Low Salaries, High Rents, Poor Teaching Conditions Create Widespread Shortage of Qualified Teachers
You’d have to be pretty out of touch to have missed that teachers, who have been striking all year from West Virginia to Kentucky to Oklahoma to California, have been showing us their pay is inadequate and their working conditions are horrible. Schools in too many places feature huge classes (too few teachers) and an absence of counselors, social workers, librarians and nurses. All this ultimately signals a school finance problem stemming from the Great Recession a decade ago and state legislatures and governors determined to cut taxes.
All this is well documented in academic research. Emma Garcia and Elaine Weiss recently released the first in a series of studies from the Economic Policy Institute, a report they summarize in a short, policy piece: “In our report we argue that when issues such as teacher qualifications and equity across communities are taken into consideration, shortages are more concerning than we thought. If we consider the declining share of teachers who hold the credentials associated with teacher quality and effective teaching (they are fully certified, took the standard route into teaching, have more than five years of experience, and they have an educational background in the subject they teach), the teacher shortage grows. If we compare the share of these teachers in high-needs schools (schools with a large share of students from families living in poverty) with other schools, we see that the shortages there are even more severe in those high-needs schools.” Garcia and Weiss are particularly concerned about the growing percentage of teachers who are not fully certified, or who began teaching with only alternative—sometimes only a few weeks long—preparation for teaching, or who are currently teaching subjects in which they have no educational background themselves, or who are inexperienced. The number of emergency-certified teachers has grown as well qualified and experienced teachers are giving up and leaving the profession. CONTINUE READING: Low Salaries, High Rents, Poor Teaching Conditions Create Widespread Shortage of Qualified Teachers | janresseger
At a nationwide level, EPI’s new report replicates findings by Linda Darling-Hammond and the Learning Policy Institute about the chronic shortage of qualified teachers in the state of California. In a research brief last September, Darling-Hammond tracks the history of California’s teacher shortage: “Budget cuts and layoffs resulting from the recession CONTINUE READING: Low Salaries, High Rents, Poor Teaching Conditions Create Widespread Shortage of Qualified Teachers | janresseger