Thread by @edu_tuan

After two weeks of talking with reporters and others about teacher shortage and vacancy, here are a few things I have learned and a few things I would like to share about the teacher shortage/vacancy/underqualification/staffing challenge.

Is there a national teacher shortage crisis?
I don’t know if YES/NO answer to this question matters very much. We have 14 states with more than 1000 vacant positions and 16 states with 2% or higher vacancy rate in their teacher workforce.

For these states, those are critical and serious issues. I don’t think we should minimize that or think that the vacancy is found only in a handful of states.

Moreover, there are more than 160,000 underqualified teachers in the US, with more than 24,000 and 16,000 underqualified positions in CA and FL (about 9% and 10% of their teaching workforce). It should not be the case that we think this is reasonable.

We can debate this question, but is it useful? The more important thing, I think, is to move beyond the rhetoric of what constitutes national or crisis, but rather focus on what can we do to fix this problem.

One thing to keep in mind is that we don’t have a national teacher labor market. We have 50 states/labor market, and hundreds and thousands of districts that have their own strengths and challenges. So I think we have to be thoughtful and judicious about our policy solutions.

We should make targeted policy decisions to meet current demands, esp at econ disadv schools, rural schools, and majority minority schools as well as for STEM, special ed, and bilingual ed teachers.

It is not the case that we have vacant positions in every district and in every school and equally for all subjects, so we should prioritize areas of greatest needs.

However, this assumes we have a reserve pool of teachers (who are certified but are currently not teaching) with those expertise or who would be willing to teach at these schools.

It is an empirical question as to how big that reserve pool is, and whether monetary incentives and otherwise would be able to pull them in and keep them there.

Similarly, we also assume there are STEM folks who would want to teach if they are properly incentivized. We don’t really know how well these assumptions hold up, and more importantly, whether these efforts could/would be carried out in states that need these teachers the most.

To this point, I think that for the long term health of our education system, for our kids and our students, we absolutely need to increase the respect, prestige, and salary for teachers and the teaching profession. I can't say this over and over enough times.

This will strengthen the teacher supply and decrease teacher turnover. Teaching is a noble profession, but that does not mean teachers should have second or third jobs to make ends meet. Should any profession require that?

Teachers should be treated like stars and celebrities. I, for one, would watch a show where we follow and feature awesome teachers in K-12 (and higher ed) every week. We have so many excellent educators in our country. Why don’t we have many more shows showing them off?

In terms of more concrete solutions, here are some excellent suggestions from excellent scholars and with some more nuances about this issue @emmagg01 @MatthewAKraft @schwartz_hl
brookings.edu/blog/brown-cen…

I think, in many ways, that even when scholars and policymakers debate about the finer points of #TeacherShortage #TeacherStaffingChallenges, the solutions are similar and that’s what matters most!

Let’s get to thinking about how each of us can participate and contribute to these solutions.

On a more personal note, it is incredibly hard (at least for me) to simplify complex, nuanced research down into 20-second soundbites. From this experience, I have learned to appreciate those of you who engaged in the public discourse of our education system day in and out.

I have also learned that many local papers can do a really thorough job of discussing the nuances, and we should do what we can to support our local papers.
themercury.com/news/education…
cjonline.com/story/news/edu…

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1564370…
@threadreaderapp unroll: what a neat feature!