More on the Importance of the Teacher Supply
Last week the Brookings Institution’s Chalkboard blog published a piece of mine on the importance of the teacher supply to education reform. It’s really an elaboration of a point I’ve made at various times in the past, with California as an illustrative example:
[M]any teacher evaluation reform efforts may be focused too heavily on the demand side of teacher evaluation. That is, many reform efforts tend to assume that principals are overly generous with their evaluations because they lack either the motivation or the information to demand better performance from their teachers. There may be something to this, but it is important not to ignore the supply side of the teacher quality problem. After all, the extent to which a principal is willing to dismiss (or give a poor evaluation to) a teacher will likely depend in part upon her beliefs about the probability of finding a superior replacement in a reasonable period of time.The extent to which principals today are constrained in their evaluation and dismissal decisions by the quality and size of the teacher labor supply is not obvious and probably varies by grade level, content area, and geographic location. There are, however, reasons to suspect that teacher supply constraints are real and may be getting worse.
Feedback has generally been very positive, but I did hear a few critiques that are worth responding to. Some of this I’d have included in the original post but even as it was I was running a little over-long.
“It’s Much Harder to Use Policy to Influence Teacher Supply”
I heard from several people that the reason education reform has not targeted supply more directly is that the policy levers to influence demand are mostly at the K-12 level and for various reasons therefore easier to pull. That is, evaluation reform can be legislated or controlled much more easily than change in the higher education system (where teachers are trained).
There may be something to this, but I’m not sure I fully buy it. For one thing, teacher evaluation reform seems to me to have been enormously difficult politically in most places, and my point is precisely that for all of the political oxygen that’s been consumed the actual impacts have often been muted. So I’m not really sure what “harder” means when thinking about teacher supply reform.
Second, the K-12/higher ed dichotomy is largely false. While improving, say, teacher preparation would be hard, the teacher supply also depends a great deal on factors at the K-12 level. As I wrote in the Brookings piece, teacher compensation, working conditions, and even evaluation may all matter for the quantity and quality of the teacher supply, but seem to me have been unjustifiably neglected.
Finally, while reform at the higher education level may be difficult, it could nevertheless be worthwhile. In fact, teacher preparation reforms may be one of the best ways to improve not only the size, but the quality of the teacher supply. That promise is why I signed on as an adviser to Deans for Impact.
“Reformers Really Have Targeted the Teacher Supply”
Matt Barnum thinks I’m not giving reformers enough credit for improving the teacher supply. After all, the rise of alternative certification – which has lowered barriers to entry into teaching seemingly without sacrificing quality – is arguably one of reformers’ biggest policy wins.
I’m a supporter of alternative certification for this very reason, so I basically agree with Matt. Three caveats, however.
First, it’s not entirely obvious to me exactly how big the supply effects of alternative certification programs really are. Some programs seem to be making an effort to target geographic and subject areas that are most in need, but that’s not a universal priority and I haven’t seen a good analysis of whether these programs are meeting our greatest needs in effective ways. I also don’t know how many people who enter through alternative certification wouldn’t enter the classroom otherwise. (As one piece of anecdata, I entered the classroom through a traditional route after my application to Teach for America was rejected.)
Second, to the extent that alternative certification programs do not emphasize – and sometimes deliberately deemphasize – teacher retention, they may be More on the Importance of the Teacher Supply - Paul Bruno: