Teacher Pipeline Still Drying Up

There has never been a lower percentage of college freshmen interested in teaching.

This comes courtesy of UCLA's annual survey of first time freshmen, a survey that has been collecting data for about fifty years. You can read the full survey results in a report here.

There are several interesting takeaways from the survey, including the finding that today's freshmen are more likely to protest than any freshmen in quite a while. Also, they feel financially strapped (especially women), less connected to a particular religion, and very focused on job prospects. Also, LGBTQ students are far more likely than their straight peers to feel overwhelmed and depressed.

But for the education world, the most striking data comes from the survey question asking in what field the freshmen plan to major. The percentage of probable education majors stands at 4.2%, the lowest percentage ever since the question was first asked in 1971. And that 4.1% comes at the end of a fifteen-year decline-- at the turn of the century, the figure hovered around 11%.

The other dip in teacher enrollment came in the early eighties, when the numbers hovered around 6.5%. In that period of time, business majors were the burgeoning group. Currently, physical and life sciences are the only big growth, followed by a small bump in engineering.

The big topic for discussion is, of course, why. We can sort through other factors (there is a great interactive chart here) to see if there's anything special about this generation of freshies.

Some of the info is worth knowing about for those of us who teach high school. These college freshmen feel more overwhelmed by all that's required of them than any previous group. Also, a smaller percentage than ever before got into their first choice college. More than ever factored "getting a job" into their college choice (over 80% for the last seven years). On the other hand, the percentage who consider themselves better than average writers hasn't budged much in twenty years (mid-forty percent). Self-assessment of spirituality, mental health and physical health is slowly marching down, while self-assessment of academic skills is slowly climbing.

So where did they all go?

I'm not sure that anybody is surprised by the collapse of the teacher pipeline. But for the sake of completeness, let's rattle off most likely culprits for those people who are actually uncertain how such a thing could happen.

$$$$$

This was Suspect #1 on the list for NEA's response. States like North Carolina and Kansas have done their best to keep teacher salaries low low low, meaning that someone who was actually going to college could reasonably conclude that any other major in the world would provide a better chance of making it possible to live like an independent, family-supporting grown-up. When we start looking at notoriously expensive-to-live places like Las Vegas or Hawaii, the money problem just gets worse.

Diminished Role of Teachers

This year's freshmen have never known anything except the twin reformster regimes of No Child Left Behind and NCLB-Lite (waivers and Race to the Top). They grew up in a world where the Big Standardized Test was the be-all and end-all of education and where teachers are increasingly directed to serve as content delivery units. The sense of mission, the dedication to a higher purpose, and the autonomy to make a difference in the world by using one's own unique skills and gifts-- that has all been increasingly stripped from the profession, and these students have watched it happen, or, worse yet, arrived on the scene after the stripping was done.

"I can hardly wait to start a career where I can follow orders all day and try to help just one student bubble in just one more right answer," said nobody, ever. Also, "I want a job where I go to college and get an expensive education, and when I come out, I don't make any difference at all-- it could be me or some other shmoe off the street, doesn't matter." Nobody ever said that, either.

Diminished Stature of Teachers

It's not the drip-drip-drip of Huffington Post's relentless curating of criminal teacher stories. It's not the same-old-same-old insistence of some folks that teachers should get minimum wage because we only work part time. It's not even the vilification of teachers' unions as agents of evil in society as a whole. None of this is new. What is new is the Hunt for the Legendary Bad Teacher becoming a matter of policy and law. What is new over the last two decades is the insistence that teaching is no more a professional field than is bagging groceries. Get five weeks of training. The Las Vegas Journal-Review joined a chorus calling teacher certification requirements unnecessary and "protectionism." There's nothing special about being a teacher.

And meanwhile, while education is discussed on tv and in boardrooms and in politics and in a variety of media events, nobody ever talks to a teacher. The slow-but-steady effect is the hammering home of the message that when it comes to education, there are many experts, but none of them are actually teachers.

Job Security

Back in my day, sonny, you accepted that teaching had relatively low pay and accepted that as a trade off for job security. If you did a good job, you could relax knowing that you could plan a life without looking around every corner for some job-snatching catastrophe. But now we've removed all manner of job protections across the country, while still pushing to get rid of more. Low pay plus the prospect of losing your job at any time for any reason?? Yes, please! (For those who want to respond, "Yeah, just like any other crappy job in this country," see previous point.)

