Pennsylvania, like much of the rest of the nation, has been having trouble for over a decade recruiting and retaining teachers.
The pipeline has been drying up for a while. In 2009-2010, the state issued 14,247 teaching certificates. In 2016-17, it issued 4,412. Colleges and universities have been cutting teacher prep programs. We’ve seen a slight rebound—in 2023-2024, the state issued 6,612 certificates. But digging through the state’s Act 80 report on teacher prep and staffing still shows reasons for concern.
Last fall I spoke to Ed Fuller, a professor at Penn State and an expert on the teacher supply. According to Fuller, the commonwealth has been trending downward since a teacher supply peak in 2012-2013, and while the decline seems to have stabilized in 2019, the teacher supply has remained stagnant and far below what Pennsylvania schools actually need.
A report from Fuller and Emily Walsh at the Penn State Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis broke down the shortages into some important data points (you read my article about the report here at the Beacon). But the report sees much of the problem resting on the supply side; Fuller said that the state needs up to 8,000-10,000 newly certified teachers every year, but for a decade we’ve never done better than a few over 6,000.
In many districts, we are filling the gaps with folks working with an emergency certificate. But as Fuller and Walsh point out:
Even if every newly certified teacher took a teaching position in Pennsylvania, they would still not replace every classroom led by a teacher on an emergency permit.
A variety of solutions have been attempted. In Bucks County, several schools have launched Grow Your Own style programs that attempt to get students aimed toward teaching while they are still in high school. In 2018, Governor Tom Wolf announced a multi-million dollar residency program. Governor Shapiro has launched a program that provides student teachers with a stipend, reducing some of the financial stress that comes with that part of a teacher prep program.
It’s a complex and complicated problem, with some pieces that probably defy any sort of organized fix (How do we get politicians to stop calling teachers “groomers”). But lots of folks want to propose a solution. We can look at just one of those proposals to see how difficult the problem is to address in any meaningful and useful way.
The Big Ideas
PA Needs Teachers is a broad coalition of many education-interested organizations including the Pennsylvania Principals’ Association, several colleges, a few charter school organizations, the NAACP, and the American Federation of Teachers. But the main players here are Teach Plus and the National Center on Education and the Economy (we’ll get back to who these people are in a bit). Their stated goal is “end the teacher shortage crisis,” and to that end, they have issued several policy proposals for solutions over the years. Their latest attempt was issued earlier this month.
“Reimagining Teaching: How Strategic Staffing Can Empower Teachers & Accelerate Learning in PA” reflects the latest conference of PA Needs Teachers, and proposes that to “permanently address teacher shortages in Pennsylvania” as well as improve schools, “the job of the teacher must fundamentally change.”
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The report cites Fuller’s research about the high level of staff turnover in Pennsylvania schools, and notes that research shows that working conditions are most commonly cited as the reason teachers leave. They quote Richard Ingersoll (University of Pennsylvania), one of the most important researchers on the subject of teacher retention:
It’s not the students that drive teachers out — it’s the environment in which they are asked to teach.
That teacher attrition is most pronounced among rookie teachers and the most veteran, so the proposed solutions focus on those two groups.
The group proposes five structural features for to implement what they call “strategic staffing.”
Team-based staffing
Rather than one teacher, one classroom, the proposal suggests that teachers work in teams, perhaps adding support staff such as paraprofessionals, maybe others as well. The team would be collectively responsible for planning, instruction, and student outcomes for the group. Instead of one teacher teaching 25 students, four teachers teach 100.
Differentiated Roles and Compensation
Within that team, veteran teachers might be the team leader, with additional pay for additional responsibilities. Rookie teachers would receive support and training from their team leader. The report likes the term “Multi-Classroom Leader,” which suggests what the role might look like.
Structure and time for educator collaboration and support
There needs to be time and space for the team for planning, coaching, and mentorship, so that “professional learning is growth-oriented, job-embedded, and curriculum-aligned.”
Flexibility in school staffing and scheduling, with teacher voice in design
To do all of the above, schools will have to “think outside the box” when it comes to the structure of the school and the school day.
Integrated preparation pathways
Allow teachers to enter the field via college programs, or teacher apprenticeships, or para-to-teacher programs.
Should we get excited about the transformative possibilities of this model?
Short answer: no.
The report offers the oft-repeated observation that U.S. schools were created for the industrial era and haven’t really changed since then (Betsy DeVos made the same observation too many times to count). This observation simply isn’t true; the tools, the content, even the students in a classroom today are unlike anything seen a century ago. The report compares that old classroom to a Model T, saying the Ford Model T “represented breakthrough technology more than 100 years ago that wouldn’t serve us well today,” but one might just as easily argue that cars haven’t changed in 100 years because they still have four wheels, brakes, and seats.
