Teacher Shortage Abates

The great national teacher shortage is easing.

After long struggles to employ enough adequately trained teachers, school districts across the country this year received a windfall of applicants. Some systems that previously had relied heavily on day-to-day substitutes even had the luxury of turning away fully credentialed instructors.

The weakened economy is drawing people to the relative stability of teaching from such battered fields as technology and business management, according to school districts and teachers groups. Also helping, they say, are more aggressive recruitment campaigns, pay hikes and the steep rise of alternative credential programs, which make it easier and faster for people with college degrees to become teachers.

“It’s a convergence of very active recruiting with a down economy,” said Tom Carroll, executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit group dedicated to improving the quality of teaching.

But he warned that it’s too early to claim that the shortage is over. There is still a need for educators in math, science and special education. The attrition rate for new teachers has been very high. Plus, he added, interest in teaching may dwindle when the economy rebounds.

“School districts should not breathe easy. They should see this as an opportunity to attract more qualified teachers into classrooms,” he said.

Among the new crop of teachers is Reginald Grant, 47, former owner of a software company in San Diego. He left the struggling computer field in May after he saw a teacher recruitment billboard for an alternative program. He is now an English teacher at Gompers Middle School in South Los Angeles.

The technology market, he said, was soft. “Like everyone else, I had success and failures. I had reached my mecca in terms of those things. The bottom line was, I wanted to make a change.”

Grant said he wanted to mentor students. He applied online to the New Teacher Project, a national program that seeks mid-career professionals. He spent last summer attending training classes and working as an intern in a middle school classroom, alongside another teacher. Then he was unleashed to head his own classroom.

By the end of his first day of school in the fall, he thought, “What have I gotten myself into?” But midway through his first year, he maintains that it is “one of the best moves I have ever made in my life. Every day I reach kids.”

Around the country, the number of such alternative teacher training programs rose over the last two decades from just eight to 122, according to C. Emily Feistritzer, of the National Center for Education Information in Washington. Nearly 25,000 teachers in 45 states were funneled into the system in 2002 this way, she said.

Many of these programs put mid-career adults like Grant or recent college graduates without education backgrounds on the fast track to teaching credentials with a method that resembles boot camp: a few weeks or months of intensive training before being assigned to teach under a mentor’s guidance. They continue to take classes nights and weekends. Because those recruits usually receive less training than is provided in the traditional education degree program, some education experts question whether those programs lower the bar too much for hiring.

For school districts, the bigger question is: How many of these new teachers will stay?

According to a recent report released by the National Commission, which examined teacher retention rates from 1987 to 2000, almost a third of new teachers leave the classroom after three years, and nearly 50% leave after five years. The report cited the main reasons for this churn rate as poor working conditions, training and pay and stated that the problem had gotten worse during that time.

Melinda Anderson, a spokeswoman for the National Education Assn. union, said that if districts do not solve this “revolving door situation, simply hiring people this year and stamping this as ‘problem solved’ is way too premature.”

Hillary Meister, for example, turned to teaching last year after she could not land a job in journalism. Desperate to find work and eager to help youths, Meister leaped into teaching high school English in a rural school district in Florida and enrolled in an alternative training program.

But less than a year into the job, she burned out and quit.

“The internship did not prepare me for what I faced in the classroom,” she said. “You end up working an 80-hour work week, on top of overcrowded classrooms. They don’t pay teachers enough to go through that stuff. That’s why it’s harder and harder for them to keep new teachers.”

One inducement to stay is somewhat higher pay. According to a report released in July by the American Federation of Teachers, the national average for teachers’ salaries was $43,250 in 2001, up 3.4% from the previous year. California teachers were the second-highest paid in the nation, earning an average of $52,480. Connecticut teachers ranked first, earning $53,507. New Jersey, New York and Michigan were the next three.

The shift in hiring comes just in time. Schools are facing intense pressure under the “No Child Left Behind” law, which requires teachers in every state to be “highly qualified” by the end of the 2005-06 school year. According to federal standards, these include teachers who are credentialed or enrolled in alternative credentialing programs.

Across California, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and other districts have increased the numbers of credentialed new hires and reduced the numbers of “emergency credentialed” teachers, those who have bachelor’s degrees and limited education training but not enrolled in the fast-track programs.

L.A. Unified received 25,000 applications for 2,500 positions this year, officials said. About 49% of its hires were fully credentialed, compared with 33.5% the previous year, and only 25% in the 1998-99 school year. About 400 new hires were interns, enrolled in alternative credentialing programs, but an additional 900 were on the emergency credentials. (In California, lawmakers this week announced a bill that would abolish emergency permits over the next several years.)

The Inland Empire recruitment center, which seeks candidates for school districts in Riverside, San Bernardino, Inyo and Mono counties, reported that 68% of teachers hired through the program this school year were credentialed, compared with 32% the previous year.

Statewide, more than 200 former dot-commers, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, moved to education under the Technology to Teacher program, funded by a $1.6-million state grant that pays for tuition, books, testing fees, counseling and other support services. This year, Gov. Gray Davis plans to expand the program to include 1,000 former techies.

School districts in New York, Illinois, Texas, Georgia and other states have reported upward trends, partly boosted by other incentives, such as help with down payments on homes, rent discounts, signing bonuses and relocation grants.

However, the effect of budget shortages in many states on such hiring remains uncertain.

The L.A. Unified district boosted class sizes this year in upper grades because of budget problems. And some others in California have backed away from a kindergarten through third-grade class-size reduction program introduced in 1996. That kind of shift means more students per teacher, resulting in fewer hires.

Beyond all the economic troubles and credential complications is a stronger sense of public service among young people, said Ailin Tarbinian, a spokeswoman for Teach for America, a program that recruits college graduates to teach in public schools.

Teach for America received 14,000 applications for its 2002 corps, compared with just 5,000 in 2001. It placed 1,700 teachers in schools in low-income communities across the country, where they will stay for at least two years.

“After Sept. 11, a lot of people felt more compelled to get involved in nonprofits and do work that gave back to the community,” said Tarbinian.