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Burdensome Student Loan Debt Is Contributing To The Country’s Teacher Shortage Crisis

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US Capitol building at dusk
 

This post was originally published on November 17, 2019 by Forbes.

The country’s crushing student loan debt has been dominating education news — from the campaign trail to the recent resignation of a Trump administration senior student-loan official who called the student-loan system “fundamentally broken,” to the recent contempt of civil court charge against U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the Education Department for collecting loan payments from thousands of students defrauded by for-profit colleges.

There’s good reason for the widespread concern — U.S. student debt has roughly tripled since 2006, and about 43 million student loan borrowers carry a debt burden of more than $1.6 trillion. Even as higher education is increasingly essential in our new global economy, college costs more each year. And college graduates take their loan debt into consideration when they decide on what professions to pursue. Until the country addresses the cost of higher education and the burden of student loan debt, we will continue to see shortages of well-prepared professionals in key public sectors that pay less than many private sector jobs.

 
Ending teacher shortages is an essential step to help close the country’s opportunity and achievement gaps.
 

Teaching is one of those sectors. The profession—which has struggled with deep shortages in recent years—has been hit hard by the high cost of education, with more than two thirds of those who choose to go into education taking on an average debt of about $20,000 for a bachelor’s degree and $50,000 for a master’s degree. This debt load is especially problematic since teachers, on-average, make 30% less than peers with similar degrees and even less if they choose to work in poorly resourced, high-need communities.

This is especially true for teachers of color who are most heavily impacted by student debt. These teachers, who are underrepresented in the workforce, are critical to the goal of closing the achievement gap as they are most likely to choose to work in the highest need schools, and they significantly boost the academic performance of students of color, while also benefitting all students.

Stories about the teacher shortages often focus on low teacher pay and under-resourced schools (two of the chief issues at the heart of teacher strikes), but the story begins with the daunting barrier teachers face even to enter the profession — the cost of high-quality teacher preparation programs. Underscoring this challenge is the fact that enrollments in teacher preparation programs have been on a steady decline for years, dropping 39% for undergraduate and post-baccalaureate programs between 2010 and 2017 — resulting in more than 277,000 fewer professionals working their way toward the classroom.

These high-quality preparation programs matter greatly to teachers’ success as they foster more effective classroom practices and result in teachers remaining in the profession 2 to 3 times longer than those who enter without preparation. Yet a growing share of teachers are entering without training on emergency permits or through alternative routes in which they try to learn how to teach at the same time that they’re actually teaching. These teachers are less effective when they enter and they leave at higher rates, which also harms student achievement.

High-achieving countries like Finland, Singapore, and Canada, which generally have teacher surpluses instead of shortages, make significant investments in teachers before and during their careers, including investing in high-quality teacher education, usually at the graduate level, in large part at government expense, along with salaries that are competitive with other careers.

Our failure to address this issue is a major source of the achievement gap pundits decry every fall when test scores are released. Expert teachers are the most important — and, in the United States — the most inequitably distributed — school resource. Widespread teacher shortages in a majority of states mean that schools have to cancel courses, raise class sizes, or hire instructors without the content background or pedagogical training they need to be successful. In schools serving large numbers of students of color, students are four times more likely to be taught by uncertified teachers — a factor that substantially contributes to gaps in opportunity and achievement.

Government can play an important role in clearing the obstacles for prospective teachers by addressing college affordability. Among the most effective supports are service scholarship and loan forgiveness programs that underwrite preparation in return for service in a high-need location or field. Such financial subsidies from the federal government are common in professions like medicine, which has long used them to ensure an adequate supply of doctors. Effectively designed programs are free from complicated administrative requirements and provide enough financial support to candidates to significantly or completely underwrite the cost of professional preparation in return for a commitment to practice where most needed.

A number of states have made similar investments to build pipelines of diverse, well-prepared teachers. For example, the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program provides up to $8,250 annually for up to 4 years for students to attend an approved North Carolina university in exchange for a commitment to teach in the state for at least 4 years. Other state programs, such as the Tennessee Minority Teaching Fellows Program, aim specifically to increase the number of teachers of color.

At the federal level, the TEACH Grant Program (developed through the bipartisan 2007 College Cost Reduction and Access Act), authorizes scholarships of up to $4,000 each year to undergraduate and graduate students who are preparing for a career in teaching in a high-need field and in high-need schools. Unlike other federal loan forgiveness programs, such as the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, this grant provides the funding up front — easing the burden of early career teachers earning low salaries who would otherwise have to make years of loan payments before receiving any loan forgiveness.

And this approach makes a difference: In a 2018 analysis, 58% of TEACH Grant recipients said the grant was influential in their decision to pursue teaching in a high-need field at a high-need school.

These supports can have a real impact, but only when awards are large enough to substantially offset training costs and support students while they complete their programs. At a time when college costs in every sector continue to rise, the TEACH Grant Program annual award has actually been shrinking, due to cuts required by the 2011 Budget Control Act. This year, the maximum annual award is only $3,764, just 20% of the average annual cost for a public university. Meanwhile, Pell grants, the primary federal grant support for undergraduate education, have slipped as well, now covering only 28% of the cost of attending a four-year public college. In 2011, Congress also eliminated subsidized loans for graduate students, which many teacher candidates relied on.

These cuts have contributed to the decline in entry to teaching. But Congress now has an opportunity to turn this situation around: As the House and Senate take up the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA), they can help recruit more candidates to teaching by expanding the size and reach of TEACH Grants. In the Senate, there have been proposals to strengthen the program and increase the size of the grants. In the House, members are considering a bill that would address the administrative challenges of the TEACH Grant program, but the bill does not currently increase the award amounts. It will be important as HEA moves forward that the fundamental importance of recruiting much-needed teachers is more effectively addressed, much as Congress has long done with federal subsidies for medical personnel training.

Ending teacher shortages is an essential step to help close the country’s opportunity and achievement gaps. This goal is well within reach, but only if we can invest in those people we entrust with the future of our children and the global competitiveness of our country.