Plain English with Derek Thompson - America’s National Teacher Shortage: Looming Crisis or Media Myth?

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Students are going back to school this month. But according to many news sources, there won't be nearly enough teachers to greet them. The Washington Post has warned of a “catastrophic teacher shortage.” ABC World News Tonight called it a new “growing crisis,” and the Wall Street Journal warned of a “dog-eat-dog” scramble to hire underqualified instructors. Heather Schwartz, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation, explains why she thinks the "national teacher shortage" narrative is overblown, why declining teacher morale is a real story, and what's really happening in American public education today. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Heather Schwartz Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News, and I'm covering the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. With my new show, The Town, I'm going to take you inside Hollywood with exclusive insight on what people in show business are actually talking about. Multiple times a week, I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know, journalists, insiders, all of whom can break down the hottest topics in entertainment to tell you what's really going on. Listen now. Welcome back to plain English. I hope you had a nice Labor Day week. weekend. America students are fully back at school this month, and according to many media sources, districts won't have nearly enough teachers to greet them. The Washington Post has warned of a,

quote, catastrophic teacher shortage. ABC World News Tonight called it a growing crisis. The Wall Street Journal warned of a, quote, dog eat dog scramble to hire underqualified teachers, and we have several national surveys now that show a surge of teachers planning to quit or retire early. This sounds really, really bad. And for weeks, I've been watching the American national teacher shortage narrative bloom across the media landscape. And it made me curious, is it real? Or is it not? At the same time, in our inbox, plain English at Spotify.com, I'm not sure there's any other topic that has been more requested in the last few months than the phenomenon of the teacher shortage. We've got Marissa from Missouri writing,

quote, I'm a high school math teacher in Missouri. I have a math undergraduate degree, a master's degree in educational administration, as well as a master's in math. I'm curious if you could address the teacher shortage or teacher exodus that is happening and how it will impact America in the near future. We have Kevin who writes, there is currently a teacher shortage in the U.S. elementary school system. What do we need to do to help the next generation of students get educated. We have Eric who writes, it seems as if there's a national teacher shortage that is only going to keep getting worse. So I reported this out. I called a bunch of education experts to ask if the teacher shortage was real. And today you're going to hear from one of them.

Heather Schwartz is today's guest. She is a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation focused on K through 12 education. Heather is widely quoted, widely cited among education researchers and education reporters, especially on this issue, the state of the teaching profession. And fair warning, I think this episode might surprise some people, and I hope not upset them, because as you're about to hear, Heather does not entirely buy into the narrative of a national teacher shortage. But she also thinks there are some very serious problems with the state of the teaching profession. So the goal of this podcast is not only to pierce false and maybe overly catastrophic claims

about our school system, but also to make clear what problems with the American education system today really are catastrophic. As always, please continue sending your feedback, your emails to plain English at Spotify.com. I'm Derek Thompson. This is PlainEnglish. Heather Shorts, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. So in the last few weeks, we've seen all these news headlines about a national teacher shortage.

Before we get into the details of what exactly is happening here, under the hood, I'd love you to give me a thesis statement on how you feel about the news narrative of a, quote, catastrophic and quote, national teacher shortage. What do you make of that narrative and whether or not it's true? I think it's overblown. But it is a messy story to summarize into a neat single soundbite because the shortages varies so much by district and state. So yes, there are many districts that have shortages. Are they, quote, catastrophic? I don't think so. So let's talk about where there is a teacher shortage and what teachers there is a shortage of. Because to your point, this is clumpy, this is spiky. It's not a national phenomenon necessarily.

