Subtraction problem

Math shows fewer candidates for teaching jobs, and worsening

It’s not unusual for the supply of potential teachers to shrink.

Dr. Kimberly Minor said that in her 25 years in education she has seen it happen several times. It’s cyclical, the Exeter School District superintendent said, with shortages seeming to pop up about once a decade.

Bill McKay, Gov. Mifflin School District superintendent, said it happened as recently as about 12 years ago. With the economic downturn of 2008, schools found themselves in financial strife and many made severe cuts.

Teaching jobs suddenly became unavailable, he said.

“Word got out that there weren’t jobs and that you shouldn’t go into teaching,” he said.

The result was fewer high school graduates headed to college seek

ing teaching degrees.

And in turn, fewer certified teachers were in the candidate pool when the economy began rebounding and schools started hiring again.

Another teacher-pool shortage has cropped up over the last few years. And it has been steadily worsening.

But this time around, it doesn’t seem quite the same as those that came before it. This time, things feel different, local education leaders say.

This time, they say, it may be the sign of a very serious problem.

Shrinking candidate pool

As local school districts look to fill their rosters this summer for the upcoming school year, they’re finding that it’s becoming more difficult.

While district leaders aren’t reporting that won’t be able to fill positions by the start of the new school year, they say the number of applicants for open slots has shrunk dramatically.

For some specialized positions — like special education or consumer sciences or technology education — the pool of candidates is nearly dry.

“If we have a tech ed opening and we get four or five candidates, that’s good,” McKay said. “We’d be happy to get four or five candidates.”

Minor said the current environment is unlike anything she’s seen before.

“It is absolutely worse than it has been before,” she said. “I have never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen it be this dramatic. It’s just going to turn education on its head.”

Bigger than Berks

And the problem isn’t just local. Schools across the state and nation are reporting concerning shortages in qualified teaching candidates.

A national survey by Frontline Education found that two-thirds of schools are reporting teacher shortages. The problem seems to be impacting urban districts particularly hard, with 75% reporting shortages compared to 60% of suburban districts.

Looking at a statewide picture, the U.S. Department of Education’s teacher shortage tracker reports statewide shortages for nearly all positions. Their list includes:

• Language arts grades 7-12.

• English as a second language grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• World languages grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• Elementary education grades pre-kindergarten-4.

• Language and speech grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• Physical education grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• Life sciences grades prekindergarten-12.

• Gifted education grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• Computer science grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• Family and consumer science grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• Elementary education grades 4-8.

• Special education grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• Career and technology grades 7-12.

• Math grades 7-12.

• Art and music grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• Bus tech education grades pre-kindergarten-12.

• Social studies grades 7-12.

“The ability to recruit and hire qualified candidates, particularly in specialty areas, is certainly a challenge,” Brandywine Heights School District Superintendent Andrew Potteiger said.

Potteiger said part of the problem is the state requires separate certifications for each subject.

“For instance, in the field of science there are separate certifications for each field of biology, chemistry, physics,” he said. “This makes hiring a ‘science teacher’ challenging. It limits the scope of what courses a teacher is able to teach and also limits the availability of candidates.”

Then there’s retirements

Minor said the shortage is being exacerbated by an increase in teacher retirements.

Although national data has not yet shown it to be the case, local educators say they’ve definitely seen an uptick in retirements following a school year turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s been an absolutely exhausting year,” Minor said.

For the most part, teachers are able to retire a bit earlier than those in other professions. Generally a teacher can retire when they are 55 and have worked for 25 years.

Minor said that most teachers usually don’t call it quits when they meet those requirements, typically sticking around until they’re in their 60s.

“But what you saw with the pandemic was people who were hanging on later in their careers were like ‘nope,’ “she said. “So you have a mass exodus that would normally be spread out over several years.”

Pensions and salaries

In the past, teacher shortages have tended to be reactionary, local educators say.

Minor said the cycle would typically see a shortage appear, perhaps from a large number of older teachers retiring, followed by an increase in students entering college to study education.

“Everybody is encouraged to go get a teaching degree,” she said. “Then you have a glut of teachers.”

That overflowing pool of candidates makes finding a teaching job harder. That leads to fewer students pursuing education because of the increasingly competitive job market.

Then the cycle starts over again.

But, Minor said, there are factors now that the world of education hasn’t really faced in the past. Ones that could mean a quick turnaround isn’t in store.

One of the biggest, she said, is that the state has gotten rid of pensions for new teachers, replacing them with 401k-style retirement plans.

“A lot of parents when they would talk to their kids about careers, you look at education and you might not get paid much to start but you have a really good pension,” she said. “That’s not really a thing anymore, that’s not really a carrot for parents to say you should go into this career.”

Minor said pensions, something that most jobs these days don’t offer, gave schools a competitive advantage over the private sector. With that now off the table, the main remaining advantage is that teachers have summers off.

Pensions have been an important recruiting tool for education in part because pay for teachers, especially at the start of a career, isn’t as high as what people can earn in other fields.

Schools operate on fairly tight budgets, and teacher salaries are part of negotiated contracts. That means there’s pretty much no flexibility when it comes to what schools can pay.

McKay said he has retail stores offering $15 or even $20 an hour as businesses find themselves struggling to find staff.

“It’s tough for us to compete,” he said. “As a public school district we can’t compete with those rates.”

Other pressures

Brad Hahn, director of human resources for the Wilson School District, said pay is only one of many lifestyle factors that college students weigh when picking a career. There are also things like being able to work from a remote location, the autonomy to work at your own pace and schedule flexibility.

