Utah facing teacher shortage
Utah will face “a severe teacher shortage crisis unlike anything it has ever experienced within just a year or two,” according to a recently-completed study by David Sperry, dean of the College of Education at the University of Utah.
The problem is that Utah’s swiftly growing student population has created a demand for new teachers which is not being matched by the numbers of new teachers graduating from the state’s colleges and universities, according to Sperry’s study. New student enrollment in the state has increased dramatically in recent years and is projected to increase by about 14,000 each year for the next ten years, Sperry said.
At the same time, enrollment in the state’s 10 teacher education programs has remained constant or even declined slightly. During the 2005-06 school year, nearly 1,400 more teachers were hired in the state than graduated from Utah colleges and universities, according to the study. Compounding the problem is the fact that nearly half of the teachers currently teaching will be eligible for retirement within the next five years.
“When you compare the number of new teachers in the state against the numbers of new children and retirements coming in the next few years, you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” said D. Ray Reutzel, director and endowed chair of USU’s Emma Eccles Jones Center for Early Childhood Education.
Many school districts are already feeling the effects of the teacher shortage, especially in certain subject areas. Districts struggled to fill many teaching positions in the 2005-06 school year, especially in math, science, special education and early childhood education, said Sperry. The student population grew so much in Jordan School District, located in southern Salt Lake Valley, that administrators had to take people who worked in the district offices and use them as classroom teachers just to be able to have enough teachers to start the current school year, said Brad Wilcox, associate professor of teacher education at Brigham Young University.
The problem is worsened by the fact that a large number of teachers leave the profession within the first few years, which has caused teaching to become a “revolving door,” said Jim Dorward, interim head of USU’s elementary education department. Nearly half of teachers in the state who left their districts after the 2005-06 school year did so after teaching five years or fewer, the study said.
What is causing fewer students to become teachers? And why are so many new teachers leaving the profession? Sperry, Reutzel, Dorward and Wilcox each say there are many factors, but inadequate pay is the root of the problem.
Utah currently ranks 38th in the nation in teacher pay while consistently having the
highest teacher to student ratio in the nation, Sperry said. Teachers in Washington, D.C., which has the highest average pay rate, earn an average of $19,000 per year more than Utah teachers. Teaching is a profession that many people simply can’t afford to support a family on, Dorward said.
Some states neighboring Utah pay significantly higher salaries to their teachers, which makes it difficult to recruit and keep quality teachers, said Lynette Riggs, principal of Lincoln Elementary School in Hyrum. Riggs said she witnessed this several years ago on a recruiting trip to the University of Utah while working for Logan School District.
“We were offering peanuts, while all around us there were people from out-of-state districts, like Clark County, Nevada, that were offering huge signing bonuses, huge paychecks, down payments on houses. There’s no financial motivation to stay in our area.”
In addition to low pay, teachers’ work conditions are increasingly difficult, Reutzel said. The amount of money teachers are paid is not nearly enough to adequately compensate them for the work they perform, he said. Through legislation such as No Child Left Behind, the nation and the state have placed increased pressure and accountability on teachers in recent years while failing to raise wages to match that pressure, he said.
Teachers are subjected to “intolerable work conditions,” in which they’re expected to do huge amounts of paperwork, teach multiple subjects and deal with large class sizes, while being given inadequate time to prepare and having almost no help, Reutzel said.
“It’s one thing to be paid poorly and held in low esteem when you have little or no accountability, but when you raise the bar, you need to increase the pay and increase the esteem,” he said. “There’s a lot of baggage that comes with being a teacher.”
All these factors combine to create a situation in which teachers are “very dispirited right now,” Reutzel said. “As young people look at these dispirited teachers, that’s not a lot of incentive to join their ranks.”
So what should be done about all of this to increase the number of teachers produced in Utah? USU recently began four new teacher training programs at extension sites around the state, which will enable 40 to 50 new teachers to be trained each year, Dorward said. The state also now has a program which allows people trained in other fields to be licensed as teachers after fulfilling certain requirements. Steps such as these will do little good, however, if there aren’t enough people who want to become teachers, Sperry said.
A big part of the answer is to increase teacher pay, Sperry, Reutzel, Dorward, Wilcox and Riggs said. This is made difficult, however, because so many people are more concerned about getting a tax cut than having quality teachers, Reutzel said. Meanwhile, neighboring states are taking steps to increase teacher pay and improve working conditions, he said. For example, every teacher in Wyoming was recently given a raise of at least 18 percent, he said.
“If a foreigner or someone from outer space came and saw the way it is here, what must they think of our value system?” Reutzel said. “We pay people more per hour to shear our dogs and cats down at PetSmart than we pay our teachers to teach our children. They might think we have a pretty perverted set of values.”
Sperry is in charge of a task force recently formed to address the concerns raised by his research. The task force consists of state legislators, school district superintendents, university professors and others. Some of their goals will be to find ways to draw more people to becoming teachers in the state and address immediate shortages in subject areas such as math and science, he said. Their findings will eventually be presented to the state legislature, where they will likely recommend increasing teacher pay, increasing scholarships for teachers-in-training and other strategies.
Utah’s education system is long overdue for significant changes that will bring about significant improvement, Reutzel said.
“We really are at a critical point,” he said. “Everyone who cares about education needs to pull together. We need to solve these problems instead of just putting on Band-Aids.”
-dfelix@cc.usu.edu