Supply in demand: Is there light at the end of the teacher pipeline? 

That glimmer at the end of California’s once-celebrated “teacher pipeline” isn’t daylight, it’s an oncoming train, freighted with accidents waiting to happen:

• One hundred thousand new teachers will be needed over the next 10 years as baby boomers retire and younger teachers leave the ranks for other pursuits; a shortage of 27,000 fully credentialed K-12 teachers is projected in 2007-08.
• The “highly qualified teacher” requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act takes effect June 1. Ten thousand teachers in California schools didn’t qualify at the start of the 2005-06 school year.
• The number of undergraduates enrolled in teacher credentialing programs dropped 11 percent in two years, from 76,000 in 2001-02 to just 67,500 in 2003-04.

The pileup will culminate in the mid-2010s, when school districts’ scramble for teachers will be the most desperate. K-12 enrollment is projected to climb from 6.3 million today to nearly 6.5 million in 2013-14; approximately 317,000 teachers will be needed to instruct them, compared to the 306,000 working today, according to the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, or CFTL.

“This is not an urban problem. In fact, it’s an issue that every district in the state is likely to face,” said CFTL Executive Director Margaret Gaston.

It’s also a national trend. The National Center for Education Information says 40 percent of America’s public school teachers plan to leave the profession in the next five years. That’s the highest rate since at least 1990. Retirement is the main reason, with 42 percent of the nation’s teacher corps reaching age 50 or older last year. By 2015, the National Center for Education Statistics estimates that 2.4 million new teachers will be needed throughout the country.

“The numbers are stark,” said Chris Reising, Director of the Teacher Recruitment and Support Center at the San Diego County Office of Education. “It’s just stunning.”

The number of candidates who took the California Basic Educational Skills Test, the initial threshold to the teaching profession here, has fallen precipitously – from more than 129,000 at its peak in 2001-02 to fewer than 78,000 in 2004-05, according to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

“Now, you do the math,” Reising said. “CBEST is the initial indicator. It’s the very front of the pipeline.”

Déjà vu

Not to worry – California has weathered teacher shortages before, right? The Class Size Reduction Act of 1996 created 23,500 new K-3 teaching jobs to be filled almost overnight, according to a 1999 Rand Corp. analysis, and the estimated shortage of qualified teachers throughout the state’s K-12 system was several times higher.

The demand was met in large part through increased reliance on new teacher accreditation policies, including alternative routes into the profession such as on-the-job internships. The number of newly credentialed teachers ramped upward, growing from around 12,000 annually in the first half of the 1990s to more than 21,000 in the 2001-02 school year.

“California really did have one of the most sophisticated and efficient teacher pipelines in the United States” at the turn of the new century, said CFTL’s Gaston, who congratulated members of the state’s education policy community on how quickly they put the pipeline in place. “It was akin to turning the Queen Elizabeth in the harbor.”

But turning a luxury liner is an expensive proposition (the Queen Elizabeth II reportedly gets 29 feet per gallon), and so is finding teachers for California’s 9,400 public schools.

California paid 298,000 teachers more than $15.75 billion in salary in the 2001-02 school year, according to a U.S. Department of Education survey. That doesn’t include the cost of benefits, let alone the state’s cost of preparing those teachers or the amount that local districts spend to recruit them.

“At the peak of expenditures in 2000-01, state spending for recruitment initiatives surpassed $150 million. The recruitment drive soon ended, however; most of the efforts begun in the late 1990s were abandoned in 2003-04 because of the state’s budget crisis,” according to the 2005 edition of CFTL’s influential annual report, “Status of the Teaching Profession.”

Paths into the pipeline

If California’s teachers come from pipelines, the state’s public institutions of higher education are the primary reservoirs, accounting for 86 percent of all newly credentialed teachers in the state in 2004-05, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (12 percent came from out of state, and 2 percent were prepared through district intern programs). But teacher recruits at California’s universities and colleges are harder to find than they used to be, according to CFTL’s report; 76,000 prospective teachers were enrolled in teacher prep programs in 2001-02, but only 73,000 in 2002-03 and just 67,500 in 2003-04.

Unless they enter a “blended” undergraduate program that combines a subject-matter major with teacher training, candidates typically have a bachelor’s degree in hand when they enter one of the state’s 75 public and private teacher preparation programs. They must pass CBEST’s measurement of their basic reading, math and writing skills, as well as the California Subject Examinations for Teachers in the area they want to teach; they also must have 80 hours of experience working with children and be familiar with the U.S. Constitution.

