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Policy Corner

Penn GSE experts on the educational headlines of the moment

By Rebecca Raber

The Headline

Teacher Shortages Continue to Plague the US

The Story

Research has shown that teachers are the single most important school-level factor for student success. Unfortunately, at the start of this school year, tens of thousands of teaching positions across the country were vacant or filled with underprepared teachers with emergency certifications. Florida, for example, began the term with more than 5,000 vacancies and with 5,000 classrooms without professionally trained teachers, according to the Florida Education Association. And the outlook for the future isn’t much better. High schoolers’ interest in the profession is down 50 percent since 1990, and the number of people across the US earning a teaching license each year plummeted by more than 100,000 from 2006 to 2021.

The expert

Associate Professor Sarah Schneider Kavanagh is the director of Penn GSE’s Collaboratory for Teaching and Teacher Education. A former middle and high school teacher, she is an expert in teacher education, instructional coaching, and professional development. This past summer, she and former Penn GSE dean Pam Grossman hosted a convening on “Strengthening Pathways into the Teaching Profession,” part of an ongoing series bringing together stakeholders to tackle the related problems of the teacher shortage.

Photo credit: Joe McFetridge for Penn GSE

HER TAKE

“Historically, in the face of teacher shortages, the standards of entry into the teaching profession are lowered,” said Kavanagh. “The danger of lowering standards of entry is you end up exacerbating problems long-term. Lowering entry standards makes teaching into an unsustainable profession because new hires wind up being unprepared for the job and they leave quickly. Over the long term, it makes the profession less professional, which makes it a less desirable career option for the next generation. The short-term solution to the problem of a shortage winds up having long-term ramifications.”

The August event that she helped convene on campus explored the tension between the urgency of needing teachers in classrooms immediately and the long-term benefits—not just for students, but for the teaching profession overall—of waiting to find or train the right teachers for the job.

“We want specific teachers—teachers who look like the kids in the room, teachers who are highly prepared, really good at their jobs—to do the work,” she said. “It’s actually a much more complicated issue than just getting bodies in rooms.”

Quality teacher preparation is key. Debate has persisted for years about whether training is crucial for teacher development or needless “red tape” that’s keeping aspiring educators from filling urgent vacancies. But, said Kavanagh, the research shows that teacher preparation is not only good for the teachers, but also for their students.

“Having some preparation to go into the profession—getting a credential—means that your kids are more likely to achieve,” she said. “Standardized test scores aren’t the only important measure, but if that’s the measure you’re looking at, you want your kids to have a teacher who is certified.”

But, she warned, not all training programs are alike. The for-profit teacher preparation programs that have recently proliferated online may not be leading to the same student success as other types of certification programs.

“It’s a new area for research, but emerging research shows fully online for-profit certification programs look much more like no certification when it comes to [student test] scores,” she said.

So, how do we ensure a well-trained, diverse stream of educators are in the pipeline, especially during this time of great need?

“We have to figure out how to not make it so expensive to get certified,” said Kavanagh. “Do states offer loan forgiveness for teacher prep? Do they partner with universities so that the cost of their programs doesn’t fall on the students? . . . You’ve got to make sure that the cost of entering the profession doesn’t fall on the young person who wants to teach, and then, you have to make sure districts are compensating teachers adequately once they’re [in the classroom]. That’s a solvable problem from the level of state and federal policy. People are making reasonable decisions not to enter teaching, and we can change the math of that reasonable decision.”

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