LPI In the News

Newsweek | The U.S. Labor Department predicts that the teaching sector will grow 6% by the year 2024. In addition to this, a recent Learning Policy Institute report raised concern about the number of underprepared teachers who have been assigned to some schools. More than ever, opportunities for effective and inspirational teachers are at an all-time high.

Newsweek | California voters may have a solution to their state's teacher shortage: paying instructors the same hefty salaries as they pay their politicians. The proposed Teachers Fair Pay referendum would peg teachers' pay to the wages of state lawmakers, roughly $104,000 a year. It’s a bold move in a time when schools are desperately scrambling for innovative ways to retain teachers and recruit new teachers.

EdNC | Though the UNC System saw a rise in educator preparation program enrollment in fall 2016 for the first time in several years, the changes may not reflect increased interest in teaching as a career. The data collection methods used in 2016 differed from previous years which may have influenced the results.

Chicago Tribune | Colleges and universities are trying to figure out how to entice more people into the teaching careers to fill vacancies, a dilemma that down the road could pose ramifications throughout educational leadership.

San Francisco Chronicle | The decision by San Francisco city and school officials to commit a plot of land and $44 million in public funds toward building affordable housing for teachers came after years of waffling and wavering. And it signaled a growing desire to help educators who make too much to qualify for low-income housing and not enough to afford skyrocketing city housing costs.

NPR | There are more nonwhite teachers than there used to be. But the nation's teaching force still doesn't look like America. One former education school dean is out to change that. New research shows that the number of K-12 teachers who belong to minority groups has doubled since the 1980s, growing at a faster rate than the profession as a whole. But big gaps persist, with around 80 percent of teachers identifying as white.

The Washington Post | Where are all the teachers? That’s what education expert Linda Darling-Hammond asks and answers in this post about the teacher shortage in many parts of the United States — and what can be done to finally end it. While teacher shortages are not new, they are getting worse in many parts of the country.

Curbed | Teaching crises have challenged American education for decades. Increasing enrollment, substandard facilities, and a scramble to find a way to pay for solutions: Today’s familiar pressures were making headlines back in 1954. While the issue may be the same, today’s teaching crises in the Bay Area have taken on dimensions that postwar administrators couldn’t have imagined. San Francisco and its surrounding communities offer the most extreme case studies that showcase the challenging math of making it, and making a home, as an urban school teacher.

NBC News | School districts and state governments across the U.S. are combating the worsening teacher shortage crisis that is expected to peak this school year with new creative policy solutions—and they're not exactly going by the textbook. For its school year that began last month, Clark County school district, which has jurisdiction over nearly all public schools in Las Vegas, faced such a pressing shortage of special education teachers that it brought over 81 teachers from the Philippines.

TeenVogue | Historically, “the people who [had] benefited by...higher education admissions policies had been essentially white males, particularly if they had a legacy [meaning they were relatives of alumni],” Peter W. Cookson Jr., senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, tells Teen Vogue. “[Affirmative action] was an attempt to bring equity and equal opportunity to the admissions process.”