But there are clearly districts where shortages exist. There might even be entire states where shortages exist. And there might be specific kinds of teachers that districts are struggling to hire enough of. So help us understand the geography of this spiky shortage and which teachers, which kind of teachers are affected. And there might be shortages of teachers in certain schools and not others even within the same school district. So there is just layer upon layer of variation here. So right now it looks like shortages are extreme in Florida and Arizona. We've been seeing coverage about districts in those states, recruiting military vets to come into the classroom in Florida, switching to four-day school weeks in Arizona for lack of teachers. So that's one thing. So there's geography as a source of variation. Then there's specialty area. historically long before the pandemic ever started, there have been shortages in special education teachers, substitute teachers, math teachers, science teachers. And now fast forward to where we are now,

the areas where we hear district leaders saying they have the strongest shortages are in substitute teachers far and away. That is the area where the most districts say they have the greatest shortage. Bus drivers, special education teachers, and to lesser extent, elementary teachers, math teachers, science teachers, and other areas. Why are those positions historically so hard to hire for? They are, so historically, these are areas of growth. So there's an interesting paper that came out last year in 2021.

looking over a 30-year span from the late 1980s up through 2018. And over that time, the number of teachers nationally has grown from about 2.5 million to 4 million. So there's a significant increase in the total number of elementary and secondary teachers. What's been driving that? So the authors hypothesize, which I think is really reasonable, that, middle and high schools have increased the number of courses required for our math and science, thus triggering the need for more math and science teachers. The number of students who've been classified as needing special education services has grown significantly,

thus requiring a greater number of special education teachers. And then as elementary, there's been a class size reduction over that 30-year period from something like an average of 25 students per class down to somewhere around 21 or 20. I'm not remembering the exact number there. But if you're decreasing class size, you're increasing the number of teachers required to serve a given number of students. One thing that I'm hearing from your analysis is that a lot of trends that are historical are being treated as acute and specific to 2022. So we've seen historical difficulty to hire up science teachers and historical.

historical difficulty to hire special ed teachers and historical difficulty to hire substitute teachers. We've also seen over the last few decades that the Deep South and some rural areas have consistently struggled to hire enough teachers. And again, we're seeing that. There was a 2022 government survey that found that vacancy rates for special ed teachers specifically was four times higher than for physical ed instructors over the previous few years. So one theme that I think you could, that one could write, sort of pulling up from all of this, is that a lot of news headline writers in the summer of 2022 are treating, as specific to this year, issues that are relatively chronic in the education industry.

Is that a true upshot, number one, and number two, what, if anything, is special to 2022? Yeah. I do agree with that. I do agree with that media has been covering chronic problems and treating them as if they're not chronic. I do think that the pandemic has exacerbated chronic problems. For example, I think the substitute teacher shortage is more severe now than it was pre-pandemic. And why? Well, districts are competing with other industries for low-paid workers. Another thing I think is different now. during the pandemic, that's not just the same old, same old chronic problems that we've been seeing for decades, is that teacher morale has plummeted. So, for example, in 2016, before the pandemic ever started, 75% of teachers in nationally represented surveys, said that the stress and disappointments of the job were worth it. Okay, now we go forward two years in 2018, 72% teachers said that.

Now we flashed into 2020, just when the pandemic started, 58% of teachers said that the stress and disappointments of the job are worth it. Then in 2021, 51% of teachers, now 22, 44% of teachers. So that only 44% of teachers are saying the stress and the disappointments of the job are worth it compared to 75% what was that six years ago. One of the reasons, I think, why there's been this prevailing, narrative of a national teacher hiring crisis is you take that statistic. You take the fact that teacher morale has plummeted by, it looks like, 40, 44%, which is huge. And you combine that with the fact that local government education hiring has also declined pretty significantly. Right before the pandemic, there were about 8 million people who were employed, according to the federal government

under local government education. And that fell to 7.3 million. So it declined by about 700,000. And that it's only increased to 7.7 million. So we appear, at least underneath the rubric of local government education, to still be down 300,000 workers. I want to take this issue one by one.

I want to first ask you, if that's not teachers, who is it? And then let's talk about the issue of Teach him or Al. So we're down to 300,000 local government education workers. Who are they, if not teachers? Well, when the pandemic first struck, and we're in March 2020, schools just closed. Over that spring and summer, there was a significant decline in a number of paraprofessionals and cafeteria workers, bus drivers, other non-instructional support staff roles.