Once admitted to a teacher preparation program, candidates spend the next year or more studying the pedagogy – the principles and methods of teaching – and they complete a student teaching assignment. This qualifies them for a preliminary teaching credential, which is good for five years.

That’s the traditional route, the mainline into the teacher pipeline. Increasingly, though, teachers are filtering into the profession through university or district internships, which allow individuals to complete their teacher preparation coursework on the job with mentoring and support from colleges, universities or through school districts.

The intern path to teaching was introduced in 1983, but wholesale changes to the state’s credentialing process in the 1990s increased its use. Some 32,000 teachers have completed internships since 1993, according to Michael McKibben, project officer for alternative certification at the teacher credentialing commission.

“We wanted to attract a different kind of teacher,” McKibben said.

They succeeded. Most intern teachers are more than 30 years old and a quarter are over 40; the average age is 36. “You’re a little bit older, a bit more savvy,” McKibben said. “Most of these 36-year-olds had really made a conscious decision that they want to teach.”

Many bring with them valuable experience from the military or other careers, including teachers from other states and even other countries. Internships last up to three years and are often combined with innovative recruitment programs such as Troops to Teachers, a program of the U.S. Department of Education and Department of Defense.

“We’ve been highly successful in taking individuals with military backgrounds and placing them in the classroom,” said Reising, the teacher recruiter in San Diego, home to the highest concentration of military bases in the country. “It’s been a very good source of a very ethnically diverse pool of candidates.”

On-the-job training

Whatever route they follow into the pipeline, the challenges that new teachers encounter once they’re on the job are daunting. However, the level of support and professional development they receive can vary greatly.

“Recruitment is only part of the equation,” observed Ellen Moir, Executive Director of the New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “You have to get the right people ... [but] once they arrive, and they’re given their own key, we have a moral obligation to offer them the very best opportunity possible to be successful.”

Teachers who start work with a preliminary credential participate in the Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Induction Program. Interns don’t initially qualify for BTSA because they lack a preliminary credential; instead, they get on-the-job training and support through a wide variety of university and school district programs lasting two to three years, and they follow that up with BTSA induction, according to McKibben.

More than 22,500 beginning teachers, working in nearly 96 percent of the state’s 9,400 public schools, were enrolled in BTSA programs in 2004-05. Internship programs served just 9,135 participants, but that is up more than sevenfold from a decade earlier, at least in part because intern teachers are considered “highly qualified” under No Child Left Behind, while teachers with preliminary credentials are not.

All alternative programs must meet the same high standards as traditional programs and must be accredited by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, according to a 2005 CTC report: “Each program must show how it prepares interns prior to their classroom experience – usually during the summer – and must show how interns are mentored and assessed in addition to providing continued teacher education courses and seminars.”

However, questions about the quality of those preparation programs persist, as do concerns about the prevalence of interns in low-performing schools, and in classes filled with minority students and English Learners.

“The instructional support interns receive from their programs is in some cases sorely lacking or entirely absent,” the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning concluded in its 2005 report, “The Status of the Teaching Profession.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have a work-seasoned teacher in one of those harder-to-staff schools?” countered McKibben, the CTC’s point man on interns. He cited a 2003 study comparing intern teachers and traditionally prepared teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The research gave intern teachers a slight edge over BTSA teachers in classroom management and found a slim edge in math and spelling among intern teachers’ students.

Executive Director Gaston clarified that CFTL does not regard the intern label as a pejorative. “These are the very people we need to fully support so they thrive in the profession and they stay there,” Gaston said. “Interns are worthy not only of our respect but our thanks.”

Whether teachers enter the profession via blended programs, preliminary credentials or internships, though, experience may be the best teacher. The study comparing LAUSD’s interns and BTSA teachers concluded that “the performance of both groups was inferior to what we would expect to find from more experienced teachers.”

Foraging for teachers

Teachers don’t really come from pipelines, or cabbage patches, or test tubes of DNA. School districts generally have to go out and hunt for them.

The search was easier a few years ago when the state operated six regional recruitment centers, funded the development of an online job bank and provided grants through the Teaching as a Priority program to attract teachers to low-performing and hard-to-staff schools to help address a teacher shortage brought on, in part, by class-size reduction policies.

