Plenty of people want to teach...

They just don't want to go through traditional teacher preparation programs

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, and I want to return to a point I made last fall. Namely, based on survey results it appears that teacher morale is bad and getting worse. At the same, schools have more teachers and the pipeline is growing.

What explains this disconnect? Is this just a matter of stated versus revealed preferences? Is it possible the survey results are biased in some way, or perhaps larger societal trends are hitting teachers particularly hard?

I can’t explain what’s behind the disconnect, but I do think it’s real and that it matters for how we think and talk about the teaching profession.

For one, it’s weird to talk about the “fall” of a profession that’s actually growing in size. Even with the post-pandemic rise in turnover rates and hiring challenges, schools were able to fill their open roles and then some as teacher staffing counts climbed to all-time highs.¹ Because student enrollments are down in most parts of the country, that means districts employ more teachers per student. At least in historical terms, schools are very well staffed.²

The teacher pipeline has also been growing in recent years. Those numbers are nowhere near back from their most-recent highs, but they are rising.

However, the trends among different types of preparation programs is telling us something important. The graph below shows the percentage change over time for teacher preparation programs, separated out by program type.³ All the lines start in 2006-7, our most recent peak.

The black line is the total number of people completing a teacher preparation program of any type. As you can see, it had fallen 40% by 2018-19. Those numbers have started to rebound in more recent years, but it’s still down 34% from where it was in 2006-7.

The light gray line shows the trend for new teachers coming from traditional, university-based preparation programs. As you can see, it’s driving the bulk of the overall trends. When the graph starts in 2007, traditional programs accounted for 86% of all new teachers prepared.

But look at the red line. The number of people coming through alternative teacher preparation programs bottomed out much more quickly, in 2013-14, and has rebounded sharply (up 48%) since then. As of the most recent data, it’s down just 4% from where it was in 2006-7. Because of the divergence between traditional and alternative programs, the share of newly licensed teachers coming via alternative routes has increased from 14 to 20%.

One takeaway from all this is that plenty of people are at least somewhat interested in teaching, but it has become increasingly hard to recruit candidates into traditional, university-based teacher preparation programs.

1. Public schools employed the equivalent of 3.2 million full-time teachers last year, just squeaking out the previous high set in 2008-9. Data via: https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/elsi/tableGenerator.aspx

2. I’m speaking nationally here. It’s not true everywhere or even in most places, but there are some districts that have fewer teachers than they did pre-pandemic.

3. Because Texas is a such a big outlier in terms of alternative preparation program participants and completers, I’ve taken it out of all of these national numbers.