Listen to "NAEP? Nope." The Test Score Tango.

NAEP? NOPE.

The Test Score Tango.

Preface: You may already know how I feel about Big Testing and test scores. If not and you're interested, I've written about it here, and here, and here, and here. That said, the least terrible of the Big Tests is probably the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, if only because you don't have to shut down an entire school every year to give it, and because it doesn't sort the high-score schools from "failing" ones. 

Yet, when the latest NAEP scores dropped a couple weeks ago the usual suspects were predictably aghast. Hilariously, some of the same dopes that declared the teacher shortage a fake now credulously announced the loss of twenty years of progress based on one set of scores on one test given to nine-year-olds in the third year of a fucking pandemic. 

Kids, there are demons out there bent on the destruction of public schools, and they'll do whatever it takes to make it happen. When I was in the classroom, it felt like I was in the middle of one big chaotic shitstorm. It may feel that way to you, too. But it is not. It is strategy. It's a program. Think of it that way and it's easier to recognize. You just have to know what to look for. Then maybe we can fight back. 

And now, the Test Score Tango.

A lot of the early NAEP score headlines were overwrought and eerily similar. The usual suspects, of course. The New York Times had "The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading." But also from outlets that should know better. From Chalkbeat: "Math and reading scores plummet on national test, erasing 20 years of progress." And of course piling on from The74: "‘Nation’s Report Card’: Two Decades of Growth Wiped Out by Two Years of Pandemic" (all emphasis mine). A little later The New Yorker had this terrible "interview" full of leading questions and reformster* rhetoric.

Getting out early with sensational claims helps shape the narrative. Fortunately, several observers responded quickly with a more measured, nuanced analysis than the doomsayers. This article from Education Week does a good job explaining what the scores actually mean. Jan Resseger    situates the test results within the broader context of the trauma and disruption caused by the pandemic, and suggests the limits on conclusions that may be drawn from them. And this thoughtful article from Jill Barshay titled, "6 Questions to Better Understand Math and Reading Scores" asks really good questions and doesn't pretend to have all the answers. In advance. 

Leonie Haimson of classsizematters.org stresses the lack of clarity in the data and pushes back on the popular assertion that closing schools and the consequent remote learning were a key driver in the score decline. 

Haimson also challenges the conventional proposals for what administrators and education Big Thinkers call "learning recovery." Addressing "negative impacts on learning and test scores," Haimson writes, will require not simply "longer days and years." Instead, she advocates for smaller class sizes rather than what she calls "false and damaging policy prescriptions."

It's difficult to know whether all the hyperventilation comes from genuine misunderstanding, or underlying partisanship, or if it's just for clicks, but it is surely... overblown.

Many of the agitated commenters were no doubt expecting--and knew their readers (and funders) were expecting--the pandemic to have a severe impact on student learning. And many remain particularly focused on the closing of school buildings and the shift to remote learning. Many expected those effects to have been disastrous, and they are heavily invested in blaming teachers and their unions for the damage. When the scores came out, it was easy to read them as confirmation of their expectations. 

But the truth is, in the best of times the NAEP scores don't mean what a lot of people think they mean or would like them to mean. And in pandemic times, it's even harder to draw conclusions.  

One of the things about NAEP that doesn't mean what people think it means is "grade level." In 2016's "The NAEP proficiency myth" from Brookings, Tom Loveless demolishes the notion that NAEP proficiency is "synonymous with grade level" and urges states not to use NAEP’s proficient level as a basis for education policy. 

Some interested parties--including organizations promoting a "failing schools" narrative to advocate for school choice--continue to deliberately misinterpret the NAEP levels and conflate "proficient" with grade level. By this definition, then, in a given year two-thirds! of test takers might fall short of "grade level." 

The truth is, however, that what most of us think of as "grade level" more closely aligns to NAEP's Basic level. By simply being honest about the meaning of the NAEP scores, instead of two-thirds below grade level we in fact have two-thirds at or above. The sky may be a bit cloudy, but it's not falling.

The Covid pandemic has obviously had a profound impact on students, and the new NAEP scores clearly reflect that.    However, in an example of the scores not meaning what some people would like them to mean, several partisan observers have used the scores to criticize the ways schooling was conducted during the pandemic. In doing so, they either misconstrue or ignore the data completely.

