EWA panel: Select Shortages to Looming Layoffs: Reporting on the Teacher Workforce: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

EWA panel: Select Shortages to Looming Layoffs: Reporting on the Teacher Workforce

Rory Linnane1h 2min

Madeline Will, Education Week

00:24

reminder is that we will be going through a lot of slides today with some data, and that those will be available after the presentation. If you all bring in here for this presentation on reporting about the teacher workforce, we're going to go through five big stories that are using the workforce today. I'm gonna go ahead and introduce our speakers on my far right. We have Audra fatigue. Ritter, she is a fifth grade math and science teacher at Iron Mountain public schools in Michigan, and she also has background in special education. We have C Dillon, he is a policy researcher at Rand, where he works with the American educator panels. And Dale wolkaver, who is the director of two education research centers, one at the American Institutes of Research and another at the University of Washington. Okay, so our first big story is shortages. As we all know, these have teacher shortages have really dominated the headlines in recent years, but it can be a very nuanced issue. Shortages can vary a lot from place to place and even subject to subject. So Dan, if you've done a lot of data, have a lot of data on the teacher paper market. Could you walk us through what reporters need to know to tell the story?

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

01:49

I'm going to rely on the question of my slides so we can pull the slide up, and if I speak loud, can you all hear me in the back? No,

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

02:00

that's okay,

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

02:07

let me know if we can't hear you, I think like the main message that I would say to reporters and is that we need to think about this issue with a lot more nuanced than some of the stories that I had seen that have come out, because there are stories that ran that said, hey, there's a national teacher shortage. You know, we're going to be short. You know, 100,000 teachers in my year, 2020, whatever, half the teacher workforce is thinking about leaving next year. And for an education researcher that uses administrative data, you know, I think that's maybe not the right way to think about it, because teacher labor markets are actually quite different from state to state. Because, you know, licensure is a is governed by the state rules, and they differ a lot within this stage. So there's kind of a geography, geographic component to the way that you need to think about nuclear market. And then there's often, like a mismatch between supply and demand that is focused on particular subjects. I'll talk a little bit more about that. And by the kind of school that teachers are working in, and so to just sort of say that there's a teacher shortage, to be frank with you, I find that frustrating. As I'm getting old, and I've lived through a number of cycles of stories about the teacher shortage and the stories that we saw in, you know, the 2020s did not look fundamentally different to me than the stories that appeared in like the late 1990s when people were worried that there was going to be a massive teacher shortage because all the teachers were going to leave and then go to tech conference for the tech office. And so I think that policymakers tend to respond to kind of stories that they see without necessarily responding to some of the nuance underneath the headline. This is some data from the schools and staffing survey. Now the National Teacher principal survey, which is a national survey that asks but one of the questions that they ask is, How challenging is it to hire teachers? Wrap up here is the percentages of administrators who said we couldn't hire teachers of this type, or we found it extremely challenging to hire. And we've got different years going from 1990 to 25 for different subjects, teachers at the Morrigan elementary ed level, social studies and English stem special education and ESL. And there are two things that jump out at me for looking at this figure. One is that, in general, STEM center led and ESL, it's always harder to hire in those areas. And if you look at recent years, so if you look at 2020, here, it's gotten higher. It's gotten harder to hire in all sectors. So the challenge and the increased challenge of hiring is real. But what I want to focus on today, if you I don't know, press forward. Okay,

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

05:38

let's focus right here, that is 2011 12, if I remember correctly. So 2011 12 is states are having a hangover from the Great Recession. So this is a year where there really were not stories about the about the future shortage. But look what you see here, the proportion of administrators in 2011 12 in special ed and ESL and staff who reported that it was really challenging to hire in these areas. That's higher than the proportion that say it's challenging to hire at the elementary edge and social studies English in 2020 when there are all those headlines. So it's always really much harder to hire in some of these areas than others. Immediate question answer, we can talk about why.

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

06:42

Okay, um, missing this. Hey, this is a different way of looking at the same issue in Washington State, where I use the administrative data we work with the teacher education programs, and so we get information about people who are doing their student teaching and password licensure tasks that are kind of fully credentialed and ready to meet. And we say, how many of those people show up in the labor force the next year? And depending on which cohort we are looking at, it looks quite different. So again, why is this area? We have great recession, and if you're at the elementary and Ed level, it was only 20% of the people who were training to teach showed up in the future workforce of next year. Now they showed up in other ways. They were long term subs. They were working in central offices. They

