Education Week - January 23, 2013 - 14

EDUCATION WEEK

JANUARY 23, 2013

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Elementary Teachers in Greater Supply Than Demand
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

should bear the responsibility of
aligning their production of teachers to state or local market needs.
“Would we raise this question
about English majors? It’s sort of
notorious that English majors get
jobs waiting tables, ... but people
still do it because they enjoy it and
find it a useful thing to do,” said
Jim H. Wyckoff, a professor of education and policy at the University
of Virginia, in Charlottesville. “So
I’m a little concerned about treating education differently from
other disciplines.”

Telling Figures
Questions of teacher supply and
demand have been raised for decades, predominantly in light of
view of “shortage” areas or large
demographic trends. By contrast,
the particular effects of oversupply have been far less probed.
For this article, Education Week
examined data from states’ own
labor projections and from supplyand-demand analyses, then crosschecked them with federal data
submitted by the states as part of
the reporting required under Title
II of the Higher Education Act.
New York state’s bureau of labor
statistics anticipated the need
for 2,800 elementary teachers in
2011-12. The state prepared more
than twice that many, or about
6,500 “childhood education” specialists in 2009-10, the state’s
most recent Title II data show.
According to Illinois’ supply-anddemand report from 2011, roughly
nine new elementary-teacher certificates were issued in the state
in 2009 for every one first-time
teacher hired in 2010. By comparison, only two special education certificates were issued per slot.
Such data come with important
caveats, including the varying
ways of calculating the teachersupply pool and estimating labor
projections.
Scholars attribute the trends to
the teaching labor market, which
generally leaves it up to individuals to decide whether to pursue the
profession, according to Robert E.
Floden, an education professor at
Michigan State University in East
Lansing, Mich.

“There is not a tight link the
way there is in other countries,
where there is a management
of access to particular majors in
higher education, tied to perceived
needs of teachers, and also a national system for getting teachers
who have graduated to the hardto-staff places,” Mr. Floden said.
The United States is also a
much more fluid market, in which
many states draw from their

TEACHING
THE TEACHERS
neighboring states’ supplies.
For example, Maryland data
show that despite having teacher
shortages in more than a dozen
fields, the state produces nearly
enough elementary teachers instate to meet districts’ needs:
1,000 elementary teachers in
2010-11, a year in which 1,100
were hired.
Yet of the 723 new hires in that
group, fewer than half were from
Maryland’s own teacher colleges;
the others came from out of state.
Finally, the tendency toward
oversubscription in the elementary
fields is also a function of candidates’ interest, said Amee Adkins,
an associate dean of the college of
education at Illinois State University, in Normal, and the president of
the Illinois Association of Colleges
for Teacher Education.
“It’s content material they were
less intimated by,” she said, ticking
off a list of reasons. “Kids are cuter
when they’re little. And it’s probably when [the candidates] remember having the most fun in school.”

Raising the Bar?
Groups such as the National
Council on Teacher Quality have
advanced one compelling argument for why policymakers should
be concerned with supply-and-demand mismatches.
If colleges produced fewer elementary-level teachers, the council
argues, they could be more selective about whom they admit and
give candidates more intensive
experiences, including the full year
of student-teaching that national
organizations for teacher-college

accreditation have endorsed.
It’s the latter argument that appeals to Arthur E. Wise, an independent consultant and a former
president of the Washington-based
National Council for Accreditation
of Teacher Education.
“I think this is the real conundrum in all of this, because of
course we lose approximately half
of new teachers, which means we
have not fully prepared many of
these people. Or we want them to
learn on the job, some of whom succeed and some of whom do not,” he
said. “We could improve, enhance,
and extend the quality of teacher
preparation, and therefore produce better-qualified new teacher
graduates, but probably fewer in
number.”
There’s a financial argument to
consider, too. States subsidize an
important part of teacher training
through public university systems
and loan-forgiveness programs.
When teachers must go out of
state to find job openings, states
lose out on that investment.
The nctq contends, moreover,
that states and programs could
cut back on production while raising standards: A widely cited Educational Testing Service report
from 2007 found that despite improvements, elementary teachers
continued to have lower qualifications than other college graduates,
so there is room for growth.
“We could raise the bar and get
teachers with higher aptitudes in
classrooms and still have plenty of
elementary teachers,” Mr. McKee
said.

