Why is there a teacher shortage?

[Anonymous]

School systems are more and more like franchises. The menu and ingredients are the same at all schools. This is determined by the upper levels and politics (not the teachers).

If you believe that the best food is fresh and made using creative recipes from the best chefs, you need to stay away from public education as it exists now.

The best chefs are not cooking in these restaurants. They are cooking elsewhere or are hiding in the freezer rearranging the shelves. Many clients are cooking at home because they can get better quality there.

Holding people's feet to the fire with standardized testing produces mediocrity. Maybe that's an improvement for some schools (and what a sad statement that is). The best chefs are worse than uninspired in such an environment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
School systems are more and more like franchises. The menu and ingredients are the same at all schools. This is determined by the upper levels and politics (not the teachers).

If you believe that the best food is fresh and made using creative recipes from the best chefs, you need to stay away from public education as it exists now.

The best chefs are not cooking in these restaurants. They are cooking elsewhere or are hiding in the freezer rearranging the shelves. Many clients are cooking at home because they can get better quality there.

Holding people's feet to the fire with standardized testing produces mediocrity. Maybe that's an improvement for some schools (and what a sad statement that is). The best chefs are worse than uninspired in such an environment.

Your analogy is absurd, but I'll play along. Jacques Pepin started his career at Howard Johnson's. Just saying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We can use our current data to show progress. But everyone's boss comes down on them when the students don't meet benchmarks. Nobody cares that they just came to this country last year and are learning English. Nobody cares that the student is absent 20+ times by Christmas. Nobody cares that the kids are incredibly tired everyday because they don't have a bedtime. If we bring up these factors, we are told that we are making excuses. Nobody cares about progress.

Either you and I work at the same school, or our bosses are twins!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We can use our current data to show progress. But everyone's boss comes down on them when the students don't meet benchmarks. Nobody cares that they just came to this country last year and are learning English. Nobody cares that the student is absent 20+ times by Christmas. Nobody cares that the kids are incredibly tired everyday because they don't have a bedtime. If we bring up these factors, we are told that we are making excuses. Nobody cares about progress.

Either you and I work at the same school, or our bosses are twins!

I also didn't write that but definitely could have! -NP

[Anonymous]

Unless you have a job in a high income area or AAP program, it's easy to be burned out as the brighter kids are all gone and you're left with a constant diet of trying to motivate kids who've been convinced they're the dumb ones.
Teaching in a school where families are highly engaged and kids have been given every opportunity to succeed is a lot different from dealing with the daily grind of the average child. (and teacher).

[Anonymous]

We need to go back to diverse classrooms. It is ridiculous to have AAP programs for kids who are just "a little ahead" of their cohort. All kids can be accommodated in a regular classroom--perhaps, with the exception of the very highly gifted--and the AAP program is far from that.

[Anonymous]

I spent ten years working in a high FARMS/ESOL school. I work in a wealthy school now because I have children and cannot deal with the demands of the job.

I loved my first school. It was a fantastic place in the sense that the teachers knew they had to go above and beyond to reach their students. We did a lot of really creative tactics to try to push our kids to grow. And the data we had tracking kids through the school showed growth every year. What it also demonstrated was that the kids were not progressing to grade level and were falling further behind as they progressed. The latter is the sole metric the county and state and federal government care about.

But it's a losing battle. Because you are spending all of K getting the students up to speed on concepts they should have grasped in preschool. And it just adds up. Combine this with the fact that a large chunk of the kids do not have the language skills to access the curriculum (meaning they don't know what the hell is going on because they do not understand enough English), you are going to be destined to have lower test scores. I am dually certified to teach K-6 and ESOL and worked as both a classroom and specialist. I saw the frustration first hand.

I really liked my school and think we were doing a great job in terms of getting kids out of ESOL services and proficient enough in English to access the learning content. It's hard and crazy unfair that a level 2 student is taking the SOL with the expectation that they would pass because they spent a year in a US School. I get angry when I think about it because it puts the kids in an unfair position, it puts the teachers in an unfair position, and it sets up the cycle for long term learners because the ESOL student gives up on school when they aren't successful. The rub is that the kid was never going to be because it takes 5-7 years to become proficient enough in a second language to access learning content on the same level as a native speaker. The studies support that. The politics don't.

I gave up and decided to transfer because my school was basically going to get the hammer thrown at them. I think the county now requires all lessons plans to be reviewed and critiqued by the admin as well as a central admin. The county also put in tons of other administrative requirements, including extensive documentation requirements to show why the students cannot meet benchmarks. And if you were under review, this data would be considered in terms of determining your effectiveness. According to friends, this has added 15-20 hours of work on top of what they were already doing. We were given no additional planning time to do this administrative work. Or pay.