They left the industry, so to speak, and those number of, haven't completely recovered. So that's part of your story, Derek. There's also just natural attrition, like year-on-year teachers retiring, or are we deciding to quit at rates that are consistent with what they've been pre-pandemic? And districts not replenishing those roles in that 2019, I'm sorry, 2020, 2021 year. So that's part. So districts are now have been building back and in many cases expanding the number of staff that they employ above pre-pandemic levels.

And that's why I think we are seeing some of the shortages now, is that in some cases districts are trying to fill newly expanded open positions that they did not have pre-pandemic. on teacher morale, you know, speaking of chronic issues, teachers have been exhausted for a while, they've been underpaid for a long time, they've been stressed out, and you've just pointed out that according to polls, they are more burned out than ever and more inclined to quit than ever. And that is really, really important whether or not we call this phenomenon a teacher shortage. But as long as we're evaluating, whether or not a national teacher shortage is actually happening,

It seems really important to ask this question. What is the relationship between the share of teachers who say they are more inclined to quit and the number of teachers who actually quit? Like, we are seeing a huge rise in intention to quit the teaching profession, but are we actually seeing a mass exodus? We're not seeing a mass exodus. And the relationship between saying you intend to quit and actually quitting is about three to one. So about three times as many teachers say they intend to quit as actually go on and do quit.

This is based on one study. And then we did a similar study of principals and school principals and found a roughly similar relationship. So yes, it's inflated. When you say I'm tending to quit does not necessarily mean you're walking out the door. But what do we make of the fact that morale has been eroding? It's not just hovering at pre-tendemic levels. It's significantly eroding. Does that mean that teachers are potentially going to quit in a few years from now?

Does it mean that they are talking to their friends? Social networks is a really important way that teachers come into the field. And does it discourage prospective teachers from entering the field? And of course, it's bad for the teachers themselves to have that low morale, and it's bad for their students. So the morale problem, like you said, really matters in and of itself whether or not it translates

into teachers walking out the door. You said it better than I did, and I'm really, really glad that we're making a point to hit this hard because sometimes in, like, debunking a media narrative, someone in my position or maybe your position can come across saying, oh, there's nothing to see here.

There's no problem here. There's no catastrophic national teacher shortage according to the data that we have, and therefore you shouldn't worry about this. And I feel like it's much more reasonable to say, look, based on the data that we have, which, by the way, is pretty crappy across the board. We don't have great national data

on teacher vacancy rates, district by district across the country. But we're debunking that narrative, but we're still holding up this narrative that morale among the teaching profession is plummeting, and that could mean potentially a teacher shortage in the next few years, as it bubbles up and bubbles up and creates this wave of quitting for whatever reason.

So I think it's really, really important just to hit that point, especially hard. Any other point you want to make there before I move on to the next question? Well, yes, there is a story here, which is the morale story. That one, I think is not overblown. I do think it's very concerning. I do think it's national. I do think it really means that districts should be listening to their teachers because the sources of stress.

And we know that stress is the number one reason that teachers. leave. Like we, we did a survey of about a thousand teachers who left the profession, no longer teach, and asked why. Job-related stress was the number one, and it was about twice as common as low pay. That's not to say pay doesn't matter. Pay definitely matters. And in places with lower pay, it's harder to find teachers to fill the positions. Arizona being an example of that right now. So pay matters, but workplace conditions matter equally as if not more, for teachers. So this raises another question for me.

You're saying there is evidence for a nationwide crisis of cratering teacher morale. But we've just made the point that there are huge differences between school districts state by state, county by county. And teachers have been underpaid and stressed out for a long time. So why are we seeing teacher morale plummet across the country? Is it just the pandemic? There's a lot of hypotheses floating around and not a lot of firm answers. So the hypotheses floating around is that politicization of schools has increased teacher stress. Helping kids catch up

academically from the pandemic, another major source of stress. The mental health needs of students definite another source of stress. The student, the heightened rates of student misbehavior at school this year and last year, also in other source of stress. So at least those four are ones that are commonly bubbling up in surveys as sources of stress. We also see, it's something that I didn't mention as the cause of teacher shortages. So I'm kind of going back to one of your prior questions, is teachers sort, they migrate across schools and districts over time, such that certain schools, they're harder to staff and have much more severe shortages, aka high poverty schools, schools with a large number of students of color.

