Dive Brief:
- In Philadelphia, some students don't have teachers for 50% of classes because of teacher and substitute shortages.
- The problem is due to a district-wide "inability to find enough qualified teachers to fill the available jobs," the Philadelphia Public School Notebook reports.
- Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, told the Notebook that the root of the problem isn't a lack of qualified teachers, but a failure to retain them.
Dive Insight:
"The big story is not on the supply side, but on the turnover side,” Ingersoll told the Notebook. “It’s not that we produce too few teachers, but that we lose too many.”
While the district has tried to mitigate the problem by using non-union substitute teachers from Source4Teachers, that company has reportedly failed to deliver on its promise of staffing. Annual teacher losses are said to be around 4.375%, and local officials also underestimated student enrollment.
Low wages and a lack of a teacher's contract exacerbates the problem for Philadelphia, and the two issues are reflected nationally in urban areas experiencing similar dilemmas.
But it's not just an urban problem. In Indiana, the number of teacher licenses issued recently dropped by more than 50% between 2009 and 2013. In Kansas, hundreds of vacancies were unfilled in the weeks before the school year began. North Carolina and South Dakota are also struggling.
Education Dive previously reported on the "perfect storm" of political and budget factors behind teacher shortages, including new approaches like financial incentives and new technology and models meant to alleviate the problem.
So what can administrators do? First, they can help prevent the problem by "growing their own teachers," encouraging local paraprofessionals and former graduates to "consider teaching as a full-time job and [then] help support them in getting certified.... Given their already existing ties to the area, they'll be more likely to come home and stay."