Madeline Will, Education Week

07:36

were doing other things, you

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

07:39

know, in the school district for in Washington State, but they didn't struggle teaching divisions, so differences again, across the subjects. But then you can see that when the economy was recovering, all of a sudden, the proportion that showed up in the teacher workforce is a lot higher because schools were higher again. So I look at this, and I think some of the web, some of the issue around the piece of a market is a demand side issue. The way stories tend to talk about it is only from the supply side. So you probably talk about, you know, what it's like to be a teacher, and a lot of stories say sort of taking the reflections of people who maybe are thinking about teaching or left teaching, but they don't get the nuance at how many people are being hired, how many slots are available. Okay, so there's one. Okay, this is over. This is a picture just over a very long period of time I'm wrapping up. I should have told you to tell me when I needed that Bible. So from 1986 to 2022 in Washington State, the blue are the percentage of teachers who left the teacher workforce and they don't show up in any capacity in public schools green are teachers without teaching positions and then got deployed elsewhere in a school system. So maybe they became a curriculum specialist, maybe they became assistant principal, and then red is people who switched jobs but stayed teachers. And so you can see there's a fair bit of fluctuation from year to year, and indeed, total turnover in 2021 21 I think, was at the highest that we saw at any point in the last, I don't know, 35 years, however many years I've got up here, but it was not really all that far outside of the door that we see when the labor market in general is tight, people leave when there are other opportunities. The other thing I want to point out is, on the right now, we take those same figures, but we look at what the turnover looks like. It's red, what the overall trend work looks like. If you're somebody teaching in a high poverty Reduced Lunch school, top quartile versus a low poverty, bottom quartile produce lunch school. And you can see across every year since 22,000 June, that there's a gap that it is the trail is always higher if you're in high poverty schools. And the thing that I want to point out is that the difference, the average difference between a high poverty and low poverty school, is about four percentage points. That four percentage points is larger than the change that we see in any year from year to year in turnover. So the way I kind of talk to this, when I talk to reporters about this issue, I say, if we think that turnover is a crisis this year, then it is a crisis for high poverty schools in every year, even in years where there's no New York Times front page headlines about there's still this crisis in some schools. So again, the frustrating thing is, sometimes I feel like the stories aren't new enough, nuanced enough to drive policy makers to think about the structural issues that they just had or exist for a very important career.

Madeline Will, Education Week

11:29

Thank you. And this is the brand asked teachers, are you intending to leave? What are your intentions? Can you talk a little bit about what we found living on the side and but also, what is it? How is it tell us why it's important to kind of take the intentions to leave with a Rangel, what can they what can that show

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

11:51

you? Or what could that not show you? Yeah,

Sy Doan, RAND

11:54

that's a great question that we did not plan in advance at all. Yeah. So I

Sy Doan, RAND

12:09

do so we asked through the state of American teacher. And so these are surveys that we they're funded at NEA, and we fueled them. In January, we asked teachers, what is the likelihood that you will leave your job at the school at the end of the year? And so some of that we really want to keep in mind, so just for full transparency and how we asked them that we asked that question before we say very unlikely, somewhat unlikely, somewhat likely, very likely. And so if you said one of the two likely options, you classify you to someone who's intending to leave their job. And so just asking a group here, imagine you're answering this question, you had a terrible day at work, right? Is that enough to kind of take you from somewhat unlikely to somewhat likely. And so what we kind of say, which is sort of intentionally, so you can see on screen there, what it says, is that. So these were data that we asked in January of 2023 so roughly one in four to 3% that they intended to leave their job in that year, a significantly higher percentage of African American teachers of white teachers and female teachers were more likely to stay, to do and then to leave their job. So that's what we've done. And so what do we kind of make of that statistic? And so some colleagues of mine, Tuan Wynn and Erica back in they actually had data from Michigan, and so they took a look at Mission survey data, and they looked at intentions to leave, and then match that up with the actual percentage of teachers that actually left within next year. So I guess I have an open call for the room among teachers who said that they intended to leave, what percentage of those teachers even left the following year? Just call it out. You. So the actual percentage is 30% of teachers. And so if you take that 25% right there, and you multiply that 30 and you get something like six or 7% that's like a very rough at the envelope calculation, and so that's just kind of your sense of like, if you're using this measure, it only is a way to kind of predict whether or not teachers will actually visit every year, that sort of 30% but I think one of the important things with this measure is that it's not just a proxy for whether teachers are leading, right? If someone's saying they're intending to leave your job, it's probably, you know, more, one indication that teachers aren't happy currently within that job. And so something that we'd like to encourage, like whoever it is looking at the data, not just looking at that as whether predicting teachers or not, but serve as a sign that teachers satisfied with their job. And if you have 25% of your workforces to satisfy, perhaps that is a serious workforce issue, so kind of returning again to sort of Michigan data. So what they thought was that 30% of teachers left their job the following year and after saying they leave their job. But within two years, 50% of teachers have left their job, and within three years, two thirds of teachers have left their job. And so you might see that turnover, it might not happen in that first year, but it is sign of, sort of the, you know, dissatisfied workforce. And so that's kind of how we look at these intentions to meet in general, sort of beyond some point, sort of, you know, perhaps overstating shortages, intentions to leave don't necessarily equate automatically to teachers, you know, actually believe in the workforce, but they are assigned as sort of the satisfaction with proof in the workforce is something that we should kind of look at and take seriously. Thank you.