Lack of Role Models

If you are not a white female, the odds are good that you could get through most of your K-12 education without ever seeing a teacher who looked like you. That means that even when you were in a good class with a good teacher who didn't look like you, the part of your brain that would say, "Boy, I can see myself doing this," was less likely to be awake.

Job Availability & The Substitute Problem

Even as many districts go begging for teachers, many geographical areas have a glut of teachers in certain teaching specialties. In many areas, jobs are scarce because financial pressures are slashing programs and positions (in PA, we have shed thousands of teaching jobs every year for almost a decade).

Back in the day, an aspiring teacher could ride out a tight job market by substituting-- it kept you from starving and let you basically audition for districts so that when an opening did appear, you were right on the spot and a known commodity to boot. But substitute teacher pay has kept up with inflation only slightly better than the minimum wage has, and most aspiring teachers can't afford to substitute without some other source of support.

So bottom line

Many local districts and many states have done their utmost to make teaching as unattractive as it could possibly be. No respect, no autonomy, low pay, no job security, poor work conditions, no control over your professional fate, and treated as if you're a child. What could be more appealing?

I keep waiting for Free Market Acolytes to read the writing on the wall. After all, the invisible hand is very clear on this-- when people don't want to buy what you're selling, when people do want to take your job under the conditions you've set, that is a clear sign that you have undervalued the merchandise.

It has always been an oddity of teacher-related education policy-- there is always the presumption that teachers must be teachers, that they cannot choose to be anything else. This is not true. People may choose to be teachers. Or they may choose not to be. Right now, a whole lot of college freshmen choose not to be.

If you want to buy a Lexus for $7.95 and nobody will sell one to you for that price, that is not a sign of a automobile shortage. If you want to hire a surgeon to cut your grass for $1.50 an hour and nobody will apply for the job, that is not a surgeon shortage. If you want people to become teachers under the current job conditions (and that is a large-ish if because it's possible that some folks think it would be easier to run education if teachers would all just go away), and fewer and fewer people are biting, that is not the sign of a teacher shortage-- it's a sign that you need to make your job more attractive. This seems obvious to me. We'll see if anybody in power can figure it out.

Charters Can Always Quit

We can talk about many troubling features of charters and the many rules from which they are exempt. But perhaps no difference is more troubling than this one-- charters are under no obligation to keep providing students with an education.

A popular selling point of charters is that they will provide for poor kids the same sort of rich choices available to wealthy kids. But that's increasingly not how things play out. As Wendy Lecker reports from Connecticut, for example, government is shifting education dollars away from poor public schools. In New York City, we see charters literally push public schools out of buildings, while in places like New Orleans the public school system has been allowed to simply collapse. People are now telling me stories of places where a new charter school is opening within a stone's throw of an existing public school.

In short (and some charter advocates aren't shy about saying so), the dream is not supplement the public system, but to replace it.

What does that look like in ten years?

It's not that public school systems don't ever systematically underfund schools that serve non-wealthy non-white students. It's not that public schools don't ever become part of a system that discards and underserves large chunks of the population.

But public schools have laws they must answer to. Kansas has been trying to systematically underfund its poorest schools, and the Kansas state supreme court ruled they were violating the state constitution and ordered the legislature to come up with a better system. The legislature is fighting back, but they are having to literally change how government works in order to escape their legal obligation to educate their students.

What do charters have to do to escape their legal obligations to their students? Ha! Trick question-- they have no legal obligations to their students. In the last fifteen years, thousands of charter schools have closed, some of them in the middle of the year, some of them in the middle of the night. Charter schools are first and foremost businesses; profit or non-profit, they are ruled by their bottom lines. They have no obligation to provide the same services-- or any services-- from year to year.

In fact, recent case law suggests they don't even share a public school's need to recognize student civil rights-- after all, the students are customers in a business, not citizens in a government institution. A charter school doesn't need to recognize a customer's right to freedom of speech any more than McDonalds does.

So, won't the free market even this out? Maybe it is possible that the public will start to understand that just because a charter school has the word "school" in its name, that doesn't mean it has a school's legal obligation to stay open and recognize certain student rights. And maybe it is possible the Market Pressure would force charters to provide swell education no matter what. But I don't think that's an answer.