Those are often one in the same schools, and they tend to have historically and throughout the pandemic, they've had stronger teacher shortages. And teachers tend to migrate from hard to staff schools to easier to staff schools, from lower paid positions into higher paid decisions, from urban into suburban districts, for example. So we're seeing this complicating the picture even more, even though we have more teachers in the country nationally

than we did 30 years ago. It's not true that every district has sufficient number of teachers because teachers are moving internally across positions to ones where the working conditions tend to be easiest. So when I wrote my article in the Atlantic on the teacher, teacher shortage, the number one reaction from teachers, the number one critical reaction from teachers, was that I failed to account for a fact that there's been a huge decline in the number of qualified teachers, in the number of certified teachers. Do you see this as a real concern?

I do see this as a real concern. The fact that it's one thing to have a completely unfilled position, which is the vacancy rates that we've been talking about. And I'm saying that I think that the vacancy rates have been going down this year relative to the prior years in the pandemic. So that's a step in the right direction. Good. We need to, you know, even with an underqualified person, it's better to have a filled position than absolutely no one in the position. Is it good enough? No. We don't want these, a lot of underqualified staff in the position. So, and there are, in fact, many more underqualified staff. There's that paper that looked at looked at this across the country, and it's very regionally specific. So the degree of the problem

really depends on the where that you're asking. And so that, for example, it's high rates of underqualified staff in Florida and in Arizona. I'm working off memory here. I know there were some other states to Mississippi was another, where schools are having to find people who are not certified for the position to teach the position. This, yeah, this is very concerning for the long term to me because we, we already have teachers who could use more content knowledge on the whole. This is something that's, it's really important that teachers know the subject area that they teach.

Even when certified, there's some concerns about teachers needing to be better prepared for their position. Now we add this whole other layer, sort of a more extreme version of this, which is staff who are coming in, who are really quite unprepared for the position. And this does not spell good things for the students of these teachers. Obviously, there's variation in quality of teachers, but this is, as a trend, it's definitely going in the wrong direction. We want more qualified teachers in these positions, not the other way around.

So I do think it's a problem that we should be really quite worried about. And this might sound like a stupid question, but like, are non-licensed teachers worse teachers? Because I do know of some other industries where there are all sorts of occupational licensing funnels that people have to move through in order to work in that position. But sometimes that's just a lot of bureaucratic red tape.

Whereas on the other hand, clearly there exists such a thing as an underqualified worker, as a bad worker, and you don't want lots of people who are totally unprepared to teach math, who don't understand algebra, teaching algebra. So what do we understand to be the relationship between licensing and quality? There are benefits to licensing

where I think there's more gray area is the benefits of traditional certification versus alternative certification. And that's the alternative certification. I tend to be fairly agnostic about this and think that alternative certification has a place in the preparation because it's a way to draw more teachers into the field and help to diversify the pipeline of teachers. So alternative certification and certification, traditional certification routes

are both important and I think needed components of the pipeline building. The no certification whatsoever, these are emergency measures. Those I feel are band-aids and not ones that we should be looking to as sort of a long-term precedent to help find people to staff schools. So we've hit the narrative of the national teacher shortage. We've hit the issue of teacher morale. One of the most surprising things that I discovered when I was reporting out this story for the Atlantic is that I went into this story wanting to understand whether or not there was a significant decline in the number of teachers around the country. And what I discovered instead is that there's actually a significant projected decline

in the number of public school students that the National Center for Education Statistics projects that the number of public school students is going to decline every year for the rest of this decade. This is, in many ways, the opposite of a teacher shortage. It's like a student shortage, and that's kind of like a funny thing to say, a student shortage,