Madeline Will, Education Week

15:50

And we're going to talk about job satisfaction a little bit later on, but I want to invest our second story, which is layoffs. And it is a little ironic to be talking about teacher layouts when we're also talking about teacher shortages, but that is a concern that's on the horizon as federal escrow funds are expiring this fall, and some districts may not hire teachers with those funds. So Dan, do you have, do we have a sense of how many teachers were hired from escrow money, and what impact are you

Sy Doan, RAND

16:19

expecting to

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

16:20

go to slides again.

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

16:27

Okay,

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

16:29

so if you I'm sure you all know that schools got like $190 million a lot of a lot of money, and I think we don't really know how the schools spent that money. And there's, there's sort of two issues. There's two reasons why. We don't know. One, if you look at the SR reporting categories, they're pretty well. So they'll say, like, money was spent on personnel, but is that money that went to existing teachers? Is that money that went to retention bonuses, is that money that went to hiring new new teachers. So that's part of the problem is just sort of the broadness of the reporting categories. But I think the deeper issue is that money for lots of parts of school budget are is money, right? It can be spent in different ways. And so in Washington state, there was like $300,000 I'm looking at you not looking at my slides, so I don't know if it actually says $300,000 but there's about $300,000 that was spent on superintendent salaries out of Esser funds. Now I don't think that anyone thinks that those are school districts that wouldn't have superintendents in the absence of ESSA so that means that there was $300,000 in those budgets that was freed up elsewhere that could be used to do something. So the fungibility of money also makes it hard to know a ton from what is reported. So in Washington, we did, and we can get a paper here, we did a statistical analysis where we looked at we looked at the people who were newly hired, and we looked at the amount of Esser funding that they received. It hurts me not to tell you the more that we did, but there's more statistical work. And we then we basically estimated, when you got more Esser money, what did you do? And here's the answer. So we estimate that for every $100,000 increase in extra money, it is associated with about a half one half more filled postings. I say filled postings because we pulled down all the job advertisements over the course of the several years, and then looked at the job advertisements that got built. And I can talk to you more about that as a mesh, as a measure, but I think it's actually a very good measure of school system hire. So every $100,000 resulted in about how a half of an additional person that was hired, that is someone that we think that was hired only because of those additional Esser monies, that people that would not have been hired if the additional funding was that, depending on our estimate, looks like we call school districts Between

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

19:39

almost all of the money was spent on hiring

Madeline Will, Education Week

19:42

teachers, right?

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

19:44

So we looked across 11 different position categories, it was the lion's share of the money was spent by hiring new teachers. And I don't understand this, but it's 20% of Esser funds look like they went to hire new people. So now, putting this on context, Washington State got about $2.4 billion an Esser. We think that of roughly 12,200 total new postings, 5000 of these postings, professors were teaching jobs. Jobs. So there are 5000 people that are teachers in Washington state who would not, there wouldn't be those teaching positions in Washington State in the absence professor,

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

20:35

let's go to the next one. Okay,

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

20:42

all right. When I first saw these figures, I looked at I thought, this is kind of crazy. 5000 looks pretty big to me. Washington state has about 63,000 full time equivalent teachers. So 5000 is what a good 5% five over 12, someone do that math. Sorry, five over 60, but it's, you know, it's somewhere like 8% or something. Okay, so the the number of teacher job postings in Washington in 2022 was about it was like 11,600 and what we estimate is 5100 of these are postings that only happen because of Esther. So you take the 11,600 and you subtract the 5100 right, and you get about 5500 and those 5500 then are just the postings that you would expect in a steady state. Well, if you if you remember back to my earlier slides, the attrition rate in Washington state is around nine 10% nine or 10% of 63,000 positions is about 6000 positions. So our numbers derive through a regression analysis look very similar to those numbers I just gave you through a back of the envelope that I probably delivered in such a way that was so convoluted that nobody understood it, but they match up. Okay, so what does this mean? We don't know, but I'm worried that it means that there have been layoffs in the Great Recession. Over the course of a couple of years, the FTE in Washington was reduced by about 3000 teachers, 561 if I remember correctly, of those, 3000 were reduced because of layoffs. We're estimating that it's, you know, 5100 how many of those are going to be layoffs? I don't know, but some proportion of 5000 could be managed just by not hiring people who leave. But because people leave, you know, you can't just, let's say it's, you know, your three math teachers in the middle school that leave. You can't just decide not to have a math department in the middle school. So you can't just sort of manage this kind of thing fully by not hiring. You can't manage it fully by so I think what we're going to see is we're going to see layoffs, keep looking humanity. Make sure I'm not going over. I worry, because a lot of layoffs happen through last in, first out processes lipo. And I think that there were some real lessons that came out of the layoffs that happened in the Great Recession, which suggests that lipo is not very good for kids, and mostly I'm a non ideological researcher, and I never try to inject anything normative here, but it's very hard for me to understand from a kid perspective why school systems would use lipo as as their system for making layout decisions. And so we go to the next slide. I'll just say very quickly there are, like three reasons why one teachers, as they get more more experienced, they tend to get better. But that does not mean that all third year or fifth year teachers are better than first year teachers. So a LiPo based process means that you're going to be laying off some people that are very, very effective and keeping some people that are relatively ineffective. Second thing is that the distribution of teacher experience across schools is not equitable. Schools serving the year students have more junior teachers, and so lipo creates a lot of churn in those schools, and that churn is itself bad for students. And then the last thing I'll say is that there's been a lot of at least rhetoric around diversifying the teacher workforce. And it turns out that when you look at the proportion of very junior teachers and the proportion of teachers that are untenured, they tend to be teachers of color. So if you use a superior lifelong process, we would expect that that would disproportionately lay off, and I know