The report presents us with a set of solutions that have all been tried before. Teaching teams and lead teachers were widely promoted in the 1980s and are echoed today in Professional Learning Communities. The state of Pennsylvania already requires all new teachers to be assigned a mentor teacher. Restructuring school days has been done on many scales across the state. There is nothing new in this report.
The idea of a medical model, imitating the interns, residents, and lead physicians of a teaching hospital has always held a certain appeal. The organization’s own survey shows that a majority of teachers are supportive of many of these changes.
The report points to a program in North Carolina as a similar idea in action. The online launch event invoked “international” models (without naming the countries). This group was promoting similar solutions a few years ago. Asked if any district in Pennsylvania was doing this, the presenters hedged, saying that a couple of districts were doing parts of the program.
So why isn’t Strategic Staffing happening?
Short answer: time and money.
When pressed for an answer about the financial implications of the program at the launch event, the speakers argued that it could be “revenue neutral,” but they skipped around the question of how exactly that would work (in North Carolina, it works by having the state grant a big chunk of money to every participating district).
In fact, the proposal lacks all sorts of critical specifics. If, as in their example, a team of 4-6 professionals teaches a group of 100 students, how does that physically work? Are the 100 students in one large classroom (which would pose real physical plant challenges in most districts)? If they are in separate classrooms, how are they divided up? If the lead teacher, the Multi-Classroom Leader, has to have time freed up to observe other classes and mentor rookie teachers, does that mean the other teachers on the team are working with huge groups of students? When the team meets for its planning time, what are the students doing? And if the team is doing their planning as a team, how will the school day accommodate the fact that these teachers can no longer be expected to do lesson planning on their own time outside of school? Will all the teachers need to see the homework and assessment papers for all 100 students? This model seems very elementary-oriented; how does it adapt to a high school setting? Is the team organized by grade level or content area, and in either case, where do we place teachers with many different types of classes?
The more I reflect on the proposal, the more I suspect that “schools will have to think outside the box” is code for “we have not thought through the details of this.” And those details may seem piddly, but it is the details that determine whether programs like this live or die, not big disagreements over sweeping policy issues. It is the details—and their cost—that has stalled many of these ideas in the past.
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The presenters noted frequently that it will be up to the local school district to figure out the nuts and bolts, and that’s not unfair. But those nuts and bolts can’t help being expensive. The proposal is asking schools to inject much more non-teaching time in the day. That’s a sensible idea. The Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation has found that U.S. teachers spend more time working than the international average. That includes an average of 5.7 hours of instruction in U.S. schools compared to an international average of 5.1 hours, though research shows a wide variety of daily instructional length among states.
There’s a reason that North Carolina has to subsidize their version of this model; adding non-instructional time to a teacher’s day costs money. If you have four teachers teaching students six hours a day, and you’d like them to only teach students five hours a day, you need to hire another teacher to pick up the load. The only alternative is to increase the workload of some teachers so that other teachers have more non-instructional time, and that surely doesn’t help achieve the goal of retaining teachers by improving their work conditions.
Pennsylvania is already struggling to comply with the 2023 ruling that requires the legislature to pump more money into a funding system that, says the court, is inequitable and unconstitutional. It is unlikely that Harrisburg is going to come up with even more education money for funding this model, and since the majority of public school funding in the commonwealth comes from local taxpayers, the proposal has to be sold to local voters. Pennsylvania voters have been reluctant to pursue even obvious answers to teacher recruitment ands retention, like offering large salaries. Getting them to fund an idea that raises their taxes for the promise of an untried system with details to be hammered out at a later date—this seems like an unlikely goal. The other alternative is to cut money from an existing program to fund this idea, but few PA school districts have much fat to trim.
There are some perfectly good ideas embedded in this report (or at least concepts of ideas), but many of them have been tried and suffered a slow death, starved for funding.
Who are these people?
NCEE was founded by Marc Tucker, who caught attention with his 1992 “Dear Hillary” letter. The letter laid out ideas for a federalized education system that emphasized national standards and national testing while creating a cradle-to-grave data system that would track students and help them land in the right job. President Bill Clinton put Tucker on the National Skills Standards Board. Tucker’s work helped break trail for ideas like No Child Left Behind and the Common Core.
Teach Plus was founded in 2007 by Celine Coggins and has served as an organization to create “teacher leaders” who try to influence policy makers through a policy and advocacy network. They also positioned themselves as alternatives to the two big teachers’ unions—not as so much an alternative for teachers to join, but as an alternative voice about education for lawmakers to listen to. They have been big fans of Common Core and high-stakes testing, and at one point they were offering up a chance to talk to a lawmaker in exchange for a $500 contribution.
Both have benefited from large contributions from Bill Gates.
The report’s heart is in the right place, but its ideas are not new and are unlikely to catch hold without someone, somewhere putting more thought into how, exactly, these ideas could be implemented. Improving working conditions for Pennsylvania’s teachers would certainly be helpful in retaining and recruiting educators, but what’s offered here is not yet the blueprint we’re looking for.