First, even if the market did help sort issues out, students will not benefit by spending chunks of their childhood being batted from place to place by the invisible hand.

More importantly, education is a rare example of a "free market" system in which the government helps one party (the charters) by working to put the competition (public schools) out of business by stripping it of resources, funds, and support.

But one thing remains traditionally free marketty-- once a charter has "won" the local market and best the competition, it can do as it likes. It can quit the market entirely if it decides that prospects just aren't as good as it hoped. It can scale back operations dramatically, dropping either services offered or number of students served. It can squeeze and squeeze as it searches for growth in its operation's financial prospects. 

New Orleans is a clear example of the dangers involved. If even 50% of the charter companies operating in New Orleans decided next week that it no longer made business sense to operate there, what would happen next? Is there enough of a public school system left to go back to, or would those students just be out of luck? Would they have to settle for whatever low bar the market was willing to clear ("Well, we can probably make enough revenue if we just have one teacher drilling 200 students on basic math problems for two mornings a week. That's what we can afford to offer-- take it or we're closing up shop, too").

By switching to a charter school, a family gives up the promise that their child, as a US citizen, is entitled to a free education no matter what. The irony is that the onslaught of charters is forcing some public schools to imitate charters in this one way-- to turn their back on the mission of pubic education to educate every child.

The dark picture that is the most clear result of the modern charter boom is a future with a two-tiered system, with a well-funded charter system that serves a small, select percentage of the country's students, while the rest of the students are condemned to an underfunded, collapsing, hugely debased public school system.

But that is not the worst possibility, the darkest charter future-- in that future, a select few enjoy a fine education, and large chunks of the US have no schools at all. Giant chunks of the US, condemned as unviable business prospects, get minimal shadows of actual schools, or are simply abandoned, their educational infrastructure sacrificed to the charter gods, their local tax base unable to support a rebuild, and their state unwilling to foot the bill to recreate a public education system.

Of course, some level of regulation can guard against some of this, though a charter school that operates under the same regulations as a public school might as well be a public school. And no amount of education law can force a business to stay in operation against its will, so no amount of regulation will force charters to be responsible for students' right to an education.

Charters can always quit.

 

And Britain, Too

It is worth remembering that the privatization of public education, the hollowing out and dismantling and selling off the parts, the diversion of public dollars to private pockets-- we aren't the only country suffering through this movement.

Britain is also wrestling with similar issues. In particular, there's the matter of Multi-Academy Trusts, which appear to be like our Achievement School Districts, except with even less pretense of doing anything other than letting private corporations take charge of, if not the actual education, at least the money earmarked for it. In addition, the MAT process appears to completely wipe out the identity of the academies.

I could explain more, but instead I'd rather direct you to the work at the blog Disappointed Idealist, a British teacher who was just passed along to me (h/t to Fred Bartels) on the theory that I might find his style appealing. Good theory. Here's the DI explaining how the MAT process works on local identity:

A Multi-Academy Trust is not a club of independent schools working together for greater harmony, happy children skipping through daisies drinking coke, and the chance to teach the world to sing. This is a very common misconception. Some people will swear blind that their schools retain power and independence within their MAT. They’re wrong. They don’t actually even retain their own identity. No, a MAT is more of an acid bath of schools. The individual schools go in, but they don’t retain their identity once in there. The MAT your school will be forced to join IS the ONLY legal entity. Your school effectively ceases to exist.

So let me usher you along to this latest post, The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Schools. Or “Of Course It’s Bloody Privatisation” You may not recognize all the terminology or the names of the players, but in the hands of this very able writer, you will have no trouble recognizing and understanding the process he's discussing.

Pearson: ESSA Won't Hurt Us A Bit (But Karma Might)

AFT, Pearson, and Karma

It may be one of the most common remarks of the push back against reformsterism-- "How would these untrained non-educators like it if I showed up at their office and told them how to run their business?" And chief among the people among the folks showing up in our classrooms to tell us how to do our jobs would be the folks at Pearson, the giant publishing conglomerate that has not only ridden the bus to the bank, but has also changed the tires, punched the tickets and occasionally taken over driving.

