Education Week - April 17, 2024 - 5

als from contentious sources, so the accusation
that teachers are teaching kids to hate
America is simply untrue, " said Grossman.
Decentralization can counter indoctrination
As part of the study, AHA reviewed the K-12
social studies content standards of all 50 states,
interviewed district officials and history department
heads, and conducted a survey of 3,000
educators in nine states. Collectively, the effort
took two years.
The diffuse nature of control over history standards
means that there are local variations in the
resources that teachers access, and how they
teach history in class. But generally, Grossman
said, teachers appear to keep their own politics
outside the classroom. " They aren't telling students
to feel guilty about what their parents or
grandparents did, " he said.
In fact, the decentralized structure and local
control likely act as a shield against widespread
indoctrination, said the authors in their preliminary
findings. But they do pose the risk of teachers
relying on " unvetted " resources slipping into
a curriculum.
Kevin Levin, a history educator who conducts
professional development workshops with educators
on teaching history, said that vetting digital
material-now a primary source of information-is
a skill that teachers still need to develop.
" Some teachers do use reliable materials, but
just as many are plugging terms into a search
engine and clicking the first thing. This has potential
to mislead, " said Levin. This danger is
heightened now, because technology like ChatGPT
can fuel false information that doesn't
come with any warning.
Teachers need training
Most teachers, said Levin, are trying to navigate
thorny issues like the legacy of slavery and
white supremacy by arming themselves with as
much information as possible. " They want to
improve their content knowledge, in case they
face pushback against their lessons, " said Levin.
But threading this information needle isn't
easy. Teachers who have attempted to use or interpret
newer concepts, like white privilege, have
gotten in trouble and even disciplined.
History teachers don't personally have to be
politically neutral, said Levin, but they must
maintain a balance of diverse views within their
classrooms. Not only does that protect against
allegations of partisan teaching, but it also develops
students' skills to grapple with complicated
questions. " Students have to be taught how to
think. That is different from telling them what
to think, " said Grossman.
Levin uses several techniques to expose teachers
to different points of view in his training sessions.
He shares lectures by historians, travels
with them to field trips at historical sites, and
shares teaching resources that teachers can take
into their classrooms, especially on topics that
teachers know little about, or find hard to teach.
" When teachers can share more materials in
class, it helps students understand that the past
is just as complicated as the present, and there's
no one interpretation. Students are not treated
as sponges, who only absorb and regurgitate one
interpretation, " said Levin.
The AHA recommends better, content-rich
PD for history teachers, who are mostly left on
their own to find appropriate materials. Teachers,
the survey found, have indicated that " missteps "
in class happen because they lack information
on a particular topic, not because they're
trying a partisan approach.
" School districts should focus on history teachers
and keep them up to date on current information
or train them better in information literacy. It
can help them keep up with how misinformation
is spread, " said Grossman.
Some aspects of history education are inevitably
challenging, Levin said. Allowing students
to arrive at their own conclusions goes against
the notion that they should be taught a particular
version of past events, as was the case in prior
generations where a narrative of American exceptionalism
prevailed.
" The controversy we are witnessing is an admission
that the past conservative view of history
has failed. There is an attempt to turn things
back, but in the digital age, its impossible to control
the narrative, " said Levin.
The AHA will release its full report this fall.
Grossman hopes it will temper the accusations
laid against history teachers, and prompt more
support for their training and development as
educators who inspire critical thinking in their
classrooms.
" We are providing an empirical basis to come
to the same conclusion that we should've come
to logically, " he said. " Our data shows that educators
are using history [lessons] to develop people
who cannot be indoctrinated in the future. "
an AACTE consultant for research, policy, and
advocacy and the author of the reports.
" We were all thinking-the trends have been
down, down, down, and the pandemic is going
to make it worse, " she said. " To see that the
numbers have actually rebounded a little bit,
... it's definitely encouraging. "
The number of bachelor's and master's
degrees conferred in education is also on
the rise, which King noted is especially
promising given that many students suspended
enrollment or dropped out of higher education
during the pandemic.
The number of bachelor's degrees awarded
in education in the 2021-22 school year was
13 percent higher than the low in 2018-19.
Meanwhile, the number of master's degrees
awarded in 2021-22 increased by 4 percent
from a low in 2016-17.
Even so, the number of master's degrees
completers was slightly higher in 2020-21
than in 2021-22, so King urged caution in
concluding that the number of education
degree recipients is on a long-term upswing.
Also, while these numbers are a proxy for
interest in the teaching profession, not all who
earn these degrees will earn their teaching
licenses or enter classrooms at all.
Total enrollment in teacher-preparation
programs has stabilized at about 600,000
candidates annually, but the distribution
across program types has fluctuated. While
traditional college- and university-based
programs still make up the largest share,
enrollment in alternative programs not based
at a college or university has more than
doubled over the past decade.
This category includes programs run by
school districts, state education agencies,
charter schools, local or national nonprofits
(like Teach For America), and for-profit
companies. The for-profit sector-most
notably, Teachers of Tomorrow, which
operates in eight states, including Texas-
dominates the growth in this category.
