The New York Times tells us yet again that American education is in crisis:
A survey of National Education Association members at the beginning of the year revealed an unsettling truth: More than half of the respondents said they were looking for a way out. That’s an astounding number of unhappy teachers. If they all quit, it would leave millions of students in the lurch.
But were these just empty threats? At the start of this school year, we spoke to over 50 educators in almost 20 states to find out. The picture they painted was far bleaker than we could have imagined: Empty classrooms, kids in crisis, and teachers who can’t survive another day on the job — that’s the reality of American education today.
There is probably no force in the universe that can stop the Times and other big news outlets from publishing this drivel. But I can keep trying. Here's a chart that's different from others I've published on this subject, but amazingly says the exact same thing:
There is no tsunami of teachers quitting. The quit rate has been flat for the past few years and this year it's down. The average quit rate in 2022 is within a tenth of a point of the average rate in 2019.
Now this:
There is no massive outbreak of unfilled job openings. Over the past five years, total K-12 student enrollment has been absolutely flat and the number of new teacher hires has been precisely the same as total separations.
The number of unfilled job openings is higher than it used to be, but this is most likely due to an increase in indirect teaching jobs: diversity coordinators, special ed supervisors, senior mentors, etc.
I need to be very clear here: None of this means there are no problems in our schools. None of this means teachers don't have legitimate gripes. And none of it means there are no teacher shortages anywhere.
But it does mean that the story is not the catastrophic, pandemic-fueled one that news outlets are so fond of. Teachers are not quitting en masse. They are probably no less happy than ever. And staffing levels are about the same as they've been for the past five years. Whatever problems we have are mostly of long standing.
Nice chart.
Talk to a teacher. Or anyone in K-12. Everyone thought about quitting during COVID and some are still burned out. People treated us like shit, like blamed us for everything. Administrators have been burning out all over the place here.
The survey in the NYT was about the sentiment of the teachers, not whether they actually went through with it and how that is on the rise. You know the difference, so why did you elide it?
The survey in the NYT was about the sentiment of the teachers, not whether they actually went through with it and how that is on the rise.
If they haven't actually gone through with it, at minimum it calls into question how unhappy teachers really are, at least relative to eight or ten or thirty years ago, or (alternately) it calls into question the methodology of the NEA's survey.
But in any event there doesn't seem to be much of evidence of a national "crisis." Kevin's right about that, it seems.
Also, your "talk to a teacher" suggestion can't be quantified. The information we'd get out of such an exercise by definition would be anecdotal. Again, the data don't seem to indicate a teacher flight crisis (at least the data Kevin has been able to rustle up; maybe other sources tell a different story).
There isn't good data available. Kevin threw a bunch of line charts at us, but not any use able data to draw conclusions.
In the absence of good data, it's questionable to approach anecdotal narratives skeptically while eagerly accepting guesstimates pulled from random data points.
it's questionable to approach anecdotal narratives skeptically</i
It's definitely questionable to approach anecdotal narratives un/b>skeptically. They're anecdotes!
Also, the data might not be perfect, but BLS is normally regarded as one of the more trustworthy USG departments in terms of the value and objectivity of statistics. Finally, I'm not sure where you got the "eagerly accepting" from. The numbers Kevin brings to the table are worth more than anecdotes, of course, but I'm happy to look at alternate numbers.
All I want for Christmas is an edit button. How 'bout it, Santa Drum?
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I like the NYT, but like a lot of news media they tended to fixated on a particular narrative about some issue, and then it is very, very hard to get them to deviate off of it. I doubt the writer or editor even thought to look and see if there was actually some massive teacher shortage.
This is also why "Democrats" are perpetually "in Disarray" and an increasing vocabulary of elaborate synonyms for "lie" have appeared in the Times's pages.
The Democrats in disarray is news? It was 1935 when Will Rogers declared "I am not a member of any organized party - I am a Democrat".
It’s more than just having a teacher in a classroom. A teacher that is highly qualified with 5 or more years experience is better than a a first year teacher with a few weeks training over the summer. What is most concerning is the absolute, total disrespect of teachers. The U.S. for the last few decades have devalued the teaching profession. Kids are not held accountable and teachers bully teachers. I started teaching in 2005 and quit in 2020 during the pandemic. It has gotten worse in just those 15 years. And I taught in 3 states in public, private and charter schools. Unless you experience it you cannot understand how terrible it is. Many teachers don’t realize they have ptsd until they leave.
