Title: Is There a Shortage among Mathematics and Science Teachers
Abstract: Findings show that contrary to conventional wisdom, the problems schools are having staffing classrooms with qualified teachers are not due to increases in student enrollment or increases in teacher retirement. An argument is made that educational policy initiatives will not solve school staffing problems if they do not address the problem of teacher retention. Introduction Few educational problems have received more attention in recent years than the failure to ensure that elementary and secondary classrooms are all staffed with qualified teachers. Severe teacher shortages, education researchers and policy makers have told us, are confronting our elementary and secondary schools. At the root of these problems, we are told, is a dramatic increase in the demand for new teachers primarily resulting from two converging demographic trends-increasing student enrollments and increasing teacher turnover due to a graying teaching force. Shortfalls of teachers, the argument continues, are forcing many school systems to resort to lowering standards to fill teaching openings, inevitably resulting in high levels of underqualified teachers and lower school performance (e.g. National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983; National Academy of Sciences 1987; National Commission on Teaching 1997). These researchers and policy analysts have also stressed that shortages will affect some teaching fields more than others. Special education, math and science, in particular, have usually been targeted as fields with especially high turnover and those predicted most likely to suffer shortages (e.g. Murnane et al. 1991; Boe, Bobbitt and Cook 1997; Grissmer and Kirby 1992,1997; Weiss and Boyd 1990). As a result, over the past decade the inability of schools to adequately staff classrooms with qualified teachers (hereafter, school staffing problems) has increasingly been recognized as a major social problem, has received widespread coverage in the national media, and has been the target of a growing number of reform and policy initiatives. The prevailing policy response to these school staffing problems has been to attempt to increase the quantity of teacher supply. In recent years a wide range of initiatives have been implemented to recruit new candidates into teaching. Among these are career-change programs, such as troops-to-teachers, designed to entice professionals into mid-career switches to teaching and Peace Corps-like programs, such as Teach for America, designed to lure the best and brightest into understaffed schools. Many states have instituted alternative certification programs, whereby college graduates can postpone formal education training and begin teaching immediately. Financial incentives, such as signing bonuses, student loan forgiveness, housing assistance and tuition reimbursement have all been instituted to aid recruitment (for a review of these initiatives, see, Hirsch, Koppich and Knapp 2001 ). The federal No Child Left Behind Act, passed in winter 2002, provides extensive funding for such initiatives. Concern over school staffing problems has also given impetus to empirical research on teacher shortages and turnover. However, as numerous analysts have noted, it was difficult, initially, to study these issues because of a lack of accurate data, especially at a nationally representative level, on many of the pertinent issues surrounding teacher supply, demand and quality. In order to obtain such data, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Education, designed the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and its supplement, the Teacher Followup Survey (TFS), in the late 1980s. The Project Over the past decade I have been undertaking research using SASS and TFS to study a number of issues concerned with teacher supply, demand and quality (for summaries, see Ingersoll 1999, 2001a, 2001b). In this article I will briefly summarize what the data tell us about the realities of school staffing problems and teacher shortages, especially for math and science teachers. …
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 36
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