Is the Teacher Shortage Real?

We talk a lot about the current teacher shortage. I've posted about it numerous times. But the question remains-- is there really a teacher shortage?

A study released this month by the National Center for Educational Statistics suggests that everything we think we know about the Great Teacher Shortage is wrong. Or at least, it was wrong as of four years ago. The study is pretty straightforward, and it's worth making a note of.

The writers are Nat Malkus of the American Institutes of Research with Kathleen Mulvaney Hoyer and Dinah Sparks of Activate Research, Inc. AIR is also in the test manufacturing biz (SBA is their baby) and Activate is a "woman-owned small business" in the metro DC area focusing on research and policy. They created the report under the aegis of NCES, an arm of the USED Institute of Educational Sciences, so while none of these are without blemish, this is not another Gates-funded fake research project.

The report looks at four samples of data from the 1999-2000, 2003-2004, 2007-2008 and 2011-2012 school years, and it looked for answers to fairly straightforward questions:

1) What percentage of schools reported teaching vacancies or hard-to-fill spots?

2) What percentage of schools found these positions related to particular subject areas?

3) Did persistent hard-to-fill spots correlate to any school characteristics?

The report is easy to read through and contains lots of charts, but the answers reached by the researchers are not necessarily what we might expect. Let me just hit the highlights.

The percentage of schools reporting vacancies and hard-to-fill spots in 2011-2012 was down from 1999-2000. In fact it's the lowest of the four years.

Those percentages were also uniformly down for all subject areas, including math and special ed.

High minority schools still experience more staff challenges than low-minority schools, but 2011-2012 was still dramatically lower.

Title I schools have a harder time than non-Title I schools, but 2011-2012 was still better than all other years (I'm just going to write "pickle" every time this is the case, to save myself some typing.)

Large schools have it harder than small schools, but pickle.

When comparing city, suburban, town and rural schools, the most staff challenged schools have shifted over the four year. Cities used to lead the challenge with rural schools having the lowest percentage of staff challenged schools. In 2011-2012, suburban schools reported the fewest problems. Cities still has the most, but in all four categories, pickle. Big pickle.

I don't know what explains the pickle, and to their credit, the reports writers take a stance of, "We're just here to show you the numbers, not to make wild-ass guesses about why the numbers are what they are." The appendices give some number breakdowns and report on methodology, and while I am no trained stats cruncher, I don't see anything that sets off whopping alarms.

So am I thinking that I'll just stand down because the teacher shortage turns out to be all in my head? No. No, I'm not.

First of all, I have a certain amount of trust in my head, so I don't just throw away my head's ideas willy-nilly. I am , however, open to the notion that the teacher shortage is partly an artifact of the media's tendency to focus on a story thread and magnify it (e.g. the great shark summer of 2001).

In Pennsylvania, I know exactly why the numbers would reflect a not-shortage of teachers-- we've been shedding jobs left and right, dropping 2000-5000 teacher jobs (depending on who's counting) every year for several years. This is doing a great job of setting the stage for a teacher shortage, as college students repeatedly declare a major in Anything But Teaching. The ABT major is actually leading some college ed departments to shrink or collapse. The choking off of the teacher pipeline sets the stage for a combination of overcrowded classrooms and an actual teacher shortage.

My reading of teacher shortage bulletins is that teacher shortages are highly localized, and while the study's sampling of around 8,000 districts would ordinarily be plenty, I have to believe that the specific samples could make a huge difference.

But mostly what these results say to me is, "Holy smokes! We have plunged into a bad place very quickly over the last four years!"

Take for instance Scott Walker's Wisconsin. Here's a piece that lists the growing effects of Walker's gutting of the state's education system-- from November of 2011. In other words, the most recent data sampling in the study was being gathered just as Wisconsin schools were starting to feel the crunch. Quick quiz: have things gotten better or worse in Wisconsin since 2011?

Or North Carolina, another state that moved rapidly from a progressive education-supporting agenda to a state intent on driving teachers out.

Over the past four years, things have gotten far worse pretty quickly in schools across the country, from Race to the Top to Common Core testing. And in 2011, schools were seeing the last of federal stimulus money that allowed schools to keep hiring. When the stimulus money ran out, many districts starting cutting staff to match.


Take a look at this snip from the fed's chart on teacher employment. The first column is total teachers, column two is public, and column three is private (numbers are in thousands of teachers). 2011 is the last year for which we have hard numbers. Note that teacher employment peaked in 2008, and we've been declining since. Nothing like cutting 100,000 jobs to help reduce the number of vacancies you're trying to fill. Put another way, the study shows that 1999 was the worst in terms of unfilled jobs, but as we added more teachers, the vacancy percentages dropped. But then the last drop coincides with a drop in number of jobs to be filled. There are two ways to solve an unfilled vacancy problem, and we have now tried both. Which approach do you think is more likely to fix things in the long run?


