PRESS RELEASE:

The teacher shortage headlines are gone: what lessons remain?

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07/30/2003

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

School districts will have a hard time meeting No Child Left Behind’s requirement for a “highly qualified” teacher in every classroom by 2005-06 unless they reform underlying human resource operations and take a strategic approach to teacher recruitment, according to a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. The conclusions are based on a study of how districts responded to the teacher shortage problem between 1999 and 2002.

“Our work suggests districts face two major challenges for connecting teacher recruitment to school improvement strategies” says researcher Patrick Murphy. “First, they need to make sure recruitment and staffing policies address the unique needs of their local labor markets. Second, they have to be willing to deal with problems like rigid employment contracts and outdated staffing practices that prevent strategic teacher hiring.”

The report, From the Headlines to the Frontlines: The Teacher Shortage and its Implications for Recruitment Policy, is based on an analysis of the U.S. Department of Education’s 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), indepth field interviews with district and school administrators, and a survey of public school district human resource directors.

Among its findings:

• The shortage wasn’t a monolithic problem: Although urban districts account for only 29% of the nation’s teaching positions, they represented 41% of “late-fill positions” for the 1999-2000 school year, a proxy for vacancy rates.
• District responses to the shortage favored broad policies that may have done little to address the areas of greatest need: The SASS data show that only 4% of districts report using intra-district incentives to attract teachers to “hard-to-staff” schools; 10% report using subject-area incentives to attract teachers in particular disciplines.
• Key institutional barriers prevented districts from responding to the shortage more strategically: Without up-to-date information technology or human resource expertise – especially around recruiting – districts struggle to get a handle on their staffing problems and opportunities.