Madeline Will, Education Week

25:26

there's some districts that are trying to move away from that policy

Sy Doan, RAND

25:40

sharing, but we also have surveys of district superintendents as well, and so this is talking just a little bit about it. So it's not specifically about layoffs, but we asked superintendents about their expectations, about whether or not they think that their revenue. So this is surveys done this year. And so we asked them to predict whether their revenues into 2024, 2025, school year, whether they're being anticipated that they would be lower about the same or higher relative this year. And so roughly 26% of district school attendance we surveyed indicated that they felt that they would be lower than 45% of the same, where we see some differences across countries, we found that superintendents and districts are classified as serving predominantly high poverty students, and it's predominantly students of color who are significantly more likely to indicate that they felt the revenue speed lower. Okay,

Madeline Will, Education Week

26:39

we're gonna move to our next story, versus pay a big one, and I'll try. I'd love to hear from you, what role do you think teachers pay plays, recruitment, retention, trends and not to just

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

26:57

job conception. You guys hear me assuming you can

Audience

27:01

maybe just grab the mic off of your stand. It's not that's okay. I can stand here. So one of the things, oh, thank

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

27:18

you. One of the things I want to talk about is the discrepancy of the teacher pay penalty, or the pay gap. Essentially, it's a quote, unquote, unofficial penalty you take for taking a public service job like being a teacher. Teachers are more affected by the pay penalty than any other service profession. As you can see here, I like this visual a lot. Depending on what state you live in, you know you might be taking a 37.4% pay penalty compared to your college educated peers. So somebody with a college with a college degree, bachelor's degree like you, makes 37% more than you do in a very state by state. Of course, other states have different pay scales, and other states have different unions, and that plays a huge role into teacher pay. Then one of the other things we hear as teachers all the time is you guys have great benefits. You have dental and health insurance and all the things. And it's true. I mean, I have dental insurance, but so does. You know my friend who works in a business office, and actually hers is probably better than mine. And even with that taken into account, I'll rely heavily on my slides here, there was an increase in benefits to, you know, a 9.4% increase recorded in 2022 that still doesn't cover the gap of the teacher pay penalty. So what does that look like for retaining or attracting teachers? I know, when I was in college talking to my friends and I'm going to be a teacher, they're like, are you crazy? I barely do any work. I go to like my classes, and I'm going to make twice what you make when you start so I can see when you start out. You know, that's not promising. And then retention. Retention is hard. People stay in teaching because they love the act of teaching, but when it comes down to providing for your family or for yourself, you have to make hard choices, and I think oftentimes people are forced to leave because they cannot afford to be teachers or stay teachers, especially young teachers, when we have to start paying back our loans, and we'll talk More about loan forgiveness later. You know, I've had many friends who I graduated with who stopped teaching because they just couldn't, they couldn't afford to pay the loan that they took out to become a teacher. So it's a sad reality, but I think it's important to know that not every state is the same, and obviously there's reasons behind that. There's nuance to all those numbers. I don't have all the time go over, but

Madeline Will, Education Week

30:30

thank you. And the real teacher panel also has asked teachers about their salaries as well. Could you walk us through what teachers

Sy Doan, RAND

30:39

will Yeah, algorithmics, we're sharing that chart. And so we do ask teachers about your compensation, and, to your point, about student loans. And so these are data that aren't publicly available this year, but we do ask teachers specifically about whether monthly loan payments are the cost of childcare and a bunch of other kind of like cost of living things to help us, kind of like index compensation relative to other cost of living factors. But when we asked teachers to do this, we asked them for what's your base salary, and so this before any sort of extra pay for extra work, anything like that, we found that teachers, on average, reported base salaries of roughly 67 written but as author just showed in a chart. It varies a ton across the country, and so when we kind of roughly broke down the districtarian between areas where classified as above average cost of living, below average cost of living, the difference in base dollars is roughly $24,000 when you look at above average and below average cost of living. So just to underscore that map that Audrey showed about wide range of teacher compensation, what we saw is that only a third of teachers considered quick hearing so closer I started off so average teacher $67,000 in terms of annual salary, wide variation across lots of states, only about a third of teachers considered that their current base salaries were at votes. And so you kind of look at the charts on the right side there. So remember those teachers that said that they were intending to leave? We follow up on a survey. We asked them, well, what are the top reasons why you're thinking about leaving? And that just shows percentage of teachers that said that low pay was one of his top three reasons. They were considered reading. And so people looking particularly for African American teachers, or three quarters of African American teachers who indicated that they were intending to leave low pay was for the reasons. And so something that we found too many criteria that relative to white teachers, African American teachers third base salaries were roughly $4,000 lower. And so very importantly, this is an account for cost of living. Differences in average user experience has to be remembered as mentioned in terms of base salaries. What we found in this survey was that black teachers reported making $4,000 less in terms of pay salaries. And so just some data understorming that point about low paying

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

33:04

that actually lines up perfectly with African American teachers being more junior and therefore being more subject to a lifestyle based

Sy Doan, RAND

33:17

somebody else. We asked teachers, and so teachers that said that their face campaign wasn't at but so these are like two thirds of teachers. Again, we asked them, well, what do you think? What do you think your base salary should be, for it to be added, but, and so that's kind of what you see there. And so roughly, what we found was that teachers, on average, wanted 17 grand more than what they were currently making. So the bottom of the chart there, that was what they reported to their current base salary. And at the top there, that was kind of what they reported as their kind of desired base salary. And so that teacher paid penalty gap that Audrey showed there. And so I think it's kind of convenient that the numbers ended up that way. But that gap of $17,000 is roughly about the same size as what you know, other research estimated teacher paid how the gap. So, yeah, so it's very interesting that those numbers can line up. And so what do teachers want? Roughly 17 grand courts will be funded or survey in terms of your base salaries. It's

Madeline Will, Education Week

34:11

really interesting. Okay, so next is morale, which, of course, plays a role in I wanted to share. So Education Week recently, came out with teacher morale index. Our research center did a nationally representative poll of teachers in the fall, asked them three questions about their morale work, talking about their morale compared to one year ago, their morale work right now is worth staying better right now what their morale is and what they expected around to be one year from now, and they are at the research center, pulled together a score on a scale of negative, from negative 100 to positive 100 and we found that the average teachers around course negative 13, suggesting that they feel more negatively about their jobs than positively. This is a national score, but I want to share that next year at meetings, depending on bridges out by state, so we can see the variations across the country today has also done a lot of work on teacher well being indicators, and I'm curious, if you talk to us, talk about what you found and how that relates

Sy Doan, RAND

35:28

to Yeah, that sounds good. The idea of index is really cool, because we have lots of different statistics, and maybe people can be combined into one thing. But we have, over the years, asked about different indicators of teacher well being. So you can see them on the screen there. And somebody asked teachers, do you experience frequent job related stress? Do you have difficulty coping with job related stress? You report any symptoms of depression? Do report burnout? And so what you see there on the screen is that in that blue line, there goes. And so if you look at all the way to the top left there, these are percentages of teachers that report experiencing job related stress. So in the first year we started tracking this, and so this is in 2021 78% of teachers reported that they experienced related stress. So you can see sort of a positive trend over years in that it's 58% in 2023 now. So it's still over half of teachers in terms of seeing the trend line go where you want to go once we see and that blue line there is that we also have a sample of working levels. And so these are folks above the age of 18 were working same exact survey questions. And so one of the nice things about this is that we can kind of compare how well being looks on these same items and teachers versus sort of general working publicly across many of these different indicators. The thing that kind of stands out is that, generally speaking, teachers report poor well being than on the same exact sort of items relative to sort of this general sample, sort of working adult and so something nice that we can do there is a benchmark against teachers and other folks who are just working within the

Madeline Will, Education Week

37:04

population. And one interesting finding that we found was that school leaders, we asked them to estimate their teachers morale, and they dramatically overestimated the morale of the teachers at their school. But Audrey, I'm curious, from your perspective, are these findings surprising to you? How did they relate to your experience.

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

37:24

I know it's not surprising when you're in a school every day, you work with teachers every day,

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

37:34

it's nice to see that those numbers are going down. A lot of like to offer a perspective of I don't know that people are less stressed or just managing their stress.

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

37:48

And I think some of that's apathy, because after so long, it's hard to continue to, you know, kind of beat your head against something over and over. So a lot of my co workers would probably agree, like, not that it's getting better, it's just that we're getting used to it. And I think my admin call that resiliency, which is great, but

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

38:20

it's not surprising. I

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

38:21

do think you know, when we're hiring new teachers and more teachers, there is kind of a sense of hope that new staff brings. So sometimes more turnover is good. It's just being able to coach those new teachers into healthy working conditions and not not a positive aspect of the school that's really

Madeline Will, Education Week

38:50

interesting. Okay, our last slide, our last story is preparation. Audra, you work with early career educators in Michigan, so what are some of the pain points that you hear about teachers preparation and creating the classroom?

