The Public Teaching Crisis, Part 2
Steps We Can Take to Put More Good Teachers in Classrooms
Civic Way continues its public education series, exploring themes that affect every state’s public education system. This essay offers ideas for ending the public school teacher shortage. In future essays, we will discuss three other looming public education issues—unions, vouchers and accountability. The author, Bob Melville, is the founder of Civic Way, a nonprofit dedicated to good government, and a management consultant with over 45 years of experience improving public agencies.
We would serve our students better by focusing on attracting and retaining the quality teachers by raising teacher pay. – Jeb Bush.
Introduction
To make our public schools great again, we need to stop wasting our precious time and resources on contrived cultural issues. Instead, we must do everything in our power to put a strong leader in every public school and a qualified teacher in every classroom. Among other measures, this will require our school districts to recruit, develop and retain great teachers—and remove bad teachers.
In our last essay, we discussed the public school teacher shortage and some major causal factors for that crisis, including teacher pay, preparation and assessment. In this essay, we propose some potential strategies for fixing the crisis and ensuring the quality of public school teachers in every community.
Institute Stopgap Measures
From the outset, states and school districts should use available data to identify and forecast teacher shortages with greater precision. Where are the shortages most acute? Which teaching specialties are suffering most? Which schools, communities and grade levels have the most vacancies? This kind of information will help states and districts tailor promising strategies to specific staffing needs.
Teacher pay must be increased, but until then, other steps should be taken. Give teachers a bigger voice in school reforms. Grant teachers more control over their schools and classrooms. Repeal overly prescriptive, top-down statutes (e.g., Florida). And allocate teachers more time—especially during the summer break—for critical non-classroom tasks (e.g., lesson planning, professional development and parental communications).
States and school districts also should use other instructional resources to offset teacher shortages. Ease access to impactful digital tools. Add full-time swing substitute teachers. Hire more aides, coaches, counselors and virtual learning specialists. Use more graduate students for tutoring and after school programs. Use qualified volunteers for elective courses. Teacher vacancies demand a range of responses.
Upgrade Teacher Compensation Systems
While bigger paychecks don’t guarantee success, most large private sector organizations use compensation to attract and retain the best employees. Most public education sector studies show some positive correlation between increased teacher pay and improved teacher recruitment and retention. Many studies also suggest that good teachers ultimately improve student performance.
Some argue that public school teachers enjoy longer summer breaks and more generous benefits than most comparable professions. Others contend that public school teachers work longer hours than reported[i]. Both positions have merit and relevant data should inform any competitive analysis of teacher pay. Still, the teacher shortages and shrinking teaching pipeline belie claims that teacher compensation is competitive.
Upgrading teacher compensation systems should link higher pay with a shift from seniority-based pay to performance-based pay. Recommended strategies include the following:
Increase teacher base pay concurrently with longer school years and days.
Offer performance-based pay that will put combined teaching pay on par with similar professions.
Fund one-time bonuses for teachers who improve student outcomes.
Offer differential pay to high-performance teachers serving high-need schools or students or doing extra work (e.g., team leadership, teacher mentoring, student tutoring or community facilitation).
Offer retention bonuses to high-performing teachers extending their service[ii].
Provide multi-year contracts memorializing compensation and performance standards.
States should work with school districts and educators to test different performance pay models. For instance, they may authorize school districts to offer high-performing teachers alternative performance incentives (e.g., higher defined-contribution plan benefits instead of a one-time cash bonus). By testing alternatives, states could help school districts find the compensation features most likely to enhance student outcomes.
Competitive compensation attracts higher-quality teaching candidates, helps districts fill high-need teaching positions and boosts retention[iii]. The evidence linking better pay to better outcomes is less convincing, but higher teacher salaries—like higher pay in other professions—should increase the odds of better performance[iv]. Besides, exemplary teachers are more likely than other teachers to prefer performance-based pay programs[v].
