Teacher ranks shrink, skew white and less experienced in report
Over a five-year period that included the near-elimination of collective bargaining in Wisconsin's public schools, the teacher workforce in metro Milwaukee is smaller, less experienced and still largely white, according to a new report.
The metro region also lost 700 teachers during that time, but that trend was most pronounced in Milwaukee Public Schools, which lost a total of 730, the report said.
Those are the key takeaways of a teacher workforce analysis to be published Wednesday by the Public Policy Forum. The report surveys key characteristics of public school teachers in the 53 school districts within Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties, between the years of 2009-'10 and 2013-'14, the most recent year available.
"This is giving us a valuable pre-Act 10 and post-Act 10 snapshot," said Rob Henken, president of the Public Policy Forum.
Act 10 was the controversial legislation signed by Gov. Scott Walker in 2011 that all but eliminated collective bargaining for most public workers and sparked widespread protests.
But some predicted consequences of the law — like widespread teacher mobility — did not materialize in the data.
The report shows that only about 7% of teachers in the metro region moved to a different district over the years studied, despite anecdotes from district administrators that suggest otherwise.
It became easier for teachers to move between districts after Act 10, because new employee handbooks did not offer the same incentives as collective bargaining agreements to stay with one district until retirement.
"We didn't see widespread evidence of districts poaching teachers" from other districts, said Joe Yeado, senior researcher of the new study. "Even when we looked at (teachers in hard-to-staff subjects), there wasn't an outsize impact of teachers jumping from one field to another."
The analysis showed no real change in the average age of the region's public school teachers over the past five years. But teacher experience declined in the region.
"That suggests that districts are hiring teachers who are not necessarily younger, but are less experienced," Yeado said. "They're not necessarily hiring new college graduates to fill these vacancies, but older teachers with less teaching experience."
That drop in experience did not occur among MPS teachers, where the average years of experience remained Teacher ranks shrink, skew white and less experienced in report:
