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Education Dive
Why colleges are struggling to graduate more teachers
As public K-12 schools address a dearth of instructors, higher ed is
looking to expand the pipeline — but uptake among students has been
limited so far.
Wayne D’Orio
Sept. 18, 2019
The teacher shortage is growing in the U.S., but it's an uphill battle for many colleges looking to create more candidates.
More institutions are starting boutique programs, taking the time to
build relationships with high school and even middle school students to
expand the pipeline of future teachers. Although the individual
programs may be successful, their collective impact has been small so
far.
Meanwhile, the teacher deficit is growing. Since about 2012, the number
of teachers needed in K-12 public schools has outpaced the number of
available candidates. That gap has grown to a shortage of more than
110,000 teachers projected for the 2017-18 school year, compared to
20,000 in 2012-13. And with relatively few students from racial and
ethnic minority groups considering teaching, the limited supply of
newcomers can have broad-ranging implications.
Delivering exceptional online learning will be the key differentiator
for institutions in the future. This requires a platform that can
support an innovative approach to online learning.
Teach Me
In response, some colleges have started or accelerated programs to
entice students to choose teaching and become certified. But with a
strong job market, most have not been successful in increasing their
education majors.
"It's the same phenomenon. Every single teacher prep program is 50% of
what it was" two or three decades ago, said Catherine O'Callaghan,
chair of the education and education psychology department at Western
Connecticut State University.
WestConn, as it's known, was founded in the early 20th century to train
teachers. Today, the school of more than 4,000 full-time undergraduates
has just 182 students in various education majors in order to become
teachers.
While that's a slight increase from four years ago, the school used to
churn out 350 teacher candidates a year in the 1980s, O'Callaghan said.
Programs shrink
A host of factors prevents students from picking teaching as a possible
career, ranging from low pay to a strong job market where work
opportunities in other fields are plentiful. More than 70% of students
responding to UCLA's latest annual survey of American freshmen say they
attend college to "make more money." In the same survey, only 4.4% said
they planned to become either elementary or secondary school teachers.
Calculated against the 1.5 million students who start college full-time
every year, that's just 66,000 potential teachers.
Most high school counselors don't have enough time to discuss the
benefits of teaching when guiding students, said David Hawkins, the
executive director for educational content and policy at the National
Association for College Admission Counseling. Even schools with strong
education programs promote their other offerings to prospective
students, he said.
At Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, the number of
undergraduates seeking teacher licensure slid from 181 students in 2015
to 161 students this year, said Kurt Brobeck, the school's director of
communications.
"In Nashville, specifically, it's hard to purchase a house on a
teacher's salary," said Teresa Dunleavy, an assistant professor of
mathematics education at Peabody. She and her colleague, Heather
Johnson, an associate professor of science education, recently earned a
$1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create a
program to recruit and prepare STEM teachers to work in high-need
school districts. The grant will help to pay more than half the cost of
tuition for students seeking a master's degree in education at the
school.
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