Kevin appears to assume that total teaching jobs should not have increased over the last 2.5 years. As long as hires roughly matches seperations then there is no shortage.
Then he assumes that actual evidence of shortages, job openings, isnt important and asks us to dismiss this evidence.
Then he assumes that 2019 or 2020 is a state of no shortage and asks us to mentally add up 100+ data points shown on a line chart to calculate in our head where things stand in late 2022?
Those appear to be assumptions that are designed to achieve a desired result and fits the standard data misinformation presentation of telling the consumer what they should think then giving them some data, but not the actual data that would show the conclusion.
We are not short on teachers, here look at 2 graphs over 4 years with 3 lines drawn through 148 pieces of monthly data and guess at the cumulative state of things at the beginning and end of those data pieces!! Also, ignore the people living and working in those data lines, they don't understand the situation like those of us drawing charts.
Why not just show full time teachers in the US divided by school age kids in the US? A ratio over time should clear this up pretty quickly?
How many teachers are there in the US? These data are harder to come by. Evidently the BLS survey on total jobs is annual and the latest results are from May 2021.
Then he assumes that 2019 or 2020 is a state of no shortage and asks us to mentally add up 100+ data points shown on a line chart to calculate in our head where things stand in late 2022?
No. That is categorically not what Kevin said. Here, let me quote the last sentence of the post:
"Whatever problems we have are mostly of long standing."
He did not say that there was no shortage on 2019. He said that, if we currently have a shortage, then that is not a recent development. There is nothing particular about the situation in 2022 that is a crisis resulting from the pandemic or developments in the last two years.
You are wrong. That throw away one liner at the end doesn't change the fact that Kevin uses 2019 as the baseline and wants us to accept that 2019 represents a normal year where everything was fine.
Does the conclusion change dramatically if 2019 quits, hires and separations are also elevated from years past? Absolutely it does.
I find it hard to brush off the fact that educational job openings are roughly 100% higher than pre pandemic and roughly 300% higher than during the Bush and Obama presidencies.
This chart certainly doesn't present the same story that Kevin tries to paint, does it?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=WCGI
Maybe the data presented here is wrong and the NY Times is correct. I don't really care either way, but since Mr. Drum is the chart guru, why is he so absolutely convinced all the data sets he reviews are valid?
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I am curious how solid the Labor statistics are. I teach high school, and in my area, there were definately more openings than usual, and we have lots of long term subs and uncertified teachers filling in. I am in a number of teacher groups on social media and it does appear that we have a higher than normal turnover. That said it seems there has always been a fairly high turnover in teaching and we seem to be having this conversation every few years.
Just by eyeball, there appears to be 300,000 unfilled jobs (separations minus hires, integrated over time) due to COVID, i.e. due to the difference in 2020. Seems like alot? Would be clearer if the graph showed cumulative numbers.
I double checked the BLS chart, it seems to be the month to month quit rate? If so, that could be misleading. Most teachers never quit mid year (You can lose your license if you do). Most teachers who quit just don’t renew their contract and don’t come back the next year. The job opening chart seems to catch this better, but the category I saw looks like it is a broad category of education, not specifically teacher? Not the data nerd Kevin is, so hard to say. I will say that in other charts, BLS reports on average 270,000 leave the profession each year. https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/data-on-display/how-many-teachers-are-leaving.htm#:~:text=More%20than%20270%2C000%20of%20these,teacher%20to%20enter%20the%20occupation. I couldn’t find the past data on this.
Looking at the total number of open positions obscures two important problems:
1) Teachers are leaving & being replaced by new people. There are schools where most of the staff is under 5 years experience. If you have contempt for teachers, you will think that's a good thing. If you know how education works, you will see that it is not good.
2) There are increasing openings in key areas, specifically special ed & math.
Yet again, Kevin ignores distributional effects and assumes teachers are quitting at similar rates in all states or school districts. But if this isn’t true - if quits are disproportionately occurring in some states or districts vs others, perhaps because better resourced districts are able to fill quits immediately by poaching from other districts and/or more sane states are able to poach teachers from the newly and increasingly insane states - there is still a problem here.
Yet again, Kevin ignores distributional effects and assumes teachers are quitting at similar rates in all states or school districts.
