Struggling to save teaching’s appeal
Educators eager to blame Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 for the declining supply of teachers say the evidence is obvious and convincing.
In 2015, four years after the law’s collective-bargaining limits reshaped the profession, the smallest group of juniors and seniors in two decades was enrolled in teaching programs at the state’s public universities.
Some 25% of school districts are reporting an “extreme shortage” of jobseekers for key positions. Teaching is “no longer considered an attractive career path” for many top students, educators warned state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers.
In the trenches, at the suburban Milwaukee district that educated the governor’s sons, Wauwatosa Superintendent Phil Ertl told parents at a meeting: “People are being driven away from the teaching profession. It’s not a lifelong career anymore.”
But the steep decline in the number of teacher candidates started before Act 10’s passage, it follows a national trend, and Wisconsin is faring better than its neighbors, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel examination found.
Experts say root causes of the drop include tougher training and licensure requirements and tight school district budgets at a time when high student-loan debt and an improved economy are sending graduates into other fields.
Act 10’s chief contribution to the continuing trend: a cloud of pessimism hanging over the much-changed profession.
Indeed, many experienced teachers have become highly negative ambassadors for their own occupation, inter-
views with educators in 25 districts showed. Upset over Act 10 changes that reduced take-home pay and job security, they are warning potential teachers to pick a different line of work.
“You have teachers coming up to you saying, ‘Don’t go into the profession because you’re limiting your potential,’ ” said Briana Schwabenbauer, 22, who is studying at the University of WisconsinMadison to be a teacher. “You’re looking at them, like, ‘What?’ ”
The downbeat attitude doesn’t sit well with some teachers.
“Teachers don’t do themselves a favor,” said Amy Traynor, the state’s 2012 middle school teacher of the year. “Too many teachers are talking students out of being teachers.”
Into the new world
Alanna Ehrike, 22, is a UW-Stevens Point education student on the cusp of a teaching career.
“The most popular question I have heard in the last four years: ‘Are you staying in Wisconsin to teach or are you getting out?’ ” she said.
The Act 10 controversy didn’t dissuade her from the profession, nor is she fleeing the state to find work.
“I had really great secondand third-grade teachers who really inspired me,” she said. “I still talk with my secondgrade teacher now.”
As a middle school student, her love of homework sealed the deal.
“I said, ‘OK, this is probably what I am going to be doing the rest of my life.’ ”
Ehrike expects to graduate in May with a degree in elementary and early childhood education and a minor in English as a second language.
Her hope is to work “in a school that I love, in a district that I love, feeling confident and loving what I’m doing every day, loving that I go into a school every day and make an impact.”
Ehrike will encounter a much different world than the one older teachers entered.
Ehrike says she will join the local union, though it can no longer bargain collectively over benefits and working conditions.
Gone, in many districts, are salary grids that raised pay steadily with each year of service. Pay for performance is increasingly common. Negotiated, across-theboard base salary increases are limited to inflation, though local school boards and voters can approve larger hikes.
The good news for some teachers is that under the free-market system ushered in by Act 10, many new and veteran teachers are negotiating their own salary increases with districts.
That has led to a surge in district-hopping, instead of teachers setting up shop in one place for most of their career.
Bonuses of $1,000 to $15,000 are common for teachers with superior skills or in-demand specialties, especially if they are younger and have a smaller salary.
Some teachers feel better positioned now to get rewarded for leadership, get customized teacher training and cut individual deals over scheduling issues.
Due to Act 10 and other changes, teachers are under greater scrutiny and some are being asked to do more, according to a Journal Sentinel review of work rules in 100 school districts.
Take the issue of “preparation” or “planning” time.
In many of the old collective bargaining agreements, teachers were guaranteed or promised a specific amount of time during the day to plan coursework, grade papers and meet with students and colleagues.
Those guarantees are somewhat less common now, according to a Journal Sentinel survey of state school superintendents.
Of the superintendents surveyed, 21% said their districts provide less time now. But 11% said their teachers were getting more.
Similarly, 24% of districts said their teachers are doing more classroom instruction than before.
After Act 10, state lawmakers required that districts use the “Educator Effectiveness System.” Partly designed by teachers, it’s an intensive, customized teacher evaluation process requiring educators to document their skills and accomplishments and their students’ progress.
A majority of teachers said they couldn’t complete it, and many felt it was taking time from teaching and lesson planning, a UW-Madison survey found. The system has caused widespread confusion and concern over how evaluations would be used.
