Education Week - March 29, 2023 - 16

Money Alone Won't Solve
The Teacher Shortage
By Katherine Norris & Kathryn Wiley
W
The American Teacher Act is a good start-but only a start
Throughout both our careers, we have also heard from
hen U.S. Reps. Frederica
Wilson of Florida and Jamaal
Bowman of New York, both
Democrats, reintroduced a
bill in February that would set
a minimum national teacher
salary of $60,000, we have
to admit that it wasn't on our radar. We had been so busy
focused on book bans, the great resignation, and legislation
to end African American and Black history programs that we
had missed the news of the American Teacher Act when they
first introduced an earlier version of the bill in December.
And, now that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is putting his
support behind the legislation on the Senate side, Congress
should take action on this issue.
While over the last few years this teacher shortage has
caught the eyes of the public, those of us in teacher education
have been ringing the alarm bell for more than a decade. Like
many in the teaching profession, we are excited to see this crisis
addressed at the national level. This attention to the profession
is long overdue, and we feel this is a great first step. However,
while we recognize that politics sometimes forces legislators to
hold back from pushing too far for fear of incurring backlash,
we would like to see this legislation go further to address the
challenges within the profession.
As the department chair of a teacher education program
and an education leadership professor, respectively, we
often hear from district leaders requesting that we share job
announcements for teaching positions they wish to be filled by
Howard University graduates.
We hear of the struggles that superintendents and principals
are facing filling teaching positions, especially those who are
seeking to increase the number of teachers of color in their
districts.
At our national job fair every spring, we see the demand from
districts looking to hire our students outpace our number of
graduating seniors.
With potential education majors seeing more opportunities
and higher wages in other career paths, stricter teacher
education requirements, and a generally bad word-of-mouth
public campaign for the profession, it's no wonder they are
choosing not to enter teacher education programs.
educators across the country that the challenges make
staying in the profession difficult for them. While working
in the District of Columbia, Colorado, and North Carolina,
we have heard from teachers who see their students hurt by
homelessness, food insecurity, and disparities in health-care
access every day. New teachers see an uphill battle ahead. For
example, just last month, a recent high school graduate told
us they were interested in going into teaching but foresaw
having to get a second job and generally " struggling for the first
five to 10 years. "
We have heard from teachers who see and feel the impacts
of decades of underinvestment in communities and from
those who have watched state legislatures fail to fulfill
constitutional funding obligations over generations.
The root causes of these large-scale inequities are not
necessarily ones that schools alone can remedy. Instead, they
require broader policy reforms to close the outside-of-school
factors that create inside-of-school opportunity gaps. And,
now, teachers face censorship in multiple states for teaching
about race, gender, and sexual diversity.
With low teacher pay, challenging classroom and school
conditions, and long-standing underinvestment in education,
coupled with the new anti-critical-race-theory and antianything-equity
movement, teachers are under greater
strain. These factors have led to a crisis in our nation's
classrooms unlike anything we have seen in our careers.
The American Teacher Act, which has the support of
the National Education Association and the American
Federation of Teachers, attempts to tackle the critical
nationwide teacher shortage head-on by offering financial
support to states to enable the increase of a teacher's
minimum salary to $60,000. The bill also offers funding
for a public-awareness campaign supporting the teaching
profession and prioritizes support for low- and moderateincome
districts.
The American Teacher Act is a good start, but more
will be needed to address the challenges to the teaching
profession that we have seen firsthand. Because the bill
structures funding for states and districts in the form of
four-year grants, we worry that already overworked and
stressed teachers and administrators will have to jump
through bureaucratic hoops to apply on top of their regular
daily demands-not to mention handle additional paperwork
16 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 29, 2023 | www.edweek.org/opinion
burdens on the back end of the grants. Such additional
work assignments tend to have a harder impact on Black
and brown communities and high-poverty schools, whose
teachers and administrators are already overtaxed.
And the short proposed timeline of grants leads us to
question how sustainable these changes will be over the long
term. What education funding needs is sustainable long-term
sources, not one-time grants.
Although the importance of increasing the number of
Black and Latino teachers has gained national prominence
(a conversation that often leaves out the historical postdesegregation
pushout of Black educators that led to today's
teacher demographics, as documented in Leslie T. Fenwick's
Jim Crow's Pink Slip), addressing salary is just one, albeit
important, component to increasing teacher diversity.
Will the federal legislation eliminate pay inequities
between teachers of color and white teachers? Will it
improve the workplace conditions for educators of color,
who are often held responsible for a range of extra roles in
schools and who must contend with racially hostile work
environments? Increasing salaries alone may be only part of
the solution. Recent studies have pointed to racial hostility
and discrimination in the workplace as additional factors
influencing thoughts of leaving the profession among Black
and Latino educators. And, looking further upstream to
factors that influence who enters the profession, it will also
be important to close the K-12 opportunity gaps that impose
unnecessary obstacles to Black and Latino students entering
the teacher workforce.
Moving forward, we would like to see this legislation
strengthened. We would like to see new legislation
introduced to tackle rising state censorship issues that curtail
teachers' ability to teach truth, diversity, and equity in all
levels of schooling. This legislation is a start to a muchneeded
movement to support teachers across the country.
But no single piece of legislation can address everything. It
will take a concerted effort on the federal, state, and local
levels to improve the status, compensation, school climates,
and protections for teachers.
NORRIS is an associate professor and the chair of the
department of curriculum and instruction at Howard
University. WILEY is an assistant professor of educational
leadership and policy studies at Howard University.
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Education Week - March 29, 2023

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