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

39:09

Yeah, so I just was thinking about what when I worked with your teachers through the through a union, our state union, I work with new educators in their first 10 years, and go over all kinds of, all things teaching and all things union. And I was going over what, what have I heard from my new educators and my student teachers that are kind of like, the the big issues. So first of all, like, the average cost for one year of college for any degree is over $36,000 that's not your tuition, that's everything our multiply that times five now, because really, most teacher preparation programs are five years. It's very hard to get licensed now in any state in under five years. Texts sub Texas, and I know they're working to change that, but it's just still an issue. So obviously it's costly to go into and then, like I said before, your pay doesn't make up for the cost of your loan. I don't know many people who, on average, have $36,000 at home every year stood away for that. And that doesn't take into account that more than half of the educators in the US Holden gas degree, and oftentimes your district will, there is an incentive to get your degree, and they make it sound like, Oh, it's so easy. You get your Masters and you make more money, yes and no, what it costs to get your Masters isn't always, doesn't always. Make up for it with your increase of pay. I and then there's, you know, there's always hidden things, hidden fees. So the cost of being certified, all of your testing, your license, your renewal, all of those things are out of pocket. And a lot of young teachers didn't realize that those were things that they got to pay for on a continual basis. I also looked up some data that was really interesting. This is self reported from survey, but out of the people who are surveyed, you know, 94% of educators have said that they spend their own money on their classrooms to an average of $479 a year. I would guarantee there's people spending a lot more than that, and the fact that they can't, you know, the write offs for taxes have been significantly decreased for classroom supplies. So I think there's a lot of things that go into becoming a teacher that this right out of college. A lot of student teachers, a lot of young teachers aren't aware of like, how often do I have to go to the store and try a grille of arts because I have hungry kids, and we are free and reduced lunch school, and they can get breakfast, except the bus doesn't get there until five minutes before the bell rings, so they don't get breakfast socks and hats in the winter, because you're not going to tell a kid that they can't that they're not going to have socks or hats to go outside. So spending all of your own money classroom prizes. If you're an elementary teacher, I have spent probably hundreds of dollars on candy alone for stickers. And we do those things not because we have to if someone's making us, but because it's part of the school experience. And as a teacher, you just are never going to sit back and just watch kids suffer or have a bare minimum, you know, learning experience. So there's a lot of things in preparing teachers that they're just unaware of. Plus, I tell them, most of what you learn is probably through your student teaching, and not so much through your classes. You don't really know until you're in it, and then you're in it. And

Madeline Will, Education Week

43:36

I would imagine that the early career teachers are the ones probably spending the most on their classrooms, as they're starting

Madeline Will, Education Week

43:41

from scratch.

Madeline Will, Education Week

43:44

Yeah, so I wanted to touch on emergency certified teachers, as many states have issued record numbers of emergency licenses in the past few years. Dan, do you expect those teachers to stay in the classroom, pursue their full degree? Do you have any information on that.

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

44:02

I mean, I don't know, I don't know what to say about that from the teacher perspective, whether they want to, some surveys that I've seen suggest that a lot of people got into the classroom during covid When you couldn't retain license your task, for instance, so you couldn't do your student teaching. So the states granted these waivers have suggested that they do want to stay. I think it's an open question as to how states respond, because there are a lot of people that are now in in schools in a way that they would not have been in the absence of this sort of these waivers, and it'd be problematic for states to enforce, I think, politically problematic to say, We told you it was going to be a three or five year labor but now either you've passed your licensure test or you haven't. I just think as soon as when people actually make it into the profession, it's a different story than when you're saying you've got to pass these tests to get into the profession, because then you've got constituents in the

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

45:06

schools. So let's sorry just say one more thing.

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

45:10

I also think there's, there's a lot of discussion going on about, like, what should the requirements be to become a teacher? You heard me say, like, Texas as an example, it's not the case in Texas that it takes in five years. Texas has a lot of alternative programs for people to enter a classroom very quickly. States are debating licensure testing and whether they want to have licensure tests very actively, more actively than any time that I can I can recall, and they're on very different sides of this issue. So some one person's like necessary insurance equality is another person's unneeded barrier, you know. So people come down on very different sides of this issue, and there's a lot of research connected tests to student outcomes, but it's uncertain how to interpret the evidence around

Madeline Will, Education Week

46:07

that a lot of states are pursuing new ways of preparation, like residency programs and apprenticeships, where teachers are undergoing on the job training or earning a paycheck while they pursue their license. Curious if any of you have any thoughts on what areas are interesting initiatives that reporters should be paying attention to,

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

46:29

I want to go back to the to the

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

46:30

point I was trying to make, that there are these long term structural issues in the labor market that we see repeated again and again and again. And so it's about, do we have enough high quality applicants for needy schools? Do we have enough Special Ed and STEM teachers? When I when I hear about these kinds of programs grow your own, or any of these sort of new initiatives, I always ask questions about whether it looks like the programs are designed to address these underlying structural issues. So I don't want to say anything about the programs itself, because I don't think that we know a ton about them, but I do think that if I were in your shoes and I was interested in the programs I would, I would try to see whether they're addressing the labor market issues that we know exist.

