Boosting Teacher Supply on the Margins
It's not enough to reward people who are already going into teaching
Let’s say there are 200,000 college students in a given state. Let’s also say that right now, 10% of those college students are majoring in education. Multiplying those two numbers together, that means roughly 20,000 young students are currently training to become a teacher in the next few years.
Now let’s say you are a policymaker in that state. You’ve seen some of your districts struggle to hire teachers in the last few years, particularly in rural areas and in subjects like math, science, and special education.
What do you do? How do you boost the supply of new teachers to fill these shortages?
This question should immediately help you think through what’s NOT likely to work. If your policy solution is focused on high school students, it would take a while for them to matriculate into college, complete their training, and enter the teacher labor market. That’s a 5-year proposition, at best, assuming those people make it all the way through and don’t change their minds along the way.
You also might not want to direct any incentives at people who are already planning to become a teacher. That could help shore up people who are waffling between a few choices, teaching being one of them, but it’s not likely to move the needle very much.
In other words, to really boost the supply of new teachers in any sort of immediate time frame, a policy would have to successfully convince the marginal student that they should go into teaching instead of communications or business or nursing. By the time they are finishing college, they must find a teaching career attractive enough compared to all the other options.
I say all this as prelude to a story out of South Carolina. I’ve scrubbed out the personal details, but here’s the gist:
As college students return to campuses across South Carolina, some of them are receiving extra scholarship money this year because of what they are studying.
Among them is University of South Carolina sophomore _________.
“My dad’s a teacher. He teaches at Blythewood High School, and he’s just always been so positive about his career choice, and I just wanted to do something that would make me happy,” ______ said.
So she is planning to become an art teacher after graduation and recently got good news that should help her achieve that goal.
“I was really excited! I called my mom, and I was like, ‘Mom, you won’t believe it!’” she said.
______ is among the students receiving a scholarship enhancement for the first time this fall for majoring in education.
I’m reading between the lines here, but my hunch is this person is not exactly someone who was waffling between teaching and some other profession. They were already majoring in education and planning to become a teacher. Plus, this person’s father is a teacher, and research suggests that having a parent in education is a strong predictor of a child also becoming a teacher.
Later on we find out that the $10,000 scholarship comes with an additional requirement that recipients remain in state for a few years, but again that’s not an issue for this teacher, who told the reporter, “It’s a commitment that you have to be able to make, and I love where I’m from, so I’m happy to work here.”
Maybe this type of scholarship will help ensure that those who are intending to become teachers can afford to stay in the pipeline. Maybe the scholarship is really just a backdoor way to give future teachers additional compensation.
Regardless, this type of poorly tailored scholarship program is not likely to meaningfully move the needle on the teacher supply situation in South Carolina. That would require convincing people who aren’t already planning to become a teacher to consider it. In economic terms, policymakers need to pay more attention to the marginal cases.