For teachers, all the changes in the profession can add up to culture shock — at least for veteran teachers used to the collective bargaining days.
“We’ve created a culture in which staff’s role is not to create a craft, it’s to follow instructions,” said Sam Barrette, a science teacher who retired in 2016 from the Oconomowoc Area School District.
“Today we are a machine of acquiescence,” he said before he retired.
Ehrike, the UW-Stevens Point education student, will enter teaching with no firsthand knowledge of the old ways.
She sees the Act 10 changes as a “bump in the road” that has to be overcome.
Teachers who stayed and accepted the new reality now are sounding more positive when she seeks them out, she said.
“There were those teachers that got out and it’s their time. That’s their personal decision,” Ehrike said. “But we can’t give up. Education has to be around, we can’t do without it.”
Resentment and fear
Act 10 in some cases pitted teachers against friends and family members.
Some felt educators’ pay and benefits were too generous compared to private sector jobs wracked by recession. Others blamed high taxes on rising education costs.
“I told my dad to find a more respectful tone or find another pallbearer,” said Lyman Elliott, a technical education teacher at Beloit Memorial High School.
In interviews, many current and retired teachers talked about getting into the profession because it was important and held in high regard. They found attacks on their motives and status hard to stomach.
“I saw it as one of the last totally honorable professions,” said Susan Disbrow, who in 1998 made a midcareer switch from theater to teaching English in the Whitefish Bay district on Milwaukee’s North Shore.
High esteem often meant a great deal of autonomy, freedom of expression, authority and a “family feeling” on the job.
In the old collective bargaining era, the combined voices of teachers carried more weight on teaching methods, student discipline, curriculum and class size.
Beth Howie, who retired in 2016 from teaching middle school in Eau Claire, didn’t join her local union for years because she considered its approach overly adversarial.
She changed her mind
in part over concerns that parents were gaining too much influence and could make false accusations against teachers. The union, she said, had helped defend a teacher in another district in such a case.
“I considered it because I had run into my share of crazy parents,” Howie said.
Terry Kaldhusdal, the state’s 2006 elementary school teacher of the year, is happy with his job and his district, but troubled by what he hears on his travels around the state.
The longtime Kettle Moraine School District educator knows of teachers who have left or lost positions because they were blamed for problems with new instruction methods they were asked to use.
“That’s new and that behavior sends a shiver down an educator’s spine,” he said.
He explained that schools are moving to customize their instruction so students can move at their own pace, often using web-based products. This “personalized learning” approach is a source of anxiety for parents and administrators used to the old model of teachers lecturing to a group of students.
Wary about their lack of job protections in this environment, some teachers are less likely now to academically challenge students, Kaldhusdal said.
“There’s fear in teaching now,” he said.
Explaining shortage
Those entrusted with preparing the next wave of teachers don’t have an easy explanation for the falloff in teaching candidates.
There’s not even complete agreement on the extent of the teacher shortage.
Hard evidence of a widespread, harmful shortage is elusive, in part because data is scant, said Peter Trabert Goff, a UWMadison assistant professor in educational leadership and policy analysis.
“Everyone around the country is screaming shortage, but nobody knows if they have one,” said Goff, who is studying the teacher labor market for the state Department of Public Instruction.
There’s no doubt the pipeline has slowed: Enrollment in teacher preparation programs started to drop in 2010, one year before Act 10.
At the time, the economy was starting to rebound, which made higher-paying private-sector jobs more available. Enrollment in education programs tends to fluctuate in sync with economic cycles.
The biggest one-year drop in enrollment, 13%, came in 2012-’13 as Act 10 took firm hold.
Wisconsin actually has seen less drop-off in enrollments than its Midwest counterparts, and the nation.
An annual survey by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found a huge decline in the number of its teaching graduates saying they’d stay in the field until retirement or disability — but that trend, too, began before Act 10.
Experts say other factors may have cut the number of teaching candidates in Wisconsin.
Public schools are feeling a budget squeeze, and in Wisconsin they increasingly are seeing state money go to private schools through the voucher program.
It’s harder than ever to become a teacher, because of greater rigor in preparation programs and highly demanding requirements designed to enhance quality, said William Henk, dean of Marquette University’s College of Education and cochair of a group of Milwaukee-area education deans.