but it's a sharp and relatively severe decline in the number of students in public schools. Help me understand this. What is happening? What are we seeing in the data? And why is it happening? Well, there's demographic shifts just in the country at large. And I think that that is the number one reason for, like, a decline in birth rates, specifically,

is the number one reason for the decline, the projected decline in student enrollments, as opposed to parents systematically pulling their kids out of public school. and putting them into homeschooling or private schooling. There have been increases in both private schooling and homeschooling, but I don't believe that that is the driver of this decline in projected student enrollment in public schools. Really, primarily, it's the demographic shifts that we have in the country that is driving that trend. And what is it going to mean for teachers? Well, we have this sort of odd moment where it feels like we're kind of cresting.

We have a lot of federal stimulus funds that districts are obligated to use, and they're trying to ramp up staffing and services for children rightly to help them recover from the pandemic. At the same time, that's for stalling the kind of cuts that districts would be making in the absence of these federal stimulus funds to respond to a decline in enrollment that so many districts already have, even this year. So I do think that the decline in enrollment is reducing the acuity of the teacher shortage that we have this year, at least for some districts. So it's this combination of districts having ramped up hiring starting last year, some districts having declined enrollment, and the lack of teacher exodus. Those three things coming together, I think, are what is really helping to start to solve the teacher shortage that we have right now. So in New York City, K through 12 enrollment dropped by nearly 10% since COVID. Officials are expecting 30,000 fewer students this fall than last fall. And I made an error in the article, I think, that I wrote for the Atlantic.

I, in listing the reasons for that decline in students, mentioned a lot of parent motivations. I said maybe parents are frustrated by curricula changes that they see as too political. Maybe some parents don't like a new school lottery system that's been introduced in New York. Maybe other parents have decided that tutors and homeschooling are better options than keeping their kids in public schools that have all of this controversy swirling around them. And what you're saying is, yes, all those things might be happening for some parents. Some parents might be choosing to pull their kids out of public school for all of those reasons and more. But the most important reason why public school enrollment is projected to decline or is already declining, that only in New York, but nationwide, is not about parents. decisions or politics. It's about sheer demographics. It's about the sheer fact of the number of

Americans who were born four, five, six, ten years ago. And that as a result, those students simply cannot, students that don't exist cannot, you know, matriculate into public schools. Is that right? Yes. Okay. Want to make sure that we understand that. Because I think a lot of people who, including me, I mean, I'm tisking myself, who hear about sudden declines in school enrollments and fit that jigsaw puzzle piece and with everything that we're hearing about the politicization of school are going to leap to the conclusion

that of course it's about parent decisions and you're saying is no, that's actually a false narrative. This is mostly about demographics, which I think is so interesting. Yeah, it is true. The frustrating truth is it depends, right? In some sort of micro areas of the United States

and Manhattan might be one of them where the incomes are especially high household incomes. Yes, the parents, voting with their feet across different sectors of schooling could be a more important issue. I haven't looked at the New York number, so I can't speak to what proportion are pulling their kids out of public and enrolling them in private, for example. But that's plausible. That is a plausible story that could be driving New York City's enrollment decline. But I'm saying when you step back and you take that bird's eye view of the U.S., this is not a mass movement of parents voting with

their feet and de-enrolling their child out of public school and instead enrolling their child in private. Some have done that, but that is not the main driver. The main reason for this projected enrollment decline is, like you said, just demographics. How would you describe the quality of national teacher data? You're laughing. I'm searching for words. Let's see. Poor, terrible, contradictory, confusing, incompletes. We could go on.

Lots of bad adjectives. Why is it so bad? Why is it so difficult to just look at spreadsheets and describe reality in the education industry? Well, it's, I mean, the truth is it is quite complicated,

but it's, so there is no national source that is responsible for a collective and publishing these data in a timely fashion. The Department of Ed does collect data, but it has several year time lag on their estimates.