No. That is categorically not what Kevin said. Here, let me quote him:
"And none of it means there are no teacher shortages anywhere."
Kevin is quite aware that national numbers are not reflective of every location. His point is that it is journalists who are covering this as if the conditions they cite are occurring at similar rates in all states or school districts.
Maybe try reading with the goal of actual comprehension.
The JOLTS data being used by Kevin would seem sto make it hard to get a clear picture on this subject. The category used, State and Local Education, is an employment sector. Since JOLTS does not collect occupational data within employment sectors, the sector data includes all employees within the sector, i.e., everyone working for public elementary, secondary and postsecondary school systems and institutions.including teachers, instructional aides, administrators, professional and support staff, maintenance personnel, cafeteria workers, and transportation workers.
The JOLTS data for Voluntary Quits, Total Hires and Total Separations is aggregate data for the entire local education sector. As a result, it's possible that recent JOLTS data is masking the actual state of teacher quits, separations and hires.
According to JOLTS, separations exceeded hires by more than 700K in 2020. That reversed somewhat in 2021, when hires exceeded losses by over 400K. So, the local education sector entered 2022 more than 300K employees below where 2020 started. We just don't know the breakdown of that deficit, or the breakdown of hires so far this year.
We do know that in 2020 many school districts reduced support, maintenance, transportation and food service staff as they shifted to remote learning mode. As schools began returning to in person instruction in 2021 and 2022, they had to hire heavily to recover from the earlier cuts. Hiring lots of teacher's aides, bus drivers, etc.could easily mask increasing losses among teachers. JOLTS simply can't clarify that.
Anecdotally, I suspect there is something to the sense that teachers are increasingly leaving the profession. My wife taught in our local district for decades and still has former collegues in several schools. Our district is large, over 40,000 student, good-paying (for local education), well-funded and highly regarded.Through 2019 all projected full time teacher positions were filled by late June or early July. This year there were still over 40 openings by the start of the school year, just in the high schools. My wife's old high school has 8 spots being filled by long-term subs, where there used to be only one or two. Department chairs, who used to have two periods free per day for non-teaching duties, now have one. All. High School class sizes have been increased by 3 to 5 students, depending on the subject, yet enrollment is basically unchanged. The demand for short term substitute teachers is so high that sub pay has been increased, with recently experienced classroom teachers getting bonuses on top of that. The state is waiving recertification requirements and fees for former teachers whose licenses have been expired for less than 10 years.
Yes, there is a problem here, and from what I see and know, at least part of it seems to involve some amount of exodus from the profession.
That's a fairly damning claim you've made there. I have no idea whether you're right or wrong, but Kevin uses the label public schoolteacher—not public education employees. We all make mistakes, so maybe he has made the error you describe here, but I've been reading him long enough to know he's typically pretty careful with stuff like this.
The 2nd graph makes no sense to me - teachers are hired / quit continuously like a chemical reaction? Maybe somebody can explain it to me (like I'm 5).
Even so, even eyeballing it, you should be able to get some kind of total by integrating under each curve. It looks like there is an accrued deficit from sometime in 2020 that's never been made up. If the student numbers are constant (that doesn't make sense either) then you have a teacher shortage. Or maybe the graph is just non functional. Locally, I think that we've had a teacher shortage for a couple years (should apply to KD's locale too, FWIW).
Any evidence to suggest that the number of unfilled job openings is caused by the all these new-fangled positions? That seems like almost as much of a stretch as the one the NYT is making.
Also, I don't have evidence to hand, but I'm pretty sure I've read of many school districts relaxing credential requirements. In many districts you need a bachelors degree in any field, or an honorable military discharge to be a teacher. That's a recent change. I've got a nephew with a marketing degree and a friend with a couple of theater degrees who are both teaching in major city school districts. That's a policy change, and I believe it's a widespread one. Why is that changing now?
How can this trend result in anything other than a national shortage of appropriately credentialed teachers?
If not, then we've either dropped standards into the basement or we're doing a superb job of importing foreign-trained educators.
>>>"The downward trend has been consistent. 𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟖-𝟎𝟗 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟖-𝟏𝟗 𝐚𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫-𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐚𝐥𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐚 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐝. Traditional teacher-preparation programs saw the largest decline—35 percent—but alternative programs experienced drops, too."
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fewer-people-are-getting-teacher-degrees-prep-programs-sound-the-alarm/2022/03