At the center of the project to blame teachers and unions for the drop in scores is the issue of school closings and the reliance on remote learning. Lots of interested parties have passed around the same study to show a link to learning loss. The NAEP scores themselves reveal a more complicated picture.  

For example, as Haimson and others have noted, the evidence for a correlation between school closings/remote learning and the drop in test scores is decidedly inconclusive. And even the NCES itself warns us that "Users are cautioned against interpreting NAEP results as implying causal relations." As Peter Greene put it in 2019: "Everyone ignores that advice, but NAEP clearly acknowledges that there are too many factors at play here to focus on any single one."

What can we know based on this limited set of data? As author and former writing teacher John Warner describes it in a NAEP discussion with Nick Covington of the Human Restoration Project: We know "a big thing happened." And "not only was school disrupted, the entire lives of everybody in the country and the world was disrupted" and "the notion that we could have avoided this with some kind of different school or different choices, going back in person sooner... it's not reflected in any of the data." (7:50)

Although the impact of the pandemic and the disruption and trauma that have accompanied it are clear and universal, the impact on student learning of going remote is, as yet, unclear. Facts are stubborn things.

Another thing we can learn from NAEP concerns the testing regime spawned by No Child Left Behind. If you assume that the promoters of NCLB were acting in good faith and not simply trying to inject an air bubble into the bloodstream of public schooling, the testing regime it initiated (not NAEP, but the hundreds of other tests kids have to take every year) hasn't succeeded on its own terms. Rather than more and more testing leading to a rise in scores, with the exception of a limited burst in the early 2000s, the NAEP scores have flattened. Big Testing hasn't worked. 

Those are things we can legitimately infer from the limited NAEP data we have right now. But what about "Two Decades of Growth Wiped Out!"? It would be easy to dismiss it as professional alarmism, but in this case the stakes are too high to simply chalk it up to selling papers. 

There are demons out there, and they are perched, waiting to jump to conclusions and manufacture analyses that serve the project to dismantle authentic** public schooling. They can't wait even a few weeks until more complete data is available. 

As Jill Barshay writes, "A more detailed report from the Department of Education on student achievement during the pandemic is expected in October. It will list state achievement scores for fourth and eighth graders on another NAEP test. Hopefully, we can unravel more of these knots together."    Maybe that's what the vultures are afraid of.

In this environment, information like the NAEP scores is routinely politicized. The scores are used to sell programs and products from organizations that profit from brokenness. And of course, the scores are cynically weaponized by the school choicers and their enablers in the press in order to promote a failing schools narrative and advance the choice and anti-union agenda.  

But the scores do not mean what the screamers say they mean. In order to turn the volume up to 11, they compare the raw scores to previous scores, find a match twenty years ago, and announce twenty years of progress loss. The thing is, it's twenty years of test score progress, not twenty years of student progress. 

In an interview conducted by Liz Mineo for the Harvard Gazette, Dr. Andrew Ho, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former member of the NAEP governing board, explains:

[E]ach point on the NAEP scale is roughly three weeks of an academic year, and the overall decline was seven points, which is roughly five months in terms of an academic school year of learning that this cohort of students is relatively behind.

Five months. Not twenty years. But the average overall decline doesn't tell the whole story, of course. Predictably, students who were most challenged before the pandemic were most challenged by the pandemic. For students who were already struggling, who were already coping with insufficient resources--including educational resources--and whose families were likely to be most severely impacted by the pandemic, results were more alarming. From Dr. Ho:

But this average betrays the inequality where the decline for the higher-scoring students was only three points, or nine weeks, whereas the decline for the lowest-scoring students was 12 points, which is 36 weeks, which is almost approaching an entire academic year. 

Terrible. Unjust. Unacceptable. We need to address this, but this is not just a test score. This is a reflection of the racism and resource inequality that permeates our system. And still, the most impacted students lost "almost approaching an entire academic year." NOT twenty. 

The kids being told right now that the scores are down and the pandemic has cost them twenty years are being crushed for the objectives of the crushers.