I saw the writing on the wall and decided to transfer. I work at a wealthy school. It's a complete breeze.

[Anonymous]

Agree completely with 10/11/2016 10:07.

I will also add: At one of the "FARMS schools" I worked at, I think the teaching was MUCH better than at the high-income school I worked at. We just had to do more and be better. The high-income parents would help or get tutors for their kids. It was completely acceptable to just give a lecture and assign some homework. You didn't even really have to grade much, because the parents were checking their kids' work all the time. At the "FARMS school", we tried much harder to give lots of feedback and create engaging lessons.

However, I also worked at a "FARMS" school which was a disaster zone full of TFA type teachers. The most experienced teachers had 5-7 years of teaching, most had under 3. It makes a huge difference in terms of classroom management and knowing how to create good lessons. The teaching and leadership at that place was pretty pathetic. It's not that they weren't trying. It was just a huge uphill struggle that no one had the skills to deal with. Insane expectations of teacher time and effort lead to incredible burn out rates- and it was like running in place.

The difference between a low-income school with great teaching and one with crappy teaching, in my mind, is good leadership, good mentoring, and reasonable expectations. That way, you'd get low teacher turnover and have some stellar experienced teachers. When I say reasonable expectations, I don't mean "low" expectations. I mean reasonable expectations in terms of the amount of time, money, energy that I spend. I mean that if you give me a class of kids who are behind, I also get a smaller class size and teachers aide. That those kids who need help (food, clothing, counseling, etc) have access to it. That kids make progress, but not, "all students will be proficient or you will be in trouble".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Agree completely with 10/11/2016 10:07.

I will also add: At one of the "FARMS schools" I worked at, I think the teaching was MUCH better than at the high-income school I worked at. We just had to do more and be better. The high-income parents would help or get tutors for their kids. It was completely acceptable to just give a lecture and assign some homework. You didn't even really have to grade much, because the parents were checking their kids' work all the time. At the "FARMS school", we tried much harder to give lots of feedback and create engaging lessons.

However, I also worked at a "FARMS" school which was a disaster zone full of TFA type teachers. The most experienced teachers had 5-7 years of teaching, most had under 3. It makes a huge difference in terms of classroom management and knowing how to create good lessons. The teaching and leadership at that place was pretty pathetic. It's not that they weren't trying. It was just a huge uphill struggle that no one had the skills to deal with. Insane expectations of teacher time and effort lead to incredible burn out rates- and it was like running in place.

The difference between a low-income school with great teaching and one with crappy teaching, in my mind, is good leadership, good mentoring, and reasonable expectations. That way, you'd get low teacher turnover and have some stellar experienced teachers. When I say reasonable expectations, I don't mean "low" expectations. I mean reasonable expectations in terms of the amount of time, money, energy that I spend. I mean that if you give me a class of kids who are behind, I also get a smaller class size and teachers aide. That those kids who need help (food, clothing, counseling, etc) have access to it. That kids make progress, but not, "all students will be proficient or you will be in trouble".

Thanks, PP here. Yup, I absolutely see my old school turning into a TFA factory. We had our principal retire after 20 years there and about 35 percent of the teachers took new positions in TransFair. No one with any sense would sign up to work under these conditions for the same pay when you can work elsewhere with much, much less difficulty. My school now has SOL pass rates in the 90's. We have some turnover, but it's people moving up in the system, going to central office, etc. I don't think anyone here would work at a Title I school. So, the kids are going to suffer. They are going to have untrained, green teachers who will also produce testing results that are not satisfactory. Those kids will quit after a few years, go to law school or whatever, and be replaced by another crop of kids who will also fail and the cycle will repeat until there is some sort of backlash that either leads to privatization and charters or eventually abandons the nonsense that growth doesn't matter and test scores are the sole determinant of teaching quality.

That's why there's a shortage. You're dealing with building a system with consistent turnover.

[Anonymous]

Yep, constant turnover.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/10/05/new-teachers-make-up-a-significant-segment.html

[Anonymous]

School systems are more and more like franchises. The menu and ingredients are the same at all schools. This is determined by the upper levels and politics (not the teachers).

If you believe that the best food is fresh and made using creative recipes from the best chefs, you need to stay away from public education as it exists now.

The best chefs are not cooking in these restaurants. They are cooking elsewhere or are hiding in the freezer rearranging the shelves. Many clients are cooking at home because they can get better quality there.

Holding people's feet to the fire with standardized testing produces mediocrity. Maybe that's an improvement for some schools (and what a sad statement that is). The best chefs are worse than uninspired in such an environment.



Your analogy is absurd, but I'll play along. Jacques Pepin started his career at Howard Johnson's. Just saying.

Yeah, and his books have none of those recipes in them. And he didn't make a career out of Howard Johnson's.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Agree completely with 10/11/2016 10:07.