“Students are picking a lifestyle first, then a major,” Hahn said.

Hahn said some students are also picking professions that require less education and higher pay like trades such as plumbing, carpentry or electrical.

Minor said one other factor that may be pushing people away from teaching careers is that the rise of social media has led to a lot of scrutiny and even personal attacks.

“If I can make more money, I’m not getting a pension anymore, I have a high standard to meet and I’m getting personal attacks on social media — I’m probably going to go be a banker,” she said.

And teachers had a particularly tough go of it last school year, dealing with everything the COVID pandemic had to offer.

With the amount of pressure teachers were under and the gymnastics they had to perform to make sure their students were learning whether in class or remotely, all the challenges of the profession were on full display.

It all adds up to a situation schools haven’t found themselves in before.

“We’re in a bind,” Minor said. “We have been isolated from what other industry have to do to recruit talent, but that’s not the case anymore.”

Shopping in other districts

The situation has led to a trend that Minor said has thoroughly shocked her. She said that when a teacher retires a district usually looks to bring in a replacement at the bottom of its pay scale — in most cases a new teacher right out of college.

That meant that once a new teacher gets a couple years invested in a district,

and moves a few steps up the pay scale, there was little reason to look for a job elsewhere.

“There has never been transience in the teachers ranks,” she said. But that has changed. “Right now every superintendent is asking their staff who’s good in other districts that we can bring here,” she said.

And, Minor added, a flood of federal COVID relief money that is flowing into schools has created a situation where just about every district is expanding and looking to hire.

“There is a lack of teachers and a high demand,” she said.

Not just teachers

Local education leaders say it isn’t just teachers who are hard to come by.

Open slots for all sorts of paraprofessional and support positions — from guidance counselors to secretaries to bus drivers to psychologists — have become more difficult to fill.

Hahn said Wilson was actually in pretty good shape this summer for teachers. That’s in part because the district hired a large number of long-term substitutes last school year to help shrink class sizes and cover for teachers forced to isolate because of COVID.

“That gave us a pool we could interview again and put in full-time slots,” he said.

But, he said, the district has had a bit tougher time finding support staff candidates.

“We get applicants, but not nearly as many as we have had historically,” he said.

Minor said Exeter has had open custodial positions since she took over as superintendent last July and has found applications scarce for an information technologies position.

Even at the top of the food chain the situation right now is difficult. Minor said 50 superintendents across Pennsylvania retired or resigned this year, representing 20% of those to hold that position in the state’s 500 school districts.

“That’s a mind-boggling number,” she said.

‘Grow our own’

The simple solution to growing the pool of teacher candidates is to create more teachers.

But that takes time, and depends on convincing students that teaching is the career for them. And that doesn’t appear to be happening.

According to data from Frontline Education, only six states saw an increase in the number of new educators coming out of college from 2010 to 2016.

Locally, data from Kutztown University shows that nearly 700 fewer students were enrolled in the college of education in 2020 compare to 2011. The 917 students enrolled last year is actually up from a 10-year low of 781 in 2016, but pales in comparison to the 1,612 in 2011.

The decrease in students enrolled in education coincides with an overall enrollment decrease at Kutztown that has seen the undergraduate population fall from 9,147 in 2011 to 6,730 in 2020.

Dr. Elaine A. Meils, supervisor of student teachers at Penn State Berks, said that at least over the four years she’s been at Penn State Berks she hasn’t seen a dip in students enrolling in education.

“Since the fall of 2018 we have not experienced any major shifts,” she said. “That’s not to say that there may not have been one over the past 10 years, but the past four years our numbers have been good.”

Some local districts are taking it upon themselves to help improve the teacher pipeline.

Hahn said Wilson has something called the Student

Instructional Aide Program where high school seniors serve as aides in classrooms of younger students, providing tutoring and mentoring.

McKay said Gov. Mifflin is likewise looking for ways to expose high school students to teaching.

“Unless you’ve had that magic of what it’s like to teach a student and feel that impact, you may not think about getting into teaching,” he said. “We need opportunities for high school students to experience that.”

Meils said she is a proponent of exposing high school students to teaching.

“I’d love to see in areas like Reading, let’s grow our own,” she said. “Start grooming them and getting them into classroom settings.”

Meils said Penn State Berks tries to do something similar, making sure to get teaching students into actual classrooms as early as possible so they can see what it is really like.

“We want them to see reality versus their perception,” she said.

‘High-stakes game’

The teacher shortage situation is so dire that it has even reached the highest levels of government. In his American Families Plan, President Joe Biden calls for investing $9 billion to address teacher shortages, improve training and support for teachers and to boost teacher diversity.

The president is calling to double federal scholarships for teachers from $4,000 to $8,000 and invest $2.8 billion in programs that improve teacher retention such as yearlong paid teacher residency programs.

Biden is also proposing spending $1.6 billion to improve opportunities for teachers to obtain additional

certifications and $2 billion for mentorship programs for new teachers.

Minor said it is important to use every tool possible to address the shortage.

“We’re creating the future of our country,” she said. “So to take an inferior candidate out of desperation because you have an opening to fill, and then the kids don’t learn how to read, that’s an incredible price to pay. It’s a highstakes game.”

Hahn agreed, saying that making sure students understand what’s at stake is a key to inspiring a new generation of teachers.

“I don’t think there’s a better job out there for graduating seniors to embark on,” he said. “You’re working to empower the youth of America. You’re able to be in a position to impact someone’s day-today life.

“I think that holds value. Every child needs someone that they can connect with on a day-to-day basis. And it’s incredibly rewarding.”