Yet the number of completions has not kept
pace: " Enrollment numbers and completion
numbers are wildly different, " King said of
the for-profit alternative programs. " Those
are folks that had an interest in teaching who
didn't end up actually completing " their
programs and becoming licensed teachers.
Overall, King is optimistic about the latest
trends, but they only represent the start of the
teacher pipeline. What happens when teachers
are in the classroom matters just as much.
" We can't recruit our way out of the teacher
shortage, " she said. " We have to find ways
to retain the teachers we have and to make
teaching a job that is a sustainable career for
people. "
2. School-level turnover is still high
Last month, Education Resource Strategies,
a national nonprofit that partners with school
system leaders, released an analysis on schoollevel
teacher turnover trends from 2021 to
2023. It uses data from nine large, unnamed
urban and suburban school districts. That's a
small sample of the nation's more than 13,000
districts, many of which are much smaller,
but the researchers believe the trends there
poverty schools; the school-level churn was still
significant; rookie teachers were still burning
out fast. "
These trends are continuing post-pandemic,
the analysis found. Schools serving the greatest
proportion of students from low-income
families lost 29 percent of their teachers
between October 2022 and October 2023,
while schools with the lowest concentration of
poverty lost 19 percent. When teachers change
schools within their districts, they're much
more likely to move to a more affluent school.
Past research shows that high-poverty schools
often have less supportive working conditions
than more resourced schools, making it harder
for teachers to do their jobs effectively.
Such high turnover at a school means
that " when I show up at that school as a
kindergartener, in three years when I'm in 3rd
grade and my little sibling is coming to school,
it is a radically different group of adults in the
Average school-level turnover across nine large districts
Stayed in district, but left teaching role
Moved schools
2019-20
2020-21
2021-22
2022-23
10.3% 1.5%
12.3%
2.1%
15.7%
12.8%
SOURCE: Education Resource Strategies
have implications for what's happening more
broadly across the country.
On average, 23 percent of teachers left their
school-or a teaching role-in the 2022-23 school
year. This is higher than pre-pandemic turnover
in the sample, which was about 18 percent in the
2019-20 school year, but lower than the 2021-22
school year's peak of 26 percent.
Although there was a slight downtick in
school-level turnover year over year, David
Rosenberg, a partner at ERS, said it's too early
to draw a trend line-and that the turnover
rate is still not " in a good place. "
" Before the pandemic, we were not in a good
place, " he said. " Teaching still was the same
as it was in many districts 100 years ago-
teachers still were leaving at a really high rate;
the variation was still much greater in higherbuilding, "
Rosenberg said. " Understanding
what that does in terms of instructional
effectiveness, in terms of school culture, in
terms of the relationships that a student can
build with adults who care about them-that is
incredibly challenging. "
After the 2022-23 school year, 30 percent
of teachers with fewer than three years of
experience and 26 percent of teachers with
three to seven years of experience left their
school-compared to 17 to 20 percent of more
experienced teachers.
Such churn among rookie teachers is a
problem because teachers make significant
gains in their skills during their first five years in
the classroom, Rosenberg said. And when they
leave with only a couple years under their belts,
school leaders, especially those in high-poverty
2.4%
3%
7.8% 23%
6.3% 18.1%
5.8% 20.2%
7.5% 26.2%
schools, are often forced to replace them with
less experienced, less effective teachers.
He said he hopes school and district leaders
will look closely at the turnover rates in their
own district, look for the root causes of why
teachers move schools, and try to find solutions.
For example, offering financial incentives to
teach in high-poverty schools is one possible
solution, as is offering more targeted support to
rookie teachers, Rosenberg said.
3. Teacher applicant supply hasn't caught
up to demand
The ADP Research Institute, the research
arm of the payroll services firm, released
an analysis last month that compared job
openings for teachers to employment levels-
and found that supply is lagging demand.
The analysis uses both Bureau of Labor
Left district
Statistics data from the Job Openings and Labor
Turnover Survey program and ADP data for
K-12 teachers in public and private schools. The
data cover January 2018 through January 2023.
Job openings for educators have increased
significantly since 2021, but actual employment
levels have remained relatively flat. (The
increase in job openings might be in part due
to districts using their federal pandemic relief
dollars-which are expiring this fall-to create
new positions.)
The imbalance between high demand and
short supply should have led to higher wages,
the ADP Research Institute analysis says-but
it hasn't. Teachers are losing ground on pay
compared to other U.S. workers.
The analysis found that teacher salaries are
growing more slowly than average wages for
all employees. The national average teacher
salary is about $68,000-8 percent less than
the average U.S. worker's salary, according to
ADP data.
The pay gap is especially pronounced among
teachers 30 and younger, the study found.
From academic recovery to student mental health,
teachers and education leaders are grappling with big
questions and challenges. This research column aims to
help readers understand what the research says-and
doesn't say-about the current context for learning
and learning in general. If you have a question, please
send it to ssparks@educationweek.org.
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Education Week - April 17, 2024

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