I will also add: At one of the "FARMS schools" I worked at, I think the teaching was MUCH better than at the high-income school I worked at. We just had to do more and be better. The high-income parents would help or get tutors for their kids. It was completely acceptable to just give a lecture and assign some homework. You didn't even really have to grade much, because the parents were checking their kids' work all the time. At the "FARMS school", we tried much harder to give lots of feedback and create engaging lessons.

However, I also worked at a "FARMS" school which was a disaster zone full of TFA type teachers. The most experienced teachers had 5-7 years of teaching, most had under 3. It makes a huge difference in terms of classroom management and knowing how to create good lessons. The teaching and leadership at that place was pretty pathetic. It's not that they weren't trying. It was just a huge uphill struggle that no one had the skills to deal with. Insane expectations of teacher time and effort lead to incredible burn out rates- and it was like running in place.

The difference between a low-income school with great teaching and one with crappy teaching, in my mind, is good leadership, good mentoring, and reasonable expectations. That way, you'd get low teacher turnover and have some stellar experienced teachers. When I say reasonable expectations, I don't mean "low" expectations. I mean reasonable expectations in terms of the amount of time, money, energy that I spend. I mean that if you give me a class of kids who are behind, I also get a smaller class size and teachers aide. That those kids who need help (food, clothing, counseling, etc) have access to it. That kids make progress, but not, "all students will be proficient or you will be in trouble".

I completely agree that at some FARMS schools the teaching is of much higher caliber than at other schools because the teachers at some FARMs schools have learned how to do much more with much less. They also tend to have a tremendous dedication to their craft and their students.

I am at a Title I middle school in NoVa. With our new principal, who is in her second year, you should see some of the incredible things that are happening in our school. We are in a complete turn-around because we once again have the leadership that we need to help us get things done. Most importantly, the new principal has helped stabilize the teaching staff so we don't have the same type of turnover problems we had for 5-6 years.

On the other hand, we have a lot of pressures that are outside of the principal's prerogative or ability to influence -- and those pressures are a constant threat to teachers' abilities to focus on core responsibilities of good teaching and learning in classrooms. When you have a crew of teachers who place a high amount of value in producing outstanding teaching and learning in their classrooms, it is those pressures, as well as things like missing steps, that cause teachers to become disenchanted and to start looking for other options.

I don't know what the answers are for solving the teacher (and sub!) shortage. Teaching is a difficult job and there is a lot of disrespect for teachers these days both within the school systems and outside them. Certainly there is much more disrespect than when I first began teaching. But I think that the dialogue needs to begin sooner rather than later, and absolutely before we hit full-fledged crisis mode with limited options. It is a tough job but we need people who can step up to the plate and pitch in before it is too late. Our children deserve it.

[Anonymous]

On the other hand, we have a lot of pressures that are outside of the principal's prerogative or ability to influence -- and those pressures are a constant threat to teachers' abilities to focus on core responsibilities of good teaching and learning in classrooms. When you have a crew of teachers who place a high amount of value in producing outstanding teaching and learning in their classrooms, it is those pressures, as well as things like missing steps, that cause teachers to become disenchanted and to start looking for other options.

+1 And the best principals are the ones who keep those pressures away from the teachers as much as possible. Unfortunately this can be at the expense of the principal's reputation with his/her bosses. The best principals are straight up honest with the teaching staff about this stuff. The staff often knows where the pressures are coming from, but it helps to know the principal is in their corner and willing to fight back when demands are unreasonable. And missing steps, yeah, that's a big problem because you never get those steps back. The result of missing those steps is often a lower pension and the impact of that is huge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

On the other hand, we have a lot of pressures that are outside of the principal's prerogative or ability to influence -- and those pressures are a constant threat to teachers' abilities to focus on core responsibilities of good teaching and learning in classrooms. When you have a crew of teachers who place a high amount of value in producing outstanding teaching and learning in their classrooms, it is those pressures, as well as things like missing steps, that cause teachers to become disenchanted and to start looking for other options.

+1 And the best principals are the ones who keep those pressures away from the teachers as much as possible. Unfortunately this can be at the expense of the principal's reputation with his/her bosses. The best principals are straight up honest with the teaching staff about this stuff. The staff often knows where the pressures are coming from, but it helps to know the principal is in their corner and willing to fight back when demands are unreasonable. And missing steps, yeah, that's a big problem because you never get those steps back. The result of missing those steps is often a lower pension and the impact of that is huge.

100% agreed.

[Anonymous]

In my experience, the principals who are screamers are the ones at Title I or near-Title I-status schools. They're just under too much pressure from the powers above to remain sane and rational in that job. (See also: Cora Kelly principal story.) One more factor contributing to the teacher shortage: unstable, nasty principals.