Policy Black Hole
However common-sense the
idea of better aligning supply and
demand is, few policy models for
doing so are available to replicate.
Some teacher colleges have
tried to redirect candidates interested in elementary teaching into
other certification fields. At Illinois State, those efforts have had
mixed results, Ms. Adkins said.
Special education, she noted, has
proved especially challenging.
“It’s almost enough to be an identifiable pattern that [elementary
candidates] who are redirected to
special ed., and who have not had
any sustained experience with people with disabilities, don’t persist
with those majors,” she said.
A few states have charged their
preparation programs with boosting numbers in shortage fields.
Michigan’s review of its programs,
updated in 2008, now gives points
to programs for preparing more
teachers in high-need subjects.
The credit makes up only a small
part of the review, however, and all
but four institutions received that
credit for 2010-11.
Michigan state schools Superintendent Michael Flanagan said
in an interview that he would
consider taking action to put more
of an emphasis on teacher supply
and demand.
“In so many ways, [the programs] do such good work,” he
>>

STATE OUTPUT
Some states produce enough elementary teachers to fill
anticipated openings, but others produce twice as many as
needed—or more.
Supply

Demand

Percent
Difference

Colorado

1,169

1,099

Connecticut

701

600

106%
117

Delaware

373

122

306

Illinois

9,982

1,073

930

Kentucky

1,275

730

175

Louisiana

1,033

650

159

Maryland

1,011

723

140

Massachusetts

1,175

1,051

112

Michigan

2,903

1,227

236

Minnesota

1,179

709

166

Mississippi

751

660

114

New York

6,498

2,800

232

Pennsylvania

6,048

1,420

426

Tennessee

1,970

1,380

143

NOTES:
Excepting Illinois and Maryland, supply figures come from Title II for 2009-10 and
represent only new teachers. Maryland supply figures do not include alternatively
prepared teachers. Supply and demand figures for Illinois and Maryland are based
on their education departments’ analyses. They represent supply in 2009-10 for Illinois
and 2010-11 in Maryland, and demand in 2010-11 for both states. Demand figures
for other states are based on 10-year occupational estimates from 2010-20, except
for Michigan, Mississippi, Tennessee (2008-18) and Colorado (2011-21).
SOURCES: U.S. Department of Education; state education departments;
state labor bureaus

said, “but they can’t be an ancillary part of this system that’s so
autonomous they don’t have to
worry about these issues of supply and demand.”
It is not entirely clear how much
authority other state agencies
have to demand similar changes.
That’s the case in Minnesota,
where state officials are working to
produce better supply-and-demand
data, but may not be able to compel
programs to address mismatches.
“We don’t mandate that institutions adjust the pool of teachers to
market needs,” said Richard Wasson, the director of educator licensing for the Minnesota education department. “We ask that they think
about it, but there’s no regulation
that governs their production of
teachers.”

Importers and Exporters
Objections to policy-based solutions tend to center on the imprecision of the data, as well as
research showing limited links
between teachers’ preservice characteristics and their classroom
performance.
“I’m a little worried that you
raise the bar around things like
academic ability, ... and that doesn’t
necessarily get better-quality teachers,” said Virginia’s Mr. Wyckoff. “It
may change the way the workforce
looks—it could make it more white,
for instance—but it’s not clear that
it would improve the workforce.”
Researchers also point to other
problems: First, a degree of over-

To see see previous articles in this series go to

production is desirable so that
districts can be choosy in their
selections. And the decentralized
nature of the K-12 labor market
means that distribution can be
uneven, even if net supply is adequate. Even states flush with elementary teachers can face shortages, particularly in urban and
rural areas.
“You have programs in remote,
rural areas where the local school
district really wants them to take
their kids and prepare them so
they can come back to teach,” Mr.
Floden of Michigan State said.
“And they would be quite resistant to being told, ‘You have to set
much higher standards.’ ”
Meanwhile, the specifics of how
teachers move from state to state
is not well understood, because
data systems typically cannot
track a teacher after he or she
moves out of state.
Kim Walters-Parker, the director of educator preparation for
the Kentucky Education Professional Standards Board, believes
that more information is needed
on what happens to those teachers
who don’t or can’t immediately get
an elementary teaching job.
If those individuals go on to dental or law school, the scope of the
problem is different from taking,
for example, a lower-skilled job
while waiting for a teaching opening or filing for unemployment
benefits, she said.
“We need to figure out in an
economic sense how big of a problem this is,” Ms. Walters-Parker

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Education Week - January 23, 2013

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