So, like, they published the Common Core of Data. They publish counts of staff. But the problem is there's across states, a particular problem, is that there is no national shared definitions of positions. So it's very hard to compare apples to apples. of whether a full-time teacher over here in math is the same category with the same category code ID. We don't have that yet as a full-time math teacher over in state B. So this is, it's a very

like wonky answer here, but it relates to this lack of shared terms and like people don't count vacancies the same way. They don't necessarily count underqualification the same way, and they don't count specialty areas in the same way. So trying to get to harmonize those is really a frustrating task at the moment. Let me try to summarize where we are here. The teacher shortage is clumpy, spiky. It is a local crisis rather than a national one. And there are a combination of reasons why some districts might be seeing teacher shortages right now, while others are not. They include Number one, some districts ramped up hiring with stimulus money after the pandemic, and they just can't hire fast enough. So right now there's a lot of vacancies there.

Number two, there's a lot of chronic issues, longstanding issues, that summer of 22 headline writers are treating as specific to this year. So rural schools, schools in high poverty areas have historically struggled to hire sufficient teachers. Substitute special ed teachers have been in short supply for a while. These issues are long, long dating. They're not specific to this year. And number three, in some districts, low-paying. is a major factor. So, for example, in rural eastern Arizona, a teacher can earn much more money if she just crosses the border and teaches in Western Texas instead. So, to-da, you have a teacher

shortage in rural Arizona in eastern Arizona because all these teachers, the people who want to teach, are just crossed the border and teaching in Texas. And finally, looming over all of this, you have the fact that the data friggin sucks. The data on teacher turnover and vacancies across the country is just rotten. It's terrible. Here's my question. What should parents do with this information? Parents should be looking to their own school districts' websites and information and public meetings to understand the degree of shortage in their specific district, which is likely to be substantially different from whatever the national averages are. So that's the first thing. It's not all districts have shortages.

That's the first point. some do. So I'm not trying to wave this away and say this is not important. It is important and shortages do matter. But in some places, it's because there's this combination of enrollment decline and expansion of staff, even where there's still a small set of shortages, the amount of staff per student has actually been going up. So I think parents can alleviate some of their worry if they see that their district is mostly staffed up already, especially if enrollment has declined, that means that the number of staff to student ratio is going up. And so we're seeing, so they don't need to feel as panicked that there's insufficient staff in the building when in fact

there may be more staff per student than there was pre-pandemic. So that's the first thing. But I don't want to act all pollyana about this because like I said, there are districts that do have real shortages. And it does matter. It is concerning to know that there's three unfilled math teacher positions in a given school and to know that they're being filled by substitute teachers or somebody who's underqualified for the position. So obviously that's something to, continue to talk to school principal and school district leaders about, and there's no simple solution for it. So that's one thing. And I should say no simple immediate term or short-term solution for it. But I think the biggest thing to have our eye on is what's happening to this profession long term, this going back to the morale problem. How are we going to be able to fill this position with a set of qualified experienced teachers who stick around. The stick around part is what I'm stressing here, because I am concerned about the rates of turnover

that have been pre-pandemic, it's been there, but if it has gone, the turnover rate has gone up somewhat, and it creates this churn within the profession or instability. And we want teachers to come into the profession and to gain years of experience, that's when we see that their instructional quality tends to improve significantly in those first years. So we wanted a place that's good for teachers to work

because that's a place that's good for students to learn. So as a parent, which I am, I care a lot about this sort of long-term prognosis of the teaching profession, and I want to make schools a place, that are good for teachers to prosper within and to stay. Heather Schwartz, thank you so much. Thanks, Derek.

I'm Derek Thompson. That was Plain English. Thanks very much to our producer, Devin Manzi. If you have any questions, comments, ideas for future episodes, please shoot us an email at plain English at Spotify.com. That's plain, no space English at Spotify.com. And don't forget to check out our new, beautiful, TikTok page. You can find us at at plain English underscore. Yes, that's at plain English underscore.

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