DISCUSSION:Teacher shortage

["Dale Courtney" <dmcourtn@moscow.com>]

Michael Podgursky is Middlebush Professor of Economics and Department
Chair at the University of Missouri - Columbia.

http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly

Oct 4, 2002

Not needed: two million new teachers

In a recent meeting with reporters in Detroit, Education Secretary Rod
Paige spoke heresy to the education establishment. He asserted that the
'teacher shortage' is 'contrived' and that many individuals who would
make good teachers are shut out by the current system. He's right.

For more than a decade, educational Cassandras have been warning that
the U.S. faces a 'crisis' in recruiting teachers for public school
classrooms. Newspaper articles warn of looming disaster as aging
teachers retire in droves, leaving public schools scrambling for warm
bodies to put in classrooms. We're told that two million new teachers
are urgently needed and that, unless taxpayers reach deep into their
pockets, throngs of children will attend classrooms with unqualified
teachers.

These self-serving crisis forecasts were wrong and remain wrong. The
faulty analysis underlying the 'two million new teachers' forecast came
from a federal study that used projections of student enrollment,
student-teacher ratios, and teacher turnover to estimate the total
number of teacher hires over a decade ('Predicting the Need for Newly
Hired Teachers in the United States to 2008-09,' by William J. Hussar,
National Center for Education Statistics, August 1999,
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=1999026). These
projections were picked up by media and widely disseminated by education
interest groups. But they were based on an erroneous assumption. The
forecaster ignored the fact that many teachers who leave the school
workforce in a given year return one or two years later. All he did was
cumulate the gross outflow of teachers for a decade while ignoring the
reflux of teachers who had withdrawn temporarily from the schools. Yet
returning teachers account for over one-third of new teacher hires in
any year. In fact, every year our colleges and universities continue to
graduate education majors far in excess of net new teacher hires.

The Cassandras also ignored the business cycle. It's true that in
2000-2001 many school districts found themselves with more teacher exits
and fewer applicants than in earlier years. Many had difficulties
filling vacancies in certain subjects. But their situation was hardly
unique. Hospitals also struggled to recruit nurses, computer firms had
trouble finding programmers, and even the local Taco Bell was
hard-pressed to find workers for its fast-food counter. Unemployment
rates in 1999-2000 hit forty-year lows that made it difficult for
virtually all employers, including school districts, to fill vacancies.
But that was then and this is now. With the recession and the
deceleration of K-12 enrollment growth, many school districts are again
awash in teaching applications.

Most districts have adequate resources to put qualified teachers in
classrooms and are doing so. But they could do a better job with the
resources they have if key reforms were made, beginning with barriers to
entryóSecretary Paige's point. In professions such as medicine, law,
dentistry, or accounting, states issue a single license. By contrast, in
teaching, a typical state issues 100+ different licenses and
endorsements (Missouri currently issues 178). And these are just current
licenses. Deciphering state teacher certification systems rivals the
human genome project in complexity. Not surprisingly, few school
districtsóeven the wealthiestóare fully in compliance.

State boards of education (or legislatures) must overhaul these
Byzantine certification systems that throttle supply but do little to
raise quality. That overhaul should include fast-track alternative
certification systems for individuals who already hold baccalaureate
degrees. Experience with the federal Troops to Teachers program and
state experiments with alternative-entry programs suggest that there is
a sizable pool of well-educated career changers who would like to become
teachers at current levels of wages and benefits. But the barriers to
entry are too high. States need to lower those barriers and at least
enable schools to audition these potential recruits.

School districts must also develop more efficient, market-oriented
compensation policies. Unfortunately, nearly all of them still determine
teacher pay according to salary schedules based on years of teaching
experience and graduate education credit hours. These schedules apply to
all teachersófrom kindergarten to high school physicsóregardless of
subject expertise, school conditions, or individual effectiveness. Such
rigid schedules have two unfortunate consequences. First, they produce
shortages. Kindergarten teachers and high school physics teachers are
both important, but their alternative earnings opportunities differ
greatly and the teacher-pay system must take account of that. Imagine
how well university business and engineering schools would be staffed if
they paid faculty salaries no higher than the sociology department.

These rigid schedules also guarantee that poor children will get weaker
teachers. School working conditions differ, and schools with many poor
and minority students are often located in tough or inconvenient
neighborhoods. Many teachers use their seniority to transfer to more
pleasant and accessible environs. By paying the same rates in every
school, these salary schedules make it harder for inner city schools to
get the most experienced instructors. The military has long recognized
the need for 'hazardous duty pay.' Public schools need to do something
similar.

When additional money becomes available, rather than boosting the pay
for new teachers, many school districts 'backload' pay, i.e. provide
larger increases to senior teachers who had 'topped out' on the salary
schedules. (That's because teachers who haven't yet been hired have no
representation on the union side of the bargaining table while veterans
have ample clout.)

But districts are not the only culprits in when it comes to backloading.
States are culpable as well. Private sector employers have long
recognized that, to recruit young, mobile professionals, they must
provide fringe benefits that are mobile as well. Hence private sector
employers (and most higher-education institutions) have shifted from
defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans. Young high-tech
workers and college professors taking their first job know that, if they
change employers in a few years (as many do), their benefits will travel
with them.

By contrast, public school teachers are locked into defined benefit
plans that transfer wealth from young teachers who may teach only a few
years to older teachers. Imagine how much more attractive teaching might
become to young college graduates if pension contributions were paid
instead into 401k plans.

Finally, districts must curb their teacher-hiring binge. Between 1980
and 1990, public school enrollment in the U.S. grew by less than one
percent while teacher employment rose by ten percent. Between 1990 and
2000, pupil enrollments grew 14 percent but the teaching workforce
expanded by 23 percent. (See Figure 1 at
http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/reports/podgurskytable.doc.) What
does it mean to talk about 'teacher shortages' while districts are
ballooning their teaching workforce at rates far in excess of enrollment
growth? If public schools returned to the student-teacher ratio that
prevailed in 1980, they would recoup about sixteen percent of their
entire payroll, money that they could use to selectively raise the pay
of the remaining teachers, thus ending spot shortages and boosting
quality. No budget increase would be needed.

Given the bleak budget circumstances now facing most states, legislators
face tough spending choices. More money may yet be needed to staff some
public school classrooms with able instructors. First, however,
districts should be obliged to use their current resources in a more
efficient manner, and policy-makers should give them the flexibility to
do so. Secretary Paige should keep pushing in that direction.