Since 2007, Maryland Has Added Just 385 Teachers Despite Gaining 40,500 Students
ESP jobs have declined while district leader and supervisor jobs have grown at 10 times the rate of teacher positions.
Schools are fundamentally human-powered community centers. At their core, they require well-trained and dedicated adults who know how to inspire, motivate, mentor, and communicate with the children in their care. It doesn’t take reams of academic literature (but maybe it does take working in these school positions) to understand that the more positive interactions children have with caring and qualified school employees, the more success they will find — academic and otherwise.
This comes down to many different sources of positive engagement throughout each school day:
It’s their bus driver, who is the first school employee most children see in the morning and the last they see in the afternoon.
It’s their teacher(s), who may get to spend an extra minute connecting one-on-one with a struggling student in a class of 20 students but not in a class of 35.
It’s their school counselor, who has to limit the time she can spend with each student because her caseload is double the industry-recommended standard of 250 kids.
It’s the building manager, who technically isn’t considered an “instructional” employee, but works hard to get to know the students who don’t have strong adult mentors at home and encourages them to stay focused on school.
And on and on and on. These relationships are the unseen factors between the lines of spreadsheet data that policymakers in Annapolis and district offices over-analyze. They aren’t the only factors — and they certainly can’t cover up the effects of concentrated poverty if there aren’t enough of them — but they are necessary even if they aren’t singularly sufficient.
Let’s take a simple metric: the students-per-teacher ratio. It doesn’t mean class size or planning time or any other metric about how to deploy staff in a building — it just looks at how adequately staffed your school is when it comes to classroom instruction.
We can see that the students-to-teacher ratio matters by looking at National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores. Known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the scores are the only standardized assessment that compares student success in each state. The last time NAEP was given to students was in the spring of 2015, and states that performed higher in NAEP generally had smaller students-to-teacher ratios.
Each of the three states with the smallest students-to-teacher ratios — New Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire — rank in the top five for eighth grade NAEP scores in math. In fact, 15 of the 25 states with better NAEP math scores than Maryland had better students-to-teacher ratios, while only four of the 24 states with lower NAEP math scores had fewer students-per-teacher. There are outliers, but staffing ratios are clearly an important factor in the mix.
School-Level Staffing Has Stalled Out Since the Recession While Central Office Staff Has Expanded
When you crunch the numbers for what has happened with Maryland school staff since 2007 — right before the Great Recession stalled out state education spending —it’s ugly. That important students-to-teacher ratio? It grew from 14.3 to 14.8. During the last decade, Maryland schools only added one teacher for every 105 students gained in enrollment.
But teachers only make up about half of all school employees in Maryland schools. What about school counselors? There are 44 fewer school counselors now than there were in 2007. That’s not the only important position that has seen real declines despite the state school system taking on 40,500 more students. There are 1,915 fewer support staff positions — building managers, secretaries, food service workers, bus drivers, and many other important roles that make our schools function — in public schools now than a decade ago.
Meanwhile, district central office staff continued to grow while school-level staff stagnated and declined. The number of superintendents, deputy superintendents, program directors, and supervisors in the 24 district offices increased by 109 from 2007 to 2016 — or 10 times the percent increase of teachers during the last decade.
Can the Kirwan Commission Correct the Derailed Legacy of Thornton?
The truth is, a lot of progress was made in the Thornton Bridge to Excellence Plan’s five-year implementation. By adding nearly 3,960 teachers from 2003 through 2007, Maryland schools drove down their 15.7 students-per-teacher ratio down to 14.3. Schools also added 2,200 instructional aides and 2,125 support staff in those five years.
Positive results followed. Maryland ranked #1 in Education Week’s state rankings from 2009–2013. Maryland led the country in Advanced Placement performance rankings in the decade that followed these staff increases. And Maryland made tremendous gains in NAEP math and reading scores from 2003 to 2013 — which were mostly due to true progress despite claims to the contrary by public school critics that have been debunked by National Center for Education Statistics statisticians.
The individualized attention students received following the Thornton ramp-up mattered in their academic performance. But following a decade of increases in the students-to-teacher ratio, and decreases in school counselor and support staff, these results have reversed. Maryland has dropped to #5 in Education Week’s rankings and Maryland plummeted to the mid-20s in NAEP scores.
Test-based results only give us one data point of comparison — but the 2015 NAEP scores can be largely explained by the analysis of the Kirwan Commission’s own consultants (Augenblick, Palaich and Associates), who found that Maryland schools were underfunded by $2.9 billion in the 2014–2015 school year. What were the top five areas that the consultants identified as needing additional resources?
- Small class sizes
- Staffing to support (but not limited to) the following areas: art, music, PE, world languages, technology, CTE, and advanced courses
- Significant time for teacher planning, collaboration, and embedded professional development
- Additional instructional staff, including instructional coaches, and librarian/media specialists
- High level of student support, such as counselors, nurses, behavior specialists, or social workers, for all students
In other words: staffing, staffing, staffing. After years of understaffing — years of students having fewer and fewer interactions with educators in school — it finally culminated in an adverse effect on student learning. Maryland educators have been warning the public about this for years — if only policymakers had been listening.
So the question is: Will the Kirwan Commission listen to educators calling for more support in their work with students?