Madeline Will, Education Week

47:29

Okay, I think we're going to open it up to audience questions so you can come to the microphone the center of the ram and please just identify yourself. While we while we wait to see if anyone has any questions. I wanted to go back to the last in person policies on layoffs and whether, what are some alternative approaches districts could take that kind of keep that level of fairness while also preventing right away, I understand this. I mean,

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

48:06

fairness is a little bit of a loaded term, because you've talked about fairness to teachers, we can talk about fairness to students. The natural thing would be to have performance evaluations factor into the layoff decision, but because the politics is hard in most places, performance valuations can factor because they say all people keep the same, which is, by the way, a complete waste of money. When, if you're doing the performance valuation, and you do an evaluation that says this gigantic labor force, everybody's the same, you may as well not do the evaluation to my mind. But the other things that you can do is you can protect certain schools, and you could say so if all of the junior teachers are teaching in the high poverty schools, but we're not going to label all the teachers off in those schools. We're going to say layouts have to be sort of proportionate to the size of the school. There are lots of things that come up in the nuances of collective bargaining agreements that are worth talking about. So in the last round of layoffs, there are cases where you had people who would switch from being, you know, they taught French for 15 years, but they were the school district was eliminated in the French department, but the person has a dual certificate, so they're in their certified to teach ELA, so all of a sudden teaching ELA, even though that's not what they've been doing. So I think that there are lots of ways when you sort of dig into the issue, that you can make things fairer and more sensible,

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

49:37

not easy to write about

Audience

49:41

how my father from the Wall Street Journal. So this is a question for Dan. For context, Dan and I have been talking about these issues for years, and Dan, we were pretty tough on us reporters for you, Matt. Okay, thank you. But let me offer another take, which is the last couple years has seen the largest increase in the highest rates of teacher turnover in the last decade or so. And I think that's been consistent across states, consistent across different types of schools, different types of teachers. You can tell me if you agree or disagree, Dan, but to me that seems like an across the board challenge. I might not call it a shortage, because if you say the word shortage like no one, people will get mad, because we don't know exactly what that means. But why isn't that an across the board challenge? It receives very high, relatively high rates of teacher terms. I

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

50:36

mean, I don't disagree with any of your facts, and I think that it is across the board that the challenge, no matter how you sort of split the data, has gone up. But what I'm saying is the challenge is not equal. And so I'm going to give you a more concrete example, attrition for teachers who have been in the classroom for 20 years, and can see a pension very, very low, very low. You know, it's like one, 2% attrition rate. Attrition for teachers in their first you know, three, five years in the classroom is very, very high. So I would guess that the attrition rate has gone up across all the different experience levels. But it's probably, this is me guessing, not, not as survey, that it's gone up kind of proportionate, so that, if you're talking about, you know, attrition, on a base of, you know, 20 or 25% early on in the career, and it's gone up by, I don't know, 1010, 20% that's a significant increase. If you're talking about attrition building up for somebody who's in their 50s, who's been teaching for 20 years, and the attrition rate for that segment of teachers was one or 2% that's a very small increase. So when I'm thinking about the nuance, I'm thinking about the nuance about how you allocate precious educational resources to address the problem and where I educations are, I would not do across the board salary increases. I would do salary increases that target the front end of the teacher workforce. I would do salary increases that made it more lucrative to teach. You know, in Harvard staff schools, and I will give you salary increases that were larger in, you know, math and science especially. Thanks.

Audience

52:32

Hi, I'm Jillian. I'm at the NPR station in Pittsburgh. I think we touched on this a little bit. But many of us, while we are seeing future shortages. We also are seeing school closures. And I'm curious just generally, what questions you guys suggest asking as we talk about consolidating schools, questions around the workforce.

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

52:59

Well, school closures, I mean, it's hard because it's such a district to district issue. I will say there's one thing I've noticed a trend in is that, you know, decisions to consolidate or to close schools often fall to local or municipal boards, school boards. And I would go back and look at what is the board involvement in those districts in the past five to 10 years. I can tell you, from a rural school district myself, that board involvement is incredibly low. Like, we had to, like, beg people to be on the school board. So I would go back and look at your local your local districts, your local politics, because that's those are the people making the decisions on consolidation and closings.

