Teacher Shortages Are Solvable

Believe it or not, it’s back to school time. Cue the primary-colored ads, the half-off backpacks and pencils and the summer-blockbuster themed lunchboxes. Unfortunately, this is also the time of year for a less positive annual ritual: news articles about local teacher shortages.

Already there has been coverage of the issue from all corners of the country: increasingly dire statistics in North Carolina, where 15 percent of the teacher workforce left their jobs last year and fewer students are studying to become teachers; an ongoing, long-term shortage in Kansas; and bonuses offered to new teachers in San Francisco as the district struggles to fill their remaining vacancies before the school year starts.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are smart, doable solutions to fix teacher shortages, such as early hiring, as well as ways to prevent shortages from emerging in the first place, like increasing teacher pay. Yet when we wait until July or August every year to think about the problem, we are faced with limited options: Take whomever walks through the door with a license, or failing that, issue emergency licenses to less qualified candidates or use long-term substitutes who may not even have a degree.

What each of these stopgap strategies has in common is that they make it much more likely that students get a subpar education. Given all that we know about how important teacher quality is for student outcomes, this is unacceptable.

One district that has worked extremely hard to avoid stopgap solutions is Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas. While the county had over 1,000 teacher vacancies in October 2015, this summer that number is down to 370 — still problematic, but a dramatic improvement. The state of Nevada and its largest district worked together to close the gap by increasing teacher salaries and giving salary incentives for teaching in low-income schools; hiring recruiters to do personalized high-touch recruitment; and using labor market data to anticipate their needs for the upcoming year.

Another district that was able to fill its recent teacher shortage was Tulsa Public Schools. While the rest of Oklahoma struggled with teacher shortages, the Tulsa school district was fully staffed by August of last year, despite having teacher salaries that were $5,000 below the national average. Tulsa was able to do this because the district started the recruitment process much earlier in the year and used a data-tracking tool to recruit high-potential candidates earlier than other nearby districts.

As the examples of Tulsa and Vegas show, addressing shortages is best done at least six months before the start of the school year, when there is still time to implement policies that require time, money, new structures or some combination of these elements. The strategies these districts used — like early hiring, high touch recruitment and financial incentives — made it possible for them to find needed personnel without sacrificing the quality of their students’ education.

“What’s Next Nevada” is a coalition focused on addressing the state’s teacher shortages and reforming school culture.

It is likely that more states and localities will experience shortages in the coming years since the pipeline for new teachers is shrinking. Enrollment in teacher preparation programs has declined by over 30 percent since 2008, so in addition to strategic thinking in the months leading up to the start of the school year, it would also be wise to consider more systemic, long-term changes to the teaching profession to prevent further long-term shortages.

Raising teacher salaries so that they no longer trail those of other college-educated workers; providing teachers, especially new teachers, with better training and support and more time to do the job well; and providing more opportunities for growth and leadership within teaching careers would all make the profession more appealing to prospective teachers and could prevent future shortages.

Conversely, desperately filling teaching positions by any means necessary, as many states and districts have historically done in times of shortage, only erodes the status of the teaching profession. Since millennials already report that they have a low opinion of teaching as a career choice, these kinds of practices are liable to further dissuade students from entering the profession, perpetuating a cycle in which a lack of interest in teaching careers causes teacher shortages to grow increasingly commonplace.

Students shouldn’t suffer because of a lack of planning or foresight on the part of policymakers and district leaders. Next August, let’s hope that there are more districts who have taken a proactive approach to reducing shortages and modernizing and elevating the teaching profession, resulting in more students taught by excellent teachers.

Policy and Advocacy Summer Fellow Hoang Murphy contributed reporting to this article.

Updated on Aug. 11, 2016: This post has been updated to acknowledge Hoang Murphy’s contributed reporting.