It's no secret that America's educated population is only a fraction of what it was 15 years ago, was hit hard by the Great Recession, and has largely shrunk ever since.
But new federal data gives researchers reason for optimism, as efforts to make education more economically viable through strategies like paying student teachers helped reverse course. It suggests that.
From 2018 to 2022, enrollment in teacher preparation programs increased 12% nationwide, with approximately 46,231 test takers, according to a March report on Title II data from the Pennsylvania Center for Assessment and Educational Policy Analysis. The number of people has increased.
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Nine states have led the pack in large increases in teacher preparation programs in recent years: Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Maryland, which has the highest average growth rate. .
At a time when American education was at its most tense, the modest increases in both enrollment and completion rates surprised experts.
“It's encouraging to see that in the middle of a pandemic, it certainly wasn't what we expected,” said Jacqueline King, research and policy consultant for the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education.
Over the past three years, only 11 states, including Montana and Minnesota, experienced sustained declines in enrollment in prep programs.
“I think all the work we've been doing around personal growth, apprenticeships, training, etc. to open up more affordable paths to education is starting to pay off. This is amazing and amazing,” King added.
Factors also include federal pandemic relief funds and new laws in states like Colorado and Michigan that pay student teachers. In Maryland, for example, some candidates earn a living wage of $30,000 during a year of teaching training.
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“It's real,” King said. “That's enough money, so don't even think about working part-time while teaching students.”
Still, researchers warn that growth is not fast enough to meet job demand. Teacher shortages are concentrated in the South and Midwest, and in key areas such as special education and math.
Enrollment in teacher preparation programs has fallen by 45% in just 10 years. That means enrollment in teacher preparation programs is decreasing by about 300,000 people a year. Severe social, political, and economic tensions fueled the decline, including the Great Recession and education reform efforts that negatively affected education and public perceptions of American schools. .
By 2021, only five regions bucked the overall trend: Arizona, Mississippi, Texas, Washington, and Washington, D.C., with higher enrollment than a decade ago. Texas' growth can be attributed to the rapid expansion of a specific alternative program, Teachers of Tomorrow. It has undergone national certification examination.
“For the past seven years, we've been at a standstill in terms of teacher numbers,” said Ed Fuller, a Penn State education professor and author of the latest analysis. “We don’t have to be where we were in 2010 because we don’t have as many students, but we do need to be much closer to it than we are now.”
Approximately 1.2 million fewer students will be enrolled in K-12 public schools nationwide in 2022 than before the pandemic. The sharpest decline is in the lower grades, partly as a result of lower birth rates.
Overall, the district did not put the brakes on teacher hiring because of the staggering 2% drop in student enrollment. Schools added 15,000 teaching positions last school year using expired pandemic relief funds.
Even though the number of full-time school employees reached a record high, a quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student than in 2016.
The demand for teachers is unmet, with approximately 55,000 unfilled teaching jobs nationwide. Since 2008, a decline in the number of teachers in training has affected schools across the country.
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Even places like Pennsylvania, where the supply of teachers has historically been very abundant and where many newly qualified teachers have been driven out of the state, are bearing the brunt of the decline in the teacher workforce. That surplus gradually disappeared over six years.
“People weren't paying attention,” said Fuller, who encouraged public figures to advocate for the value of the profession and for Congress to embrace teacher scholarships and tailor hiring to local needs. Scholarships could be allocated to teachers of color, math educators, or teachers who serve high-poverty schools, for example.
But for districts and states tasked with building a diverse and robust educational workforce, focusing solely on producing new candidates would be like using a hose to fill a leaky bucket. , King warned, the effort would be in vain.
According to the Rand Corporation, 10% of teachers nationwide will have left their jobs by the end of the 2021-22 school year, up 4% from before the pandemic. Experts point to job dissatisfaction, political polarization and burnout.
Florida, one of nine states with higher enrollment growth than any other state, has more than 5,000 unfilled teaching positions, the most in the nation. Work is also becoming more difficult. The remaining educators are teaching more students per classroom than before the pandemic. Although enrollment data suggests a move in the right direction, it will be years before today's teachers-in-training enter the workforce.
“We need to think more about the teaching profession and how to make it sustainable economically, in terms of work-life balance and in terms of giving people opportunities to develop. It has to be,” King said. “We need to think about education and why it's such a difficult job to sell.”