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

54:02

I'd say two things. I think that there are equity considerations with school closures, and even like simple statistics, like what percentage of these kinds of kids will be affected by the closures of schools versus leads to other kinds of kids. I used to be on a school board, and we knew the turnout from a local area in the local school catchment areas, and so we would know that, you know, if something happened at one school, we were going to catch hell, and if it happened at another school, maybe not so much. And it's only by asking the right questions and forcing people to sort of, maybe this is my Nirvana in my head, but make the data sort of transparent about how this affects the community property that you maybe get debates that lead to more equity. And then the other thing I think I would say, is that the easiest thing for local boards to do is to push these difficult issues off onto the future. So I think in Seattle, where I'm from, there's going to be a schools that are going to have to close the last school board pushed it out. I think this school board is looking to push it out. That doesn't mean that that there aren't other impacts, because the resources end up getting spread thinner across a great number, a larger number of schools. And so I think that some of the questions are like, Well, what does that mean about the resources that we choose not to close schools? Those are good questions asked.

Audience

55:38

Hi, I'm Alejandro Martinez Carrera with the Texas studio, I just wanted to go back to this disparity and pay between states, and I was just curious about how your thoughts on how states compete against each Other, for for for talent, or it's more of a situation where low pay just discourages people from entering the workforce.

Sy Doan, RAND

56:09

Yeah, so interstate competition for teachers, but I think it's mostly kind of within states. Most teachers go to teacher preparation program interstate. It got to teach with interstate as well. And so a lot of the competition you kind of see is like, from district to district. That's like, typically what we see, but interstate like competition

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

56:33

teachers, well, that's, that's a lot of the debate. So when you see, when you see, you know, policy makers talk about it, they're all still carrying What's it what's happening in one state, average wise to an average wise in another state. I think we don't know much about pre service and how many people are trained in one state and end up teaching in another. I just think we just don't have a lot of data about that. I do think that there are a small number of studies that look at the likelihood that somebody who has teaching experience in one state ends up moving and becomes a teacher in another state, and it is a vanishingly small proportion of people, which may be not maybe reflective of something about competition, and it may also be because licensure, tenure and pensions are all state centric, so you take a hit on all of those potentially when you try to get employed in another state. That's a that is an issue that we don't know enough about, and it's also an underlying issue, I think, with the teacher labor market, because it means that when you get a credential is not as valuable as it would be if you knew that you were getting credentials that had greater mobility. Thank

Audience

57:58

you. Hi. Erica Meltzer from talk B, this is a question that I think is first for Audrey, and then I'm interested to hear from anyone else. I'm curious about, sort of the about pay versus some of the other working condition issues that people will bring up around why people are leaving

Audience

58:20

the profession, about all the things we're asked to do that we're teaching. And I'm curious, how much difference do you think it would make to address some of those suggestions from policy solutions that would be interesting, and then, if there's a time, I'm also curious of what we know about there's an improvement on the sort of pipeline of more people interviewing teacher preparation programs for a number of years?

Audra DeRidder, Iron Mountain Public Schools

58:50

Yeah. I mean, obviously pay is not the only issue with teacher retention and issues in the classroom. I don't have exact numbers, but yes, classroom behaviors, we see those stories all the time. Significantly, it creates a special return to learn. We'll call it, a lot of unmet, physical, emotional and mental needs for students, and a lot of that has fallen on teachers directly, not necessarily intentionally, but it just happens that way. I think teachers have been the catch all for so long for all kinds of issues with students. So pay is huge. It's not so much that I want to say. It's not that we want more money, obviously, more money with health things. It's the fact that we have degrees, and a lot of us have advanced degrees in our field, and they are not deemed worth as much as somebody who has a bachelor's degree in another field, working in another sector of labor. So yes, it's money, but that money is also a symbol of, you know, our hard work, of our time, the devotion we showed of our classroom, our students, and, you know, our devotion to our career and furthering ourselves, educating ourselves, it's just it's seen as not, it's not as respected, and it's not as valuable compared to other aspects of the labor market. So I think that is a huge issue. And then you kind of compound that with all the things we're being asked to do now, which we were asked to do before, but it just kind of came to a head at this point, especially some of these severe behaviors that most teachers are not trained to deal with these kinds of severe behaviors. I work with teachers all the time because of my background in special ed and my prompt certifications and behavior analysis and everything I do, your average teacher coming to classroom is not trained, and then they get children in their have really high needs, and we truthfully do not have the resources, the time or the funding to meet their needs in a public education setting. And then I think teachers feel guilty that they themselves can't meet that mean for a student, and it leads to things like, why would I stress myself out? Or when I could just go do some other job, make more money, and I don't have to worry about 25 kids when I go home at night. Thank

Madeline Will, Education Week

01:01:56

you. I think that's a somber

Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

01:01:57

note, but unfortunately, we

Madeline Will, Education Week

01:01:58

have to everyone out of time. I want to thank all

Madeline Will, Education Week

01:02:01

our panelists for this hearing, your expertise. And again, as I will be available to you, down here.

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