Teacher Shortage Should Come as No Surprise

Florida has a serious teacher shortage and Palm Beach County School Superintendent, Robert Avossa claims he never saw it coming.

It is halfway through the school year and some districts are still struggling to fill open positions. As Florida’s student population continues to grow, the number of graduates from teacher preparation programs has declined, leading to critical shortages, especially in certain high needs subjects (math, science, special education) and in certain high needs schools (high poverty, high minority). This year, superintendents are even reporting vacancies in elementary schools, positions that used to be easiest to fill.

On January 25, 2017, Dr. Avossa was one of a panel of superintendents who participated in a Appropriations Subcommittee on Pre-K – 12 Education Workshop discussing Teacher Compensation. He noted that the decline in teachers graduating from traditional teacher preparation programs has been dramatic: last year Florida Atlantic University had 40 graduates from their teaching program yet “we need 1,500.”

“I have been involved in the reform movement for over a decade and I could not have predicted the current conditions and the lack of interest in going into education that we’re seeing today.

I could not have predicted.” (Dr. Avosso at 1:30:55)

If the teacher shortage is a surprise, then reformers like Dr. Avossa have not been paying attention.

Senator Doug Broxson, Pensacola Republican and newcomer to the Senate Education Appropriations committee, seems to already understand the problem. Senator Broxson told the panel that he has family members who are educators and they feel that Florida schools are over-testing, teachers are overworked and they are uncertain about the future:

“The best recruiters are our teachers, to their students and their children and the general community. If they’re unhappy and they’re telling people not to be a teacher… if the murmur throughout the state is do everything but be a teacher, we can have the best programs or no programs but if we don’t have teachers, we have a severe problem.” (Sen Broxson at 1:28:00)

A recent report from the Learning Policy Institute found the national teacher shortage was a result of several problems: increasing public school enrollment, decreasing numbers of college students pursuing teaching careers, and high rates of attrition among teachers who have grown dissatisfied with their jobs and leave the profession long before retirement. The study also showed that Florida’s troubles are more acute than many other states. Florida was ranked 42nd out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., on the institute’s “teaching attractiveness” rating, which took into account factors such as the percentage of teachers worried about job security because it was tied to student test scores and the percentage who felt they had “control in their classroom.” (Read more about the study here.)

Florida’s low rank on the “teaching attractiveness” scale can be directly tied to the passage of Senate Bill 736 in 2011, also known as the Student Success Act, which rewrote the way teachers were paid and retained across the state. The bill made a number of sweeping, statewide changes (read more at State Impact Florida):

1. Rating teacher performance annually, with half their score based on student performance of state assessments.
2. Establish a merit pay system, eliminating additional pay for advanced degrees or certifications and salary increases based on seniority.
3. Eliminating long term contracts and job security: All new hires, including experienced educators who transfer to a new district, receive annual contracts and must be rehired on an annual basis.

SB736 was passed, in part, to qualify for a $700 million federal Race To The Top grant. Reformers believed that SB 736 would boost teacher pay, attract higher quality teachers to the field and, subsequently, lead to improved student outcomes.

The current teacher shortage crisis suggests that SB736 has failed miserably. Teacher salaries have not increased dramatically and bonuses are not consistent from year to year. Teachers have no assurances that they will be rehired from year to year. Tying teacher pay to student test scores (using a Value Added Model, or VAM) has been called arbitrary and has led to increased “teaching to the test” rather than higher quality classroom education. Instead of attracting higher quality teachers, declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs has led to the hiring of minimally prepared teachers trained through alternative programs (like Teach for America).

By tying teacher pay to student test scores, teachers have become more reluctant to move to lower performing schools where their evaluations may suffer. This exacerbates the difficulties in placing experienced teachers in those schools where shortages are most acute, resulting in the placement of less experienced teachers, from alternative certification programs, in the highest needs schools.

During the 1/25/17 Senate Education Appropriations workshop, Escambia Superintendent, Malcolm Thomas pointed out that districts would prefer to hire graduates of teacher preparation programs. “We’ve seen a dramatic fall off in the number of students that go to college of education… More than half of the teachers we hire are alternatively certified, meaning they did not graduate from a school of education, they were in some other degree field, maybe even in business, and had a career before and we are trying to attract them into education to fill our spots. There is certainly diminished supply coming out of universities and that is part of the problem because we all believe that if you go to school to train to be a teacher, you’ll be a better teacher.”

Should the failings of SB 736 come as a surprise to Dr. Avossa and other reformers? No. The alarm was sounded from day one.