Dr. Ho goes on to discuss the broader impact of the pandemic on students' lives apart from one set of test scores and reminds us what returning to "normal" means for students getting back to school. He also suggests the need for a "learning infrastructure," perhaps in the form of a "National Assessment of Educational Equity." In his words:

I’m not just worried about academic learning. I’m worried about the structures of educational opportunity and inequality that have increased over the pandemic; this is just the tip of the iceberg. I hope we can pay attention to the entire structure of educational opportunity. Academic learning outcomes are easy to measure, but also easy to overemphasize, as if students are only trying to get better at math and reading and not also trying to reconnect with their classmates and their teachers and remember how to sit still, listen, learn, and enjoy learning and playing with others.

Again, even among the most severely impacted, most vulnerable students, the setback was 12 points, 36 weeks, "approaching an entire school year." Which, after what they've gone through, seems predictable.

Not good, but not twenty years. All the screaming is premature. Before the additional scores (8th grade) and details in October. Before students have a chance to fully readjust to in-person schooling and reinvigorate their intellectual lives. Before students have had the chance to right themselves before we've given them a chance to catch up. For many of them, before they've had a chance to fully mourn their personal losses. 

Yet the drumbeat goes on. In the newspapers. Online. On the TV news. Among administrators. Sometimes friends and family shaking their heads and tsk tsking.

What can we do? I'm no longer on the job but when I was, I tried to follow this first rule of survival:

Do not fall for their bullshit. Because they tell you something is bad doesn't mean it is. Because they tell you scores are everything doesn't mean they are. Because they say your scores are down and you failed doesn't mean it's true. 

First of all, they are not your scores. They are your students' scores. And it's only a test. You know your students, and you know how little of their intelligence and talent and humor is reflected in any single test score. 

Nod your head, pretend to care, ignore the bs. Remember that most of the world doesn't understand your world, and 99% of the press reports and all the talk on the morning news is from people who either don't know anything or are deliberately lying for their own purposes. 

That goes for the bosses, too. Don't expect your admin to honestly tell you why you're doing this test or that test or why you're spending so much time prepping for them. Don't break your head trying to figure them out. Remember that they have a different agenda. They are speaking a language different from yours. Your concerns are not their concerns. Their only honest answer to "why" is the same as yours, the same as your students': Because we're told to. 

If you're in a position to resist, do so. Ask other,  "non-why" questions--they hate that. Challenge their analysis of the scores. Their interpretation. With the rest of the world who are not your bosses, push back. At parties, with family, on social media. And write letters to editors; that's still a thing. Write a blog. You're an educator, let's educate the ones who don't know better and confront the ones who do.

You are right and they are wrong. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

*h/t Peter Greene

**h/t Steven Singer

We've had about all the help we can stand.*

Experts. 

The word itself makes my skin crawl. In my twenty-five years in the classroom, I must have sat through a bazillion "professional developments" and trainings conducted by people who didn't understand the classroom and often knew less about the topic of the training than I did. I'm sure many all of you have experienced similar frustration.

It wasn't actually horrific during my first few years. We all met in the auditorium and everyone, including the bosses it seemed, understood the performative nature of these meetings and we got through them together. As quickly and painlessly as possible. While grading papers. Once in a blue moon you might look up and say to yourself or your neighbor, “Wow. That could work.” Then you would take a few minutes figuring out how to use it.

Then, I think it was about 2000 or 2001–that would make sense–the faculty was suddenly offered the opportunity to create a matrix of PDs that would carry through the year, address our concerns, and be conducted by our own expert teachers. It was awesome. 

We dedicated two department meetings to making a schedule and in the third meeting we were told the deal was off. Back to the dictated meetings, only this time the bosses would be taking them seriously.

It was all downhill from there with more and more time dedicated to testing and whatever the latest brainchild of "Downtown" might be. And testing. 

We got more and more consultants and program preachers of one kind and another, and instead of being able to ignore them and do the work we were paid to do, the work that wanted to do--even the grading, sort of--we were now watched, monitored like prisoners in the yard to make sure we were there in the correct spirit. 

Meanwhile, our spirits were low.

Terrible experts who knew nothing about how their concepts would work in the classroom, nothing about