So it is with a certain amount of schadenfreude that I note that the AFT has put together an alliance of stockholders to tell Pearson how to run their business.

The resolution tells Pearson management that A) they had better look at strategies to increase profitability and B) those strategies had better be something other than an emphasis on testing.
The resolution starts with the observation that Pearson stock has taken a 40% dive in the past seven months.

Pearson has a response. Initially, it was five part, including the general observation that Pearson's strategy was, the stock is doing better now, testing is just a small part of their revenue-- oh, and this:

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) does not eliminate assessments. The act maintains the federal testing requirement but provides states with greater flexibility in how they use the results of the tests.

In other words, Pearson remains confident that the new law will not make the slightest dent in the market for crappy standardized tests. Do remember that the next time some educrat or reformster is saying that ESSA will totally help with the blight of toxic testing in education. Remember that the leading manufacturer of those tests doesn't see a thing to worry about.

Meanwhile, the sniping back and forth between the resolution backers and Pearson has continued, and it creates a fascinating tableau.

On the one hand, I suppose it's possible that AFT has become so plugged in to corporate world, including investing in public education's most toxic enemies, that they are actually unironically rooting for Pearson to make more money.

But on the other hand, this may be a masterpiece of corporate baloney  and concern trolling. If that's so (and I think it is and I really want to believe it is), then in this instance, AFT has mastered the reformster art of using expressions of legitimate concern and the language of industry insiders to mask a entirely different agenda. When I read AFT doing things like calling Pearson “tone deaf to the pain felt by shareholders,” it helps me believe a little more in karma. Teachers bothering boardrooms and telling corporate tools how to do their job? It doesn't get more karmic than that.

KS: The Legislature's Coup

What do you do when your state supreme court rules that you must spend more money on your public education system?

Several states have faced this challenge, and most of them have gone with something simple, like "Just ignore the ruling" (looking at you, Washington state). But Kansas has decided to take a more direct approach.

The funding problem has been brewing for a while, with the Gannon vs. State case dragging on since 2010. In 2014 the court ruled that the state had to fix the inequity of its funding for schools, and the state used a block grant to paper things over for a bit, but now the court has ruled again, giving the legislature till June 30 to get their act together.

Kansas has been a mess for a while now. Governor Brownback and a GOP legislature has tried to turn Kansas into a free market laboratory, with "business friendly" tax cuts that have put the state's finances in free fall. The attempt to implement a full-on super-GOP model is leaving the state broke. Tax cuts for the wealthy didn't trickle down, and the state is now in a mess (while Brownback runs the standard playbook of throwing attention to social issues, as if gay marriage is somehow responsible for Kansas poverty). It is no wonder that education is underfunded in the state using a formula that the state supreme court says is unconstitutional.

And that's not all. Kansas has voted to allow unlicensed persons to teach in the classroom. They voted to strip teachers of all job protections in a bizarre fracas that featured the Koch Brothers coming to Topeka to extort votes out of moderate GOP members (Nice re-election prospects you have there. Shame if anything happened to them). They have suggested that teacher evaluation could be handled by the school janitor. And they have been watching a steady exodus of teachers from the state. All that on top of the purposeful and deliberate underfunding of education, which is where the state supreme court shows up to tell them they are violating the state's own constitution.

 The official Kansas Road To Nowhere









So back to the problem-- what do you do if the courts tell you that your legislation is illegal?

You change the laws so that you can get rid of the courts.

The Kansas legislators are trying to redefine "high crimes and misdemeanors" for which judges can be impeached to include such items as "attempting to subvert fundamental laws and introduce arbitrary power," "failure to perform adequately the duties of office," and, most spectacularly, "attempting to usurp the power of the legislative or executive branch of the government."

This is a spectacular grab. Should this pass, not only can the legislature ignore court rulings it doesn't like-- it can use those court rulings as grounds for removing the offending judge from the bench. Charles Pierce at Esquire, speaking of the legislature in an article accurately entitled "The Great Let's-Totally-F*ck-Up-Kansas-Experiment Is Nearly Complete" sums up the situation nicely:

They recognize no limits to their power, no curbs to their desire. There are few frontiers in democratic government that they will not work to violate, or to twist to their own purposes. And they absolutely will not stop. Ni shagu nazad, as Stalin said to his army. Not one step backwards.

