Indeed, We Face Monster Problems

The Educator Shortage

If you talk to most school district leaders in Michigan, they are likely to tell you that the number of teaching candidates applying for open positions has dropped significantly in the last three– to five years. To validate the concerns, the Michigan Department of Education has released some information about the alleged teacher shortage. It seems it was not long ago that schools typically had 30–40 candidates for openings with 10 of those candidates being high quality. Many districts report that they are "lucky" to get between one and three candidates for openings.

Drop of 62%

Since its peak in 2004 when there were around 9,600 new certificate issued, the number of first–time certified teachers in Michigan has fallen 62%, down to 3,600 in 2016. The numbers for the last couple of years are not yet available. At the same time, the State has lost about 200,000 students. That's 14% fewer students. Those numbers do not add up.

30,000 Not Teaching

Apparently, there are 30,000 certificated individuals in Michigan who ARE NOT teaching. MDE says they are trying to do a research project with the 30,000 individuals but "it has been difficult" to get it off the ground. Thirty thousand people in our state have teaching certificates and are not teaching!

January 2010

On January 4, 2010, Michigan joined the Race for the Top fray. The state aimed to change a great deal of legislation in order to be able to even apply for RftT funds. Apparently, the main aim was to improve student achievement. Here are the basic tenets of the major change:

• allow the state to intervene in the lowest-performing schools;
• permit new high-quality charter schools to open if they meet certain standards, and permit the closure of low-performing charter schools;
• require administrators to be certified;
• require an annual evaluation of teachers and administrators using data on student growth;
• create alternative routes to teacher certification to help bring the best and brightest into our classrooms;
• raise the dropout age from 16 to 18, effective for the high school class of 2016. (source: https://www.michigan.gov/formergovernors/0,4584,7-212-57648_21974-228885--m_2010_1,00.html)

Later, changes under Governor Snyder and the legislature required teachers to pay toward their insurance (2012) as well as required new teachers to enter a different retirement system than previously had been in place (2017).

The landscape has changed. 

The pool for many educational positions is extremely shallow, so schools have to find ways to create an additional candidate pool. Sometimes schools have candidates for open positions, but often they don't. Schools are in the predicament of hiring people who previously might not have received an interview. Many of my colleagues share stories like this. So, if our human resources are not where we need them to be, then we have to do significant work as an organization — school district — to assist them in becoming successful educators.

The pool is going to affect the overall landscape of education, because many school districts are hiring the available people (read: certified candidates) to fill teaching positions instead of hiring teachers to teach. The number of new teachers (newly issued certificates), plus the the number of certificated individuals not teaching (30,000 non–teachers), plus the number of retirements (Boomers are finally retiring) has led us to an unpleasant time in human resources in education.

Yes, Virginia, the shortage is real.