Henk listed four assessments required for licensure, and said they collectively are cost-prohibitive for some teacher candidates and their families. Total fees can run from $500 to more than $1,000, according to information on the test’s websites.
Marquette University’s education college enrolled 36 freshmen this year, down from 88 four years earlier, according to the university’s website.
Student loan debt is another factor: Wisconsin ranked third in proportion of college students with loan debt (70%), according to a 2015 study by The Institute for College Access & Success.
The Journal Sentinel collected enrollment figures from teacher preparation programs in the University of Wisconsin System and six of the largest private programs in the state.
Records aren’t complete, but generally, from the late 1990s into the early 2000s, enrollment increased steadily in those teacher preparation programs before reversing around 2002 and continuing to drop until 2008. A brief upward trend stopped in 2009, with declining enrollment since then.
A closer look shows a 30% drop both in enrollment and in the number of students completing education degrees from 2009, two years before Act 10, to 2013, according to federal data on all public and private programs.
Administrators agreed that one strong Act 10 effect was the political discourse surrounding teaching.
The teacher-led protests in Madison and the bitter debate that stretched for weeks after Senate Democrats fled the state in hopes of stopping the measure created a backlash against teachers.
Prospective education students, Henk said, needed to decide if they wanted to be “greedy, lazy, ineffectual, dispassionate, and lacking in intelligence” as teachers were cast in the debate.
“Act 10 caused the conversation, and the conversation went in a negative direction and it just kept going,” said Freda Russell, dean of the College of Education & Leadership at Cardinal Stritch University.
Silver linings
Some of the negative buzz around teaching comes from the compensation outlook for educators in Wisconsin.
Ertl, the Wauwatosa administrator, said teachers formerly could count on doubling their salary over a lifetime, but many will earn far less under the Act 10 collective bargaining limits and state caps on school spending.
But some officials sees potential long-term pay gains from the law.
“In the end I think Act 10 will increase salaries for teachers,” said Sandy Raspotnik, a principal in the Bayfield district and a former teacher and union leader.
Another big change spurred by Act 10: Many teachers will be teaching longer.
Teaching traditionally had a backloaded compensation system. Pay was relatively low until the later years, and early retirement was possible at age 55 for many teachers.
After Act 10, many districts, freed from labor contracts, have reduced retirement insurance benefits.
It angers teachers who feel they gave up higher starting pay for better back-end benefits.
Still, at career’s end, the state pension for teachers remains a topshelf benefit, though teachers now are directly contributing a share, per an Act 10 mandate.
And health insurance for most teachers is still more affordable than in the private sector.
All of that comes despite Act 10’s success in getting school districts to increase workers’ share of premium costs, a Journal Sentinel review of insurance programs in 100 districts found.
In addition, the grass isn’t necessarily much greener for young Wisconsin teachers eyeing the private sector.
Wisconsin teacher salaries are more comparable to those of other professionals than is the case in most states.
At age 25, teachers make 89% of the earnings of non-teachers of similar age and education, ranking the state eighth in the nation. The picture isn’t as bright for older educators: At age 45, the figure is 77%, though Wisconsin still ranks 10th.
Those findings, based on 2013 data, come from the 2016 Rutgers University/Education Law Center “report card.”
A Journal Sentinel review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for 760 occupations found median wages for Wisconsin elementary school teachers ($53,600 in 2014) ranked 238th, in the top one-third.
A sampling of occupations with median wages higher than those of teachers: lawyers, actuaries, undertakers, insurance underwriters, college political science professors, tile setters, funeral service managers, art directors, loan officers, web developers and train engineers.
Some of those trailing teachers: carpenters, court reporters, librarians, marriage therapists, tax preparers, film editors, economists, sociologists.
Making almost the same: rail car repairers, foresters.
Despite some of the changes under the law — and in some cases because of them — it’s possible to find optimism about the future from teachers young and old, or among those in training.
Lori Cathey, leader of the local teachers union in Green Bay, thinks the new crop of teachers is wellsituated to succeed.
“While not as many people are going into education, I think the ones who are coming out of the universities, it’s really their calling, what they are meant to do,” she said.
New research on behavior and brain development, improved teacher prep programs, and teachers’ constant effort to improve ensures that the profession advances, said Rick Erickson, a highly decorated science teacher in Bayfield.
“In the long run Wisconsin’s public education system will correct and recover from the setback of Act 10,” Erickson said. Research assistants Brittany Carloni and Stephanie Harte, part of the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, contributed to this report.