Oh, and either to make things seem better, or to hedge their bets against any future elections, the legislature also wants to extend this language to members of the executive branch as well.

This is a reminder once again that attempts to gut public education are often just the tip of the iceberg, one more arm of the big-money octopus that finds democracy unpleasant and unpalatable because it lets The Wrong People have a voice in how their country and state are run. Better to shut down any and all dissenting voices, even if those voices are coming from officials in robes, and even if shutting down those robes represents a baldfaced attempt to overturn the principle of checks and balances. Balance of power? We'll tell you how power should be balanced-- we should have all of it and people who disagree with us should have none of it. And when our state's economy is spinning out of control toward a cliff made of the burning empty husks of failed economic policy, nobody had better dare to try to give us a reality check. Our will can triumph over reality itself, as long as no other voices are allowed to speak.

Look for the Kansas legislature to pass laws stripping PhD's from scientists who insist on pointing out that the earth is not flat and gravity is not small invisible gnomes. Maybe they'll also legislate the defrocking of ministers who point out that repeated and willful disregard for the well-being of other humans is an offense to God.

So, good job, Kansas legislature. You may or may not win the prize for Worst Legislature in America, but you've got a good shot at First Legislature To Drive Its State Right Into Oblivion. Maybe a new name would help. Maybe The Royal Republic of Kansastan. Or maybe you could go back to using democracy and actual not-already-discredited economic principles to run your state.

One Right Answer

Humans come out of the womb predisposed to believe in One Right Answer, and some of us spend our whole lives searching for it.

I watch my students (mostly high school juniors) struggle with it. There's supposed to be One Right Answer for which college to pick, which career to pursue, which partner to marry. One beloved fantasy has persisted for all the decades I have taught (and my years as a student before that). "I wish," says a student, "that somebody would just appear and tell me what I'm supposed to do. I wish somebody would tell me what the right answer is."

Growing up, I believed in One Right Answer even as I didn't. Like many fifteen-year-old, I believed that many of the right answers proposed by The People In Charge were wrong-- and that I knew what the One Right Answer really was. I went to college and learned there were two kinds of English professors-- those who believed that there was one way to read each work, and their job was to teach us what it was, and those who believed that there were many right answers, and their job was to teach us how to find an answer that could be argued successfully with evidence and sense. I decided I wanted to be the second kind.

I still thought there was One Right Answer to most of life's questions, and that was a belief that I rode right through marriage and into divorce, plus any number of other major and minor screw-ups. I believed that the way to navigate life was to lock the steering wheel in place and set a brick on the gas pedal, and if you hit a tree or drove off a cliff, that just meant you needed to recalibrate the steering wheel and get a different-sized brick.

Eventually, sitting in the rubble at the bottom of a cliff, I saw a light bulb (I never claimed to be a quick learner). The One Right Answer is that there is no One Right Answer. The best you can hope for is guidance by principle, relationship, context, and timing. You drive the car based on where the road goes, where you want to go, maintaining a speed that keeps you connected to the road, and turning the wheel at the right moment.

I believe that the most fundamental thing that we teach students is a view of How the World Works, and I also believe with all my heart that we do them a huge disservice if we teach them that the world is a place built out of One Right Answers.

When colleagues periodically suggest that we adopt one set of documenting standards for research papers to be used throughout the whole school, I always argue against it. "But why," goes the argument," should they have to use one set of standards in one class and a different one for that teacher and different ones when they write a paper in that other department." My answer is "because that's how the world works." When they get to college, different professors and departments will have different requirements. If they end up writing professionally, they will have to adhere to the local style guide. I still teach documenting and endnotes and bibliography and the rest, but the first rule I always teach is this-- the correct style is the one preferred by the person who is giving you your grade or signing your check.

Over the years, I have read calls from administrators for completely consistent grading systems within schools. I understand how undesirable it would be to have a school environment where grading systems varied wildly from teacher to teacher and day to day. I have personally experienced the frustration of being the teacher at a grade level who does NOT give the easy grades, watching students bail out for a transfer to lazier pastures. But what is the value in teaching students that they will answer to exactly the same standards no matter where they go or what they do? Will they get a standardized job for a standardized boss? Will they marry a standardized spouse and raise standardized children?