I'm saving a link to this study, because I believe it sets the stage for what's to come. I expect that when the next data set is added from further inside the reformy abyss, we'll see charts with upward hooks. I believe that the story will be, "Well, things were getting better, but then ed reform switched into overdrive, and it all want to hell pretty quickly."In short, nothing in this report contradicts the perception that a troublesome teacher shortage has appeared in the last four years.

I get that the Teacher Shortage is a complicated issue, for reasons including the desire of everybody on every side of the education debates to use talk of the shortage to support whatever point they'd like to make. But this new report definitely doesn't make me think that everything's actually okay, and I look forward to seeing more data when it finally appears.

Utah Does Not Love Test It Sold To Florida

A hat tip to Jeffrey S. Solochek of the Tampa Bay Times for spotting this story.

Utah has been at the forefront of Common Core adoption, and they have been at the forefront of backing the hell away from the standards as well. They backed out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium back in the summer of 2012, citing concerns about federal intrusion, and they tried hard to keep arguing for the Core. But Utah had been playing with adaptive testing since 2009, adopting a legislative requirement to develop such a shiny test in 2012.

Of course, "develop" actually means "hire somebody to develop a test,' and Utah went with AIR (American Institutes for Research). AIR has been the ugly step-sister in the Race To Make Lots of Money from Testing. In 2014 they tried to sue the PARCC folks for creating a "bidding" process that declared that you could only win the contract if your company's name started with "P" and ended with "earson," but back in 2012 they did have one big score-- they landed the contract to develop the SBAC test. So Utah dropped out of the group that had hired SBAC to write a computer-based test of The Standards so that they could hire the exact same company to write a computer-based test of The Standards.

The test was to be called the SAGE, and in its rollout it bore a striking resemblance to all the other CCSS-ish tests, particularly in the way that it showed that Utah's students were actually way dumber than anyone expected so OMGZZ we'd better get some reformy action in here right now to fix it, because failing schools!

Meanwhile, in other States That Decided Maybe Common Core Was Very Bad Politics, Florida also dumped the SBAC. In 2013, Governor Rick Scott took a break from harvesting money to decree that SBAC was out the door. But what would they do about the federally required test-of-some-sort?

So maybe Florida made a phone call. Or maybe AIR said, "Well, if you want a Common Core test with all those nasty federal overreach barnacles scraped off it, we already have such a product." And lo and behold, the state of Utah suddenly found itself about to make a cool $5.4 million by renting out the SAGE to Florida. And that, boys and girls, is one example of how we end up NOT having the cool national assessments we were promised as part of the Core, even though we simultaneously end up with the same basic test everywhere (but can never say so, because federalism and commies and Obamacore). It's the worst of all worlds! Yay.

But wait-- there's more. Even as Florida was borrowing a cup of SAGE, Utah-ians (what do we call people who live there?) were not done hating all things Core. Turns out lots of Utah-vites aren't stupid, and when you show them a test that walks and talks and quacks like a duck, and comes from the same parents as all the ducks, they do not believe you when you tell them it's an aardvark.

You can measure the desperate thrashing of Utah's educational thought leaders by this "fact sheet" about the SAGE in which they make such points as "SAGE test students' knowledge and skills, not what they believe" and "SAGE tests are not part of the Common Core but they do-- in part-- measure whether students know and understand the Core standards."

Apparently that's not enough. Benjamin Wood in the Salt Lake Tribune reports that Utah's lawmakers are not feeling the high-tech SAGE love. Rep. Justin Fawson didn't like the state board's plan to use the leasing income to beef up the test (or, in other words, take the $5.4 million and just funnel it straight back to AIR). Rep. LaVar Christensen doesn't think the SAGE data is trustworthy.

"The data comes out low and it's treated as an accurate assessment of where we are, when in reality it's inherently flawed," Christensen said. "If you're going in the wrong direction, you don't step on the gas pedal."

Additionally, SAGE has the usual problems, including a shortage of computers to plunk every student in front of, so that according to Wood, some schools start their end-of-the-year testing in, well, now. Wood quotes Senator Howard Stephenson, a lawmaker who, back in 2008, thought Utah's computer adaptive testing was the bee's knees:

"There will be legislation this year to create a task force to look at doing away with the SAGE test entirely," Stephenson said during a Public Education Appropriation Subcommittee hearing. "I think we need to be looking at the whole issue of whether we should be having end-of-level tests."

So why did I find this story in the Tampa bay Times? Because now we have the prospect of Florida buying a product from folks who don't want to use the damn thing themselves. "Try this," says the salesman, who when asked about his own use, replies, "Oh, God, no. I would never use this stuff myself. But I will totally sell it to you." Congratulations, Florida, on buying material that has been field tested in Utah (which is a place very much like Florida in that they are both south of the Arctic Circle) but which the Utahvistas don't want themselves. It sounds like an excellent bargain.