Rick Hess, writing for Edweek in 2011, bet that SB736 was “going to be a train wreck,” predicting “Mandatory terminations will force some good teachers out of good schools because of predictable statistical fluctuations, and parents will be livid. Questions about cheating will rear their ugly head. A thrown-together growth model and rapidly generated tests, pursued with scarce resources and under a new Commissioner, are going to be predictably half-baked and prone to problems.”

ALL of these predictions have come true.

Sherman Dorn, educator and blogger, called SB 736 “Overreach and Overpromise.” He questioned “Will the elimination of permanent status and due process for teachers make it harder to recruit and retain good teachers?” Saying “There’s a lot of ground between a system that requires years to remove a bad teacher and a system that leaves teachers with no job security whatsoever, and SB 736 moved about 95% of the way towards at-will employment. If this law is upheld, teachers hired in Florida on or after July 1 will have less job security than many hourly employees have in Florida’s public agencies. I am unpersuaded either that the extent of that shift is a good idea in the abstract or that it will improve teaching. Anyone who really thinks SB 736 will do everything as promised is living in a different world than the one I observe.”

Officials at Florida colleges of education also sounded an early alarm regarding SB736, wondering whether fewer students would pursue teaching degrees. As reported in The SunSentinel in 2010, Florida’s teaching colleges anticipated they would “take a hit”: “It’s very possible people may not want to go into education in Florida and choose other states where they don’t have the same kind of restrictions on the book,” Driscoll (Dean of Faculty at NOVA Southeastern) said. “Individuals are saying, ‘How am I going to be able to control for test scores? How am I going to be able to overcome this?… Colleen Kennedy, Dean of the College of Education at the University of South Florida in Tampa, said she believes the state needs to focus on initiatives that will encourage the best teachers to stay or come to Florida. She fears this bill could have the opposite effect.” The deans of these teaching colleges were correct. SB736 did have the opposite effect.

Op-eds written prior to the passage of SB736, also predicted “It will lead to our classrooms becoming little more than test-prep centers where our children aren’t taught to think, just to pass a test.” Parents of public school children can verify that this is exactly what has happened.

It is no surprise to us that reformers, like Dr. Avossa, did not anticipate the current lack of interest of individuals entering the teaching profession. We have watched  Florida’s legislators, Board of Education, and Department of Education pay little attention to anyone but education reform-minded Foundations and lobbyists for years. The so-called “successes” of education reform have been overstated with cherry picked data that hides real concerns of parents and educators. Accountability systems dependent on high stakes tests have led to the elimination of recess, art, music and other activities once considered essential to a quality and developmentally appropriate education.

SB736 promised to boost teacher pay and attract higher quality teachers to the field. Instead it has decimated teacher preparation programs, demoralized the work force and turned classrooms into test-prep factories. We were warned this would happen but legislators and reformers were not listening.

It should come as no surprise that today’s graduates would decline to enter the teaching profession. Florida’s students know all too well the realities of the test-focused education accountability system. Alternative pathways to teaching may fill in gaps in teacher supply, providing less expensive, less experienced teachers to the classroom, but they should not be expected to be the solution to maintaining a high quality teaching force. Bandaid-like fixes, like the Best and Brightest (which from it’s inception implied that current teachers are not smart enough) are no substitute for job security and professional respect.

Back in 2011, Rick Hess, an education policy expert from the American Heritage Institute think tank, wrote advice that today’s legislators should heed:

“SB 736 continues the disconcerting habit of imagining that policymakers in a state capital can “fix” schooling through complex mandates. Rather than create the tools and opportunities for districts and schools to do better, and then hold them accountable for doing so, well-intentioned legislators have voted to replace the old credential-and-paper micromanagement with mandates that rely way too heavily on test scores of uncertain reliability, validity, or import. By setting one-size-fits-all prescriptions that apply to every teacher in every school in the state, SB 736 manages to emulate best practices in the pay of encyclopedia and aluminum siding salesmen circa 1951.”

We appreciate the efforts of Chairman Simmons and the Senate Education Appropriations Subcommittee to workshop important education issues in Florida. We, again, encourage legislators to take a close look at repealing well-intention but failed legislation rather than looking for innovative (read “untested”) solutions to self-created problems. It is time to peel back some of the failed reforms. Superintendents are calling for eliminating VAM and returning teacher evaluation decisions to the districts. Districts should be free to negotiate long term contracts with their best teachers. The solution for today’s teaching shortage crisis may lie in the repeal of the portions of SB736 that created the crisis in the first place.