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A Shortage of Teachers
The statewide statistics that the Department of Education does bother to keep are alarming in their own right. Essentially, the picture they paint is one of the state fumbling and stumbling its way into a real teacher supply crisis in the coming years.
At one level, the imbalance between supply and demand is a matter of raw numbers: The state's colleges and universities produce fewer than 6,000 teachers a year vs. an annual statewide demand for about 10,000. For some time now, Florida has had to import about half of its teachers. At a different level, the distribution of teachers by subject doesn't match the demand. Those who teach gifted, handicapped and emotionally disturbed children are in such short supply that fully 25% of the teachers instructing those children statewide aren't certified in exceptional education, as it's called.
The state's teacher education schools produce too many elementary school teachers by about a third but only about half the math and science teachers the school systems need. One reason: Teaching schools simply aren't attracting college grads from disciplines that require real rigor. "Significantly, more (teacher ed) graduates majored in social studies or physical education than in math or science, even though the percentages of vacancies in math and science are from one-third to one-half higher than the percentages in social studies and physical education," states a January 2000 Florida Department of Education report.
Meanwhile, a retirement crunch is coming. A third of the teachers now teaching in the state were born between 1947-1952. That means a big chunk of the teaching workforce will have enough years of service to retire in just a few years -- and what is now a group of spotty, worrisome shortages could very well become a statewide catastrophe as Florida continues to grow.
The solution -- increasing the supply of teachers -- isn't going to come from the traditional pipeline, the schools of education. The pool of potential teachers has shrunk too drastically: Only about 13% of the total number of undergraduate degrees awarded by the State University System now are in education; in 1965, nearly 25% of all undergrad degrees were in education. Why the drop-off? The teaching profession has failed to broaden its traditional female base. (Overall, more than 80% of teacher ed graduates are women.) Meanwhile, women have many more -- and better-paying -- career options now than they did 35 years ago.
Deans at schools of education are telling the state they can increase their output of teachers significantly, but a state report says the deans' new projections run counter to all trends and "may be wish fulfillment'' by the administrators.
Finding enough teachers and attracting brighter people to the profession will mean, in part, that the state's taxpayers must pay teachers salaries that match the importance of their responsibilities. It will also mean improving teachers' working conditions -- providing enough supplies that they don't have to pay for things out of their own pockets and not asking teachers to teach out of trailers.
And it will also mean easing barriers to entry -- particularly given the large numbers of skilled, early-retired people who will be populating Florida in the coming decade and whose professional experiences make them good teaching candidates.
Presently, the state requires prospective teachers to study a mix of subject-area classes and education courses. The requirements -- nearly half as many hours in "professional preparation" (education courses) as in subject matter courses such as history and math -- create business for state bureaucrats and education school profs, but there are big questions about how good and how useful those education classes are.
Many states are experimenting with ways to take people who know something about something, give them a quick, focused background in basic teaching strategies and survival skills, and get them into classrooms. Certainly many excellent private schools do quite nicely with teachers who are never certified by the state.
Presently, only three districts in Florida -- Hillsborough, Orange and Manatee (also, FSU's lab school) -- have programs to provide alternative routes to certification for prospective teachers. Only two others, Alachua and Duval, have such programs in the works. The alternative programs put teachers in the classroom under supervision of their principal and mentor teachers while enabling them to complete required coursework by taking classes the district provides.
Hillsborough is seeking some additional flexibility in its alternative certification program to better enable it to hire people entering teaching from other careers as well as out-of-state professionals. There's still likely to be a mess of bureaucracy, but it's a common-sense response to what's already a serious problem.
Perhaps most important, Hillsborough and at least one other district,Volusia, aren't working on solving the teacher shortage problem in isolation from other issues. Those two districts are becoming "charter school districts'' -- in exchange for adopting tough performance and accountability standards, i.e., focusing on results, they get freedom from some of the state rules and regulations that keep the system mired in process.
That kind of entrepreneurial spirit and focus on accountability is admirable -- it's no accident that the Hillsborough district is run by superintendent Earl Lennard, who promised last year he'd take a pay cut if any of his schools failed the state's new report card.
The idea of setting standards, lessening state bureaucracy and letting educators at the ground level solve their own problems also is consistent with what Gov. Jeb Bush says is the proper role of government. He made a good start with his A+ program, which gave the local districts the merest whiff of accountability. Some districts may not have liked the way it smelled, but many promptly rose to the challenge and improved. Bush should lend some leadership muscle to the charter district movement.
In any event, Hillsborough's initiative to make sure its children have enough teachers to teach them -- and teach them well -- is a good one. Improving the state's educational system ultimately starts and ends with teachers -- both by having enough of them and then by empowering them to create the community of shared expectations that is the definition of a good school.
