Earlier this year, the national teacher shortage received a raft of media coverage sounding the alarm about a drain of teachers and a lack of new applicants to take their place. This was quickly followed by a chorus of contrarian voices claiming this was not alarming but alarmist — that not as many teachers were quitting as expected and only some schools and subjects were short faculty.
That unhelpful contrarianism should be laid to rest by a working paper released last week by Brown’s Matthew Kraft and University of Albany’s Melissa Arnold Lyon, who put this moment into historical context.
“The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction over the Last Half Century” examines fifty years of data from various sources and reaches a stark conclusion: “The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.”
Every measure of the profession shows it is in gravely ill health: “prestige, interest, preparation, and satisfaction are at or near their very lowest point in over a half century.“ (Education Week has a helpful summary of the paper here.)
While I’ve seen some of this data before, a few points stood out.
When parents are asked if teaching would be a good career for their child, the answer is HELL NO.
When college freshmen are asked if they want to become teachers, the answer is HELL NO.
When teachers are asked in various ways if they are satisfied with their jobs, the answer is HELL NO.
Kraft and Lyon review various potential causes for these recent trends, which were headed south before the pandemic. Is it underfunded schools, teacher pay, the overall labor market, working conditions, reform efforts, school shootings? (The school shooting chart is so disturbing it deserves its own discussion.) They conclude that it is difficult to tease out individual causes.
Of course, there are even more reasons, such as a child mental health crisis years in the making, child poverty we’ve proven we can address but choose mostly not to, the politicization of curriculum, the constant smearing of educators by political actors.
I’ve written elsewhere about some of the many misguided efforts to address the teacher shortage. What the complex picture shows is that we’re giving teachers and potential teachers too many reasons to not teach.
In their conclusion, Kraft and Lyon hit a hopeful note: the teaching profession has recovered from previous troughs in its state and status. For a future post, more about what we can do.