LPI In the News

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.”

EdSource | At an education conference Thursday, the two announced candidates for state superintendent of public instruction called for more strategies to counter a teacher shortage they said is gripping the state. The comments by Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond indicate the issue will factor heavily in their campaigns to replace retiring State Superintendent Tom Torlakson next year.

SFGATE | California public schools have struggled for the past four years with a teacher shortage that began to surface in districts during the recession. Across the state, 75 percent of districts reported a shortage of teachers in the 2016-2017 school year, including 80 percent of urban districts and 69 percent of schools in the suburbs. That's according to the poll conducted by the California School Boards Association and the Learning Policy Institute, an education research nonprofit, SFGATE reported previously.

The Mercury News | Many personnel managers are still laboring over hard-to-fill jobs, particularly in special education, speech therapy, math and science. Facing an acute national teacher shortage, schools have aggressively recruited and offered creative incentives to attract applicants. Increasingly, districts facing the biggest teaching challenges are turning to lightly prepared candidates holding non-standard credentials.

With Good Reason talked to LPI President Linda Darling-Hammond for Degrees of Separation, a special series on inequality and education. Darling-Hammond and host Sarah McConnell discussed how teacher assessment can be improved to help students and teachers succeed. Listen to the podcast.

LPI President Linda Darling-Hammond provides insights into the reasons for the teacher shortage and some efforts to address it, on PBS’s “Inside California Education.” The segment focuses on San Francisco, where layoffs during the recession, the high cost of housing, and intra-state competition created a serious shortage of teachers.