Where have the Teachers Gone

It's 2001, and school districts have 300 applications for every vacancy, schools of education have more than doubled their enrollment since the 1990’s according to the Teacher Preparation Completion 2019 from data provided by the USDOE and society views teaching as a highly respectable and successful career choice. Fast forward twenty years and we face a drastic new environment, schools of education are graduating 40% less certified teachers (Chartock & Wiener, 2018), for every vacancy a district receives less than three applications (Seidel, 2014); a career as a teacher is fraught with low pay, long hours, lack of respect, and 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years (Ingersoll, Merrill, and Stuckey, 2014).  What happened, how did America end up here? 

As a society, the perfect storm of teacher shortages has manifest despite our best efforts to the contrary. Our student population continues to grow annually (Seidel, 2014) while access to teachers decreases. The perpetual dispute between how to measure teacher effectiveness and teacher unions focusing on job security has created an institutional environment without trust or innovation. Furthermore, teachers are supposed to teach to the du jour standardized test, and are prohibited from going outside of the predetermined curricular box. This is with the underlying knowledge that districts can’t easily remove a teacher for poor instruction or pay a teacher for being innovative. We are stuck in a stalemate.  

Metrics and standardized assessment have become the normalized trend in education over the last 15 years.  The challenge is persuading teachers and those who are stakeholders in education that alterations to the instructional model of America is essential to student success and America’s long term viability.  Special interests must be managed and student achievement the critical motivator of all those involved in the education of the nation’s children. Restrictive assessment measures have caused an undercurrent of antipathy and opposition which results in less teacher autonomy within the classroom which inhibits student success as a whole. And, finally, this perennial institutional struggle has created greater challenges to overcome due to the alienation tax-payers feel towards educators in their respective districts. 

Millennial teachers have been taught their whole life to be different, creative, and to adopt innovative technology to make their lives better. They are driven to make the world a better place and to use their mind to do it. These are the students in the current teacher education programs. These are the students graduating and being placed in the current state of education.  

Teaching is the single profession whose glacial innovation resulted in the current state of affairs in education. The factory model of instruction continues to persist and undercuts the value of the reforms recommended throughout the 20th and 21st century by the likes of Dewey, Montessori and Piaget. We continue to arrange desks in a row, a sage on stage, and the same rote approach to the curriculum structure of math, science, history, English, reading and a world language. This teaching environment was developed to stratify the industrial worker 150 years ago. Our industry has changed, they are not in need of factory workers but independent, free, critical thinkers that can help mankind envision a modern future and how to get there.   

The new generation of teachers necessitates a new teacher paradigm. A model that promotes creative innovative pedagogues who seek to alter the terrain of student learning. Teachers, who are also students, with the implicit and explicit knowledge of the teaching and learning process.  Seeking to cultivate students and what they think as individuals. An open format teaching model can and will more effectively provide better outcomes for students.  A blend of the use of technology and traditional teaching methods assists schools and administrators in resourcing highly successful and credentialed teachers nationally, or perhaps internationally, and can provide students with a high quality education and instructional equity. Why does the teacher need to be “in” the classroom, why not teach virtually?  The definition of how students learn needs to be modified for where our jobs are heading.   Education needs to abandon rote teaching and organizational process and construct school program designed for the individual student by leveraging teacher resources to scaffold student success. 

It's time to rethink how we educate our students, how our teachers instruct, and where our teachers instruct from.  At what point will it be at the point of no return where both colleges and industry start to make recruitment outside of America their priority?