Vestiges of those programs survive and various proposals to strengthen them have surfaced in Sacramento, but in the meantime recruiters are soldiering on with their own local and regional efforts.

“We have relied more and more on Ed-Join,” the state-funded recruitment Web site, reported Chris Cordner, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources at Temecula Valley USD in Riverside County. “We get far better coverage in terms of getting notice out to the job market.”

Sheryl Finch, Certificated Personnel Supervisor at nearby Hesperia USD, called Ed-Join “my basic tool for recruitment online,” but said she also uses NACElink, operated by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, and Monstertrak, a private Web site matching all kinds of professional and pre-professional applicants and employers.

Len Casanega, Assistant Superintendent of Personnel at Lodi USD in the Central Valley, adds the National Alliance of Black School Educators and the California Association of Bilingual Educators to his list of resources. Lodi officials have also extended their search for math and science teachers as far as the Philippines, where the Los Angeles USD also forages to fill hard-to-staff positions.

“We have a very aggressive recruitment campaign, and that really is driven by our need,” said Deborah Ignagni, Administrative Coordinator for Certificated Employment Operations. “Our recruitment never stops.”

Some districts and county offices of education collaborate to fill their teaching rosters, and some of the most effective programs grew out of the state’s six Teacher Recruitment Incentive Program regional recruitment centers that operated until 2003.

“When the recruitment centers closed, we tried to be creative to keep our doors open,” said Donna Glassman-Sommer, Director of Teacher Recruitment and the Impact intern program for the Tulare County Office of Education. Her office serves approximately 30 school districts in Merced, Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Kern counties, charging a fee for service based on average daily attendance.

“We’ve really been able to stay alive and healthy because of our federal grants,” by including “cutting-edge” programs to promote teacher quality and teacher diversity and to help professionals from other fields transition into teaching, Glassman-Sommer explained.

The Southern California Teacher Recruitment Center serving San Diego, Orange and Imperial counties is another thriving survivor of the state’s regional recruitment operations. Chris Reising, one of the center’s two directors, takes pride in its successful recruitment efforts and its ongoing professional development successes, including a BTSA/Induction program and the San Diego County Office of Education’s Substitute Teacher Training Program.

But, he added, “We need to have some sort of systematic recruitment effort statewide that also reaches out to other states.” In the near term, that should include adjunct teachers from the private sector and retirees, Reising said; in the longer term, strategies are needed to encourage middle and high school students and undergraduates to consider teaching as a career.

Much of what Reising advocates is included in Senate Bill 1209, an omnibus education bill carried by state Sen. Jack Scott, chairman of the Senate Education Committee. SB 1209 would codify many of the recommendations included in CFTL’s “Status of the Teaching Profession” report.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell has called on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature to re-establish and fully fund the regional centers. Schwarzenegger lists “ensuring student access to quality education professionals” first among nine main elements of his official record on education on his Web site. His 2006-07 budget proposal includes $100 million for a School Enrichment Block Grant “to give school districts more flexibility to address teacher and principal staffing needs”; teacher recruitment and retention is also addressed in his one-time, $49 million Low-Performing School Enrichment Block Grant.

“Certainly, the issue of teacher quality has the attention of California’s public policy community,” remarked CFTL’s Gaston.

Highly qualified teachers

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires that all core academic teachers be rated “highly qualified” by June 1 of this year. That means they must have a bachelor’s degree and demonstrated knowledge of the subjects they teach; they also must either have a clear credential or be working toward one in an intern program – teachers in BTSA programs don’t qualify.

“More than 20,000 teachers are still ‘underprepared,’ meaning they do not hold a full credential to teach,” according to CFTL’s most recent annual report on teachers. “The demand for fully credentialed teachers is expected to grow through 2014-15. Trends in teacher supply sources do not indicate that there will be enough fully credentialed teachers to meet demand. Instead, the state will again need to employ high numbers of underprepared teachers—nearly 33,000 by the mid-2010s.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings indicated last October that the feds will show flexibility on the requirement if states can show “they are implementing the law and making a good-faith effort to reach the HQT goal in NCLB as soon as possible.”

“She doesn’t have a choice,” exclaimed Cordner, the Temecula Valley USD recruiter. “All we can say is, we’re trying.”

Brian Taylor (btaylor@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.

Related link:

• "Do pay incentives have merit?"