When dealing with actual human beings, you have to deal with the actual specific individual non-standardized human beings. Why would we not structure schools to teach that same lesson?

This is one of the reasons that charter schools often present the opposite of choice. Because they are set up around one very specific vision that is pushed down through every staff member, modern charters often can serve just one type of student. Meanwhile, larger, messier public schools offer a wide variety of educational styles under one roof. Students should be able to go to a school where they can find teachers and classes that match their personal style and interests; students are not served by a school in which all teachers and classes are identical interchangeable widgets. They should be able to go to such a pluralist school not just because it's better for their education, but because it's better preparation for real life.

Belief in One Right Answer is particularly problematic in difficult times. It is precisely the belief that gets you an ugly monstrosity like the candidacy of a Trump or a Cruz-- we are in trouble and we need the One Right Answer so let's turn to the guy who confidently asserts that he has it.

The belief in One Right Answer is the paving stone of the Road to Totalitarianism. Every Fascist and Beloved Leader made the same deal-- I will take all the power and give you the One Right Answer.

Yes, I realize that I'm arguing that allowing English teachers to require different endnote punctuation within the department is a step to fighting Fascism. I know it sounds like a large journey for such small steps, but I believe all large journeys are made of small steps.

And no-- I'm not arguing that we tell students that 2 + 2 = whatever they want to say it equals. For every question there are many answers, and some of those answers are easier to justify than others. Some vary over time and circumstances more than others-- 2+2 works out pretty much the same almost all the time, while "what shirt should I wear today" varies a great deal over time, space, individuals, and shirts. Somewhere in between we find questions like "What does Hamlet mean by 'to be or not to be'?" and "What caused the Great European War?" and "What do I want for a job?"

If we are not careful, we model for our students a world in which they are blind and helpless, trapped in a darkened room where there is one object-- chosen by someone else-- that they must fumble around for in hopes they'll know it when they touch it. Or we can model a world where they are free, clear-eyed, and know how to turn on the lights so that they can look around the room and find what they themselves have chosen to look for.

Belief in One Right Answer disempowers, limits and dehumanizes. And it's a bad model for how the world works. We don't have One Right Answer for whom we should marry (or not), where we should work, what car we should drive (or not), or how we should raise our children. We need our guiding principles, our sense of who we are, our understanding of the situation, our relationships with the other humans involved, and the particular moment in time that intersects with all the rest.

One Right Answer is not how the world works, and if it's not how the world works, then what sense does it make for schools to work that way? If we raise our children in a little world that works nothing like the world they will enter as adults, how will they ever succeed in that world?

ICYMI: For the First Day of Spring

It's nominally the first day of spring, so there's that. Here's some great reading from around the interwebs over the last week.

Cultural Competence: A Journey to Excellence

A short essay from Renee Moore about the importance of cultural competence in teaching

In Activist Era, High Schoolers Take to the Street

The Christian Science Monitor spots a trend-- the growing number of  high school activist movements, where they are coming from, and what they are accomplishing.

Gentrification and Public Schools-- it's Complicated

The title certainly covers the topic. A pretty thoughtful and detailed look at a complicated topic-- how does gentrification both affect and feed off public school changes?

Turmoil Behind the Scenes at a Nationally Lauded High School

Remember P-Tech academy, the high tech school that got so much attention that it was replicated widely and even mentioned in a State of the Union Address-- all before it was even close to graduating its first class? Turns out that they are running into some problems. Whoops.  

Disparate Measures

I kind of assume that if you read here, you definitely read Edushyster. But on the off chance you missed this one, well, don't-- Jennifer Berkshire interviews Dan Losen, the author of a new charter school story that finds that some aspects of the current charter industry are even more troubling than we thought-- and ESSA may make things even worse. How the an industry sold on civil rights is actually hugely damaging to them.

Fact Checking the Candidates

Well, the Democratic ones, anyway. Not the last word on the subject, but a fine compilation of some critical moments for Sanders, Clinton and public education.

Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

I love articles from back in the days when reformsters didn't think they had to be sneaky or clever about their intentions and methods. Set the wayback machine for 2011. This article from Dissent chronicles how the Big Three are using their money to take control of public schools. Still powerful and informative five years later.