in the state. First year teachers in Madison County make $38,000. The average first year teacher makes around $40,000 — almost $5,000 less than a first year corrections officer.
I am fully aware that there are far more teachers in the state than corrections officers, and the funding comparison is apples and oranges. Where I can push back, though, is that Tennessee has always been ranked between 44th-46th in the country when it comes to education funding, and since Lee became governor in 2019, he’s pushed for Educational Savings Accounts — aka vouchers — that would pull even more money from public schools.
Then, there’s Tennessee state Senator John Stevens who has expressed concerns about schools receiving a “windfall” from school funding formula reform:
The Center Square reports that Stevens is concerned about how locals will spend what he calls a “windfall” of new state money.
Stevens, like others, is concerned that local governments pay their portion along with the state, which budgeted to spend $5.6 billion in state funding on K-12 public education this fiscal year.
Stevens suggested the state should give less state sales tax money to local governments that do not properly support education with a funding match.
“I’m not just going to give the locals a windfall by absorbing the costs that they’re supposed to pay for without them having some skin in the game,” Stevens said. “Because all the schools want to do is hire more people.”
Of course, schools are asking for more money because:
A bipartisan group of state and local policymakers form an entity known as TACIR – Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. That bipartisan group issued a report suggesting Tennessee underfunds schools by $1.7 billion.
When the prevailing attitude of policymakers is that schools have too much money and teachers should have to work 10 years to earn the starting pay of a corrections officer, we’ve got a real problem.