A Bleak Look at Teaching in America Offers an Opportunity for School Choice

New report asks, “Who wants to be a teacher in America?”

I’m going to put my bias out there right at the top of this piece. The more I study education and the more schools I observe, the more I believe that teacher quality is pretty much the whole game in education. If you want great schools, you have to have great teachers.

Lots of other things are important. Strong school culture, appropriate instructional materials, good curriculum, robust relationships with parents, all necessary. But it is the person, the actual human being, that puts all of that into play that is the most important.

Now, I started my career as a high school teacher, am married to a teacher, am the son of a teacher, am the brother to a teacher, and have many extended family members that are teachers. So perhaps I’m blinded by my own inflated sense of self-worth or the affection I feel for the teachers in my life. Totally possible. But there is a mountain of research that backs up my observations.

That’s what makes a new paper published by the Annenberg Institute all the more interesting and important.

Brendan Bartanen and Andrew Avitabile of the University of Virginia and Andrew Kwok of Texas A&M compiled data from the Common Application for 64 million college applications from 11.5 million prospective college students from 2014 to 2025. This gave them a rich set of background characteristics as well as information on where the prospective students applied to college. This allowed the researchers to paint, in their words, “the most detailed picture to date of the early teacher pipeline in the United States.”

So what does that picture look like? There are three key findings.

• “Consistent with prior work, we find substantially greater teaching interest among women and white applicants. We also find lower interest among higher-achieving applicants as measured by SAT/ACT scores and high school GPA.”
• “We identify several alternative career paths that attract similar students, including therapy, psychology, nursing, social work, and school counseling. Except for nursing, each of these careers has seen a decline in interest over the past decade, including a 20% decline for teaching.”
• “Prospective teachers tend to apply to mid-sized, public, master’s-level universities that are both close to home and have less selective admissions.”

Not a pretty picture for America’s teaching profession. Two quick takeaways, particularly for those in school choice world.

1. Schools of choice should use their freedom to rethink teaching to make it a better gig.

Matthew Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon wrote a great paper last year tracking longitudinal opinions on the teaching profession. They found, “rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s extending into the mid 1990s, relative stability, and then a sustained decline beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.” Our frequent teacher polls track the Net Promoter Score of teachers, and for the entire time we’ve been tracking it, the profession has been under water. The Kraft and Lyon paper doesn’t find a smoking gun to explain the loss of prestige, but the authors suggest stagnant wages and the increased cost of preparation programs, perceived loss of authority and autonomy, and public criticism of teachers and teachers unions as plausible contributors.

Offering higher wages and/or better working conditions is an opportunity for schools of choice. By leveraging the freedom they have to streamline administration and plough more money into the classroom, to working for schedules and calendars that work for teachers as well as families, to giving more autonomy and authority to teachers to be the professionals they want to be, to giving teachers more opportunity to find schools that align with their values and priorities, schools of choice can make teaching better and attract better teachers for doing so.

2. There is an opportunity here for teacher preparation programs

It’s a pretty basic syllogism given what I have set up here. Teachers are essential to school quality. So, schools of choice will need great teachers in order to be great.

What can we do about that? Two years ago I wrote a paper called Surfing the Pipeline about the pipeline of educators into schools of choice. We added a couple of questions to our teacher survey, one of which asked how well-prepared teachers felt for teaching in different environments. Here is what we found:

Not surprisingly, teachers felt most prepared to teach in public schools, followed by private and charter schools. There was a steady decline to the number who felt prepared to teach in religious, hybrid, home-, and microschools.

When looking at the four most choice-rich states in the country, the paper found that there were limited opportunities within traditional preparation programs to learn the skills, knowledge, and dispositions specific to schools of choice.

There is a gap in the marketplace.

Here is where Bartanen, Avitabile, and Kwok’s finding that teachers are biased towards attending “mid-sized, public, master’s-level universities” can come in handy. These institutions, particularly in states with growing choice populations, have an opportunity to distinguish themselves by offering majors, minors, or even just courses specifically preparing teachers to teach in schools of choice.

What are some of the pedagogical strategies that are specific to microschools, for example? Are there techniques that classical educators need, or those who are in project-based learning schools? How can teachers navigate relationships with parents in schools where they have much more power? These seem like good topics for teacher prep courses! Programs that offer them can give themselves a leg up in the crowded teacher preparation marketplace.

When I see an important profession with stagnant wages, declining prestige, and decreased interest from prospective applicants, I see huge opportunities for disruptive innovation. There are opportunities for schools to rethink the profession. There are opportunities for preparation programs to retool for the new environments that educators will be teaching in. And, there are opportunities for families to partner with teachers in new ways that are better for both.

But these are all just opportunities. Everyone has to step up to take advantage of them.

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As a brief, unrelated coda that you should feel no obligation to read: This topic was of interest to me because the scores for Ireland’s college entrance exams were released recently, and it gave me a chance to see how selective their teacher preparation programs are.

At the end of secondary school, Irish students sit for a set of exams called the Leaving Certificate. The best possible score is 625.

Looking at the score requirements across colleges in Ireland, the minimum score to be admitted into a Primary Education course (the equivalent of a major in elementary education) took between 473 and 506 points. This corresponds to roughly the 70^th-80^th percentile of test takers.

The equivalent range on the ACT would be 22 to 25 and between 1150 and 1250 on the SAT. And that is the minimum. (To be clear, this is simply in relative terms, the substance of the tests are different.) This recent paper by Goldhaber et al estimated that for teachers at public universities in Washington State, 18.6% of applicants had SAT scores less than 1000 and 40% had scores between 1000 and 1299. Might be worth looking into what Ireland is doing to attract relatively higher performing students into its preparation programs…

This was originally posted to our Substack.