Boost Teacher Preparation Programs
States, working with partners like the Chamber of Commerce[vi], should invest in improving teacher pipeline programs. The initiative should have three potentially competing goals: 1) make it easy for aspirants to assess their fit for teaching and, if necessary, switch to another field, 2) make teaching careers more accessible to qualified candidates and 3) enhance the overall quality of public school teachers.
Reconciling these goals won’t be easy but teacher preparation programs should never discourage qualified candidates from pursuing careers as public school teachers. Possible strategies for improving teacher preparation programs include the following:
Design cost-effective model teacher preparation program for states to emulate.
Institute or expand teacher cadet programs to attract promising high school students.
Offer incentives to students successfully completing teacher preparation programs.
Develop flexible degree programs to help young students gauge their interest in a teaching career—and switch programs—during their first two years of college[vii].
Assign coaches to help aspiring teachers fulfill teacher preparation program requirements while doing other coursework during their third and fourth years of college.
Reduce the time required to obtain an education degree (e.g., from five to four years).
Expand teacher apprenticeship programs and pay participating students[viii].
Design model testing process for new teachers (e.g., blend of factors like college admission process).
States must lead this initiative, especially in designing, developing and supporting the implementation of new teacher preparation programs. They also must fund new programs like teaching residencies, phase out mediocre teacher training programs and help develop rigorous assessment systems for aspiring teachers.
Streamline Licensing and Certification Practices
States should work together to build a multi-state licensing and certification system that minimizes unnecessary entry barriers and eases public school teacher mobility across states. Possible strategies include the following:
Integrate licensing and certification processes across states[ix].
Eliminate unnecessary testing variances among states[x].
Explore partnerships with for-profit certification programs to certify new teachers more cost-effectively.
Exploit opportunities for relaxing credentialing requirements for suitable positions (e.g., substitute teachers and qualified instructors with specialized subject-matter expertise).
Offer—and incentivize—specialized supplemental credentials for specific subject matters or grade levels.
In addition to streamlining licensing and credentialing processes, states should fund recruitment incentives[xi] for helping school districts fill critical teaching vacancies with promising or high-performing teachers.
Strengthen Teacher Assessment and Training Practices
Teaching is a demanding profession. The challenge of placing and keeping great teachers in public school classrooms cannot be overstated. In addition to building competitive compensation systems and robust preparation programs, states and school districts continually develop and assess teachers.
To that end, states should invest in upgrading teacher development systems:
Develop uniform, multi-state training standards, curricula and protocols.
Develop, designate and pay veteran teachers as mentors to share best practices.
Assign mentors to every teacher, especially underperforming teachers or teachers in lagging schools.
Establish—and fund—minimum teacher time standards for development.
Establish consistent feedback mechanisms, especially for under-performing teachers.
Increase use of partners to support teacher training programs (e.g., community colleges)
Develop data systems that link outcomes to training programs.
States also should develop a model multi-state teacher evaluation system with the following features:
Multi-factor evaluations using evidence-based measures[xii].
Quarterly observations of new teacher classroom performance withfeedback.
Annual observations of veteran teacher classroom performance with feedback.
Annual evaluations with written (an d redesigned) evaluation reports.
Written corrective plans for underperforming teachers.
Use of teaching mentors or teams to assessing struggling colleagues.
To have value, evaluations must have clear consequences (e.g., compensation and discipline). Superior performance should materially boost a teacher’s compensation. Inferior teachers, including those exhibiting poor teaching methods, should be subject to corrective disciplinary measures. Poor teachers failing to respond to positive discipline should be terminated.
Closing Thoughts
State education agencies should play a lead role in setting policies, promoting best practices and aiding school district implementation. They should collect and publish data to track teacher performance and hold districts accountable for assessing, developing and dismissing teachers. They should ensure the full alignment of local teacher preparation, licensing, certification and assessment practices with statewide goals.
Teachers matter more to student achievement than any other school-level factor. Great teachers improve short-term student growth and long-term preparation for college, career and life. Inept teachers hurt students and demoralize good teachers. Schools need rigorous teacher evaluation and development systems to retain effective teachers, support struggling teachers and dismiss inept teachers.