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Like the movie “Groundhog Day,” the President’s 2018 education budget proposal feels like déjà vu all over again. Last year, we published a blog post that addressed the President’s proposed cuts to the Every Student Succeeds Act. Fortunately, the Congress that developed the Act and passed it in a strongly bipartisan vote in 2015 protected its key features. This year, in the President’s new budget proposal, however, those cuts are back.
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For the 2017-18 school year, 80% of California districts reported shortages of qualified teachers and 82% reported hiring underprepared teachers, according to an LPI survey completed by 25 California school districts. Those districts collectively serve a quarter of the state’s students and include urban, suburban, and rural areas. This brief examines how districts experienced teacher supply in the fall of 2017.
Linda Darling-HammondMaria E. HylerRobert SheffieldMadelyn Gardner
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Effective professional development is critical to helping teachers learn and refine the pedagogies required to teach 21st-century skills. This fact sheet, published by LPI and the California Standards Technical Assistance Network (CalSTAN), explores the design and implementation of effective professional development models to help California schools maximize this important investment.
Linda Darling-HammondLeib SutcherDesiree Carver-Thomas
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Over the last three years, thousands of news stories and dozens of studies from LPI and other organizations have documented teacher shortages across the country. Yet some critics argue that turnover is not generally a problem and shortages may not even be real. In this blog, Linda Darling-Hammond, Leib Sutcher, and Desiree Carver Thomas break down the research and explain that solving turnover and shortages is not a pipedream; it’s a policy question.
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By Jiawen Wang | How are students impacted by teacher turnover and shortages? Oakland High School junior and guest blogger Jiawen Wang, a student leader with Californians for Justice (CFJ), discusses how she and her classmates experience these issues and why a strong and stable teacher workforce is key to creating relationship-centered schools.
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Across the country, districts and schools continue to struggle to meet the growing demand for qualified teachers. Since 2012, when Recession-era layoffs ended, the teacher workforce has grown by about 400,000, as districts have sought to reclaim the positions they had previously cut and replace teachers who have left. But even with intensive recruiting both in and outside of the country, more than 100,000 classrooms are being staffed this year by instructors who are unqualified for their jobs.
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An effective, stable, and diverse workforce provides the critical foundation for the other building blocks of high-quality early childhood education programs. In this LPI Blog, Senior Researcher and Policy Analyst Beth Meloy outlines key elements of a high-quality system to achieve this goal, including improvements to teacher preparation and supports for ongoing professional development.
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High teacher turnover—or churn—undermines student achievement and consumes valuable staff time and resources. It also contributes to teacher shortages throughout the country, as roughly 6 of 10 new teachers hired each year are replacing colleagues who left the classroom before retirement. This tool is designed to help policymakers and stakeholders estimate the cost of teacher turnover in a school or district and to inform a local conversation about how to attract, support, and retain a high-quality teacher workforce.
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High teacher turnover is costly for schools and districts and can undermine efforts to improve academic opportunities and outcomes. This blog post outlines the causes and impact of turnover and speaks to the need for schools and districts to understand their local costs and begin a conversation about how to improve retention and build a strong and stable teacher workforce.
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Although the number of minority teachers more than doubled between 1987 and 2012, high turnover rates have undermined efforts to diversify the teacher workforce. Improving school organization, management, and leadership can support improved retention of minority teachers, according to this report, which examines and compares the recruitment, employment, and retention of minority and nonminority teachers over the past quarter century.
