Debate emerges over state actions needed to ease teacher shortages
As California school districts grapple with a widening shortage of teachers, a policy debate has emerged about just how actively the state should be involved in trying to remedy the problem.
The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office issued a report last month that makes the case that market forces will help alleviate the difficulties districts are experiencing in filling certain positions, and that the shortage “will decrease without direct state action.”
The report acknowledged there were “perennial staffing difficulties” in specific areas, such as special education, math and science, in urban districts serving low-income students, and in some rural districts. But these shortages should be addressed with “narrowly tailored” solutions. These could include recruiting more teachers from other states, or tapping a pool of some 10,000 teachers who have credentials but who are not currently teaching and might be tempted to re-enter the classroom.
The analysis comes against the backdrop of a concerted push by some lawmakers and others to convince the Legislature to address the shortage with a package of bills, and goes against the grain of several analyses that urge a far more comprehensive state response.
The Learning Policy Institute, a Palo Alto-based research institute headed by education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, issued a report in January that called for a “comprehensive set of strategies at the local and state levels that are focused on increasing the number of well-prepared entrants to the field of teaching, directing them to the fields and locations where they are needed, and plugging the leaky bucket of teacher attrition.”
The report was authored by Darling-Hammond, who is also chair of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, and Roberta Furger, Patrick Shields and Leib Sutcher, all staffers at the institute.
The LAO report contends that the ratio of newly credentialed teachers to the number of vacancies “tends to follow cyclical patterns, with mismatches tending to correct themselves over time.”
“Given these cyclical patterns, with trends changing every few years, state government likely cannot react quickly enough to make much of a difference before the market corrects itself,” the report says. “We encourage the Legislature to avoid broad statewide policies.”
In a detailed statement issued in response to the LAO report, the authors of the Learning Policy Institute report said they agreed with the Legislative Analyst’s Office that the state’s most immediate need is to remedy the shortage in special education, science and math, as well as bilingual instruction. But “we do not think that waiting for a market response will be sufficient,” they said.
As an example of where market forces failed, the researchers pointed to the high demand for new teachers in the late 1990s, which in the absence of a strategic approach by the state resulted in a “huge influx of underprepared teachers” who disproportionately ended up in schools with large numbers of minority and low-income students. As a result, children in those schools “were frequently taught year after year by a parade of inexperienced, untrained teachers,” the researchers said.
The only way the state was able to reduce the number of teachers on emergency or partial credentials was by enacting what the institute called an Debate emerges over state actions needed to ease teacher shortages | EdSource: