The Teacher Shortage: National Trends for Science and Mathematics Teachers

The shortage of science and mathematics teachers is a growing problem in the United States. This article looks at what research says about the causes for the growing teacher shortage and its effects on student achievement. As the teacher shortage worsens, teachers without a science or mathematics backgrounds are tasked to teach science and mathematics or underqualified teachers are being hired to fill the shortage. These underqualified teachers are not remaining in the profession, thus not solving the teacher shortage problem and creating an even higher turnover rate for teachers. In addition, experienced teachers are leaving the profession in greater numbers due to low salaries and job dissatisfaction. Research indicates that the initial preparation and support of teachers as they enter the profession is critical to surviving the beginning years and remaining in the profession. Additionally, well-prepared teachers have the largest impact on effective classroom practice and high student achievement

Initiatives to address teacher shortage

This paper is in response to an invitation from the Victorian Department of Education and Training to undertake a targeted review of effective teaching recruitment strategies. The paper provides a ‘snapshot’ of what is happening in other States and Territories and in selected countries overseas. The review is based mainly on information supplied by a small group of stakeholders (See Appendix 1) and derived from relevant printed and online resources. The main focus of the review is on the kinds of strategies that different educational jurisdictions have used to overcome teacher supply problems. The original intention of the review was to focus only on those strategies that were seen to be effective but this was broadened to include unproven and pilot strategies. This is because the majority of initiatives have only been operating for a short time, in some cases for less than twelve months, in other cases for only one or two years. This has not been long enough for an evaluation to have been carried out. A second problem relates to measuring ‘effectiveness’. Often the success of strategies is measured in quantitative terms, such as the number of applicants for teaching scholarships, the proportion of schools that report recruitment difficulties or the length of service in a remote school. The teacher supply problem is not simply one of increasing teacher numbers however. Before developing further strategies or refining the ones that already exist in Victoria, it would be worthwhile clarifying the criteria for ‘effectiveness’. Is the initiative able to attract the most able candidates, for example? Is it sustainable? Does it enhance the status of teaching? Does it encourage a long-term commitment from teachers? The problem of teacher demand and supply is both cyclical and complex with a range of interconnecting variables. It is usually most evident when ‘an underlying weakness in the supply pool is coincident with demographic or policy change which places additional strain on the supply pool’.1 This review looks briefly at practices in other Australian States and Territories, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and New Zealand

Solving the Teacher Shortage Problem in Ghana: Critical Perspectives for Understanding the Issues

The problem of getting sufficient numbers of qualified teachers to staff classrooms is one of the most significant public policy issues facing many countries. In Ghana, the problem of teacher shortage has been a perennial one, necessitated by educational expansion as well as adverse socio-economic and political circumstances, and exacerbated by high attrition rate. Efforts to find a solution are still ongoing. This paper aims to contribute to the search for solutions to the teacher shortage problem in Ghana. The paper takes the view that before education policy makers think about whether to recruit more teachers or retain existing teachers, it is important that they clearly understand the complex nature of the phenomenon of teacher shortage. The paper, therefore, reconceptualises the phenomenon of teacher shortage, clarifying it by disentangling and explicating its constituent variables. It also discusses various policy options for addressing teacher shortages, and indicates the implications of those options for teaching quality and teacher status. The ultimate objective is to provide a framework for analysing the problem of teacher shortage in a more critical way so that any interventions would be more focused and appropriately targeted. Keywords: Attrition, qualified teachers, teacher demand, teacher shortage, teacher supply

Is There Really a Teacher Shortage?

Contemporary educational thought holds that one of the pivotal causes of inadequate school performance is the inability of schools to adequately staff classrooms with qualified teachers. It is widely believed that schools are plagued by shortages of teachers, primarily due to recent increases in teacher retirements and student enrollments. This report summarizes a series of analyses that have investigated the possibility that there are other factors - tied to the organizational characteristics and conditions of schools - that are behind school staffing problems. The data utilized in this investigation are from the Schools and Staffing Survey and its supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. These data indicate that school staffing problems are not primarily due to teacher shortages, in the sense of an insufficient supply of qualified teachers. Rather, the data indicate that school staffing problems are primarily due to a revolving door - where large numbers of qualified teachers depart their jobs for reasons other than retirement. The data show that the amount of turnover accounted for by retirement is relatively minor when compared to that associated with other factors, such as teacher job dissatisfaction and teachers pursuing other jobs. This report concludes that teacher recruitment programs - traditionally dominant in the policy realm - will not solve the staffing problems of such schools if they do not also address the organizational sources of low teacher retention

Teacher shortage: Dominican extends application deadline

In response to the current shortage of public school teachers in Marin and throughout the Bay Area, Dominican has extended its application deadline for candidates interested in the teaching credential program. The University is accepting applications up until August 22. In addition, Dominican is prepared for expedited review of applications

Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage

This study examines and compares the recruitment and retention of minority and White elementary and secondary teachers and attempts to empirically ground the debate over minority teacher shortages. The data we analyze are from the National Center for Education Statistics’ nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey and its longitudinal supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey. Our data analyses show that a gap continues to persist between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in the U.S. school system. But this gap is not due to a failure to recruit new minority teachers. Over the past two decades, the number of minority teachers has almost doubled, outpacing growth in both the number of White teachers and the number of minority students. Minority teachers are also overwhelmingly employed in public schools serving high-poverty, high-minority and urban communities. Hence, the data suggest that widespread efforts over the past several decades to recruit more minority teachers and employ them in hard-to-staff and disadvantaged schools have been very successful. This increase in the proportion of teachers who are minority is remarkable because the data also show that over the past two decades, turnover rates among minority teachers have been significantly higher than among White teachers. Moreover, though schools’ demographic characteristics appear to be highly important to minority teachers’ initial employment decisions, this does not appear to be the case for their later decisions to stay or depart. Neither a school’s poverty-level student enrollment, a school’s minority student enrollment, a school’s proportion of minority teachers, nor whether the school was in an urban or suburban community was consistently or significantly related to the likelihood that minority teachers would stay or depart, after controlling for other background factors. In contrast, organizational conditions in schools were strongly related to minority teacher departures. Indeed, once organizational conditions are held constant, there was no significant difference in the rates of minority and White teacher turnover. The schools in which minority teachers have disproportionately been employed have had, on average, less positive organizational conditions than the schools where White teachers are more likely to work, resulting in disproportionate losses of minority teachers. The organizational conditions most strongly related to minority teacher turnover were the level of collective faculty decision-making influence and the degree of individual classroom autonomy held by teachers; these factors were more significant than were salary, professional development or classroom resources. Schools allowing more autonomy for teachers in regard to classroom issues and schools with higher levels of faculty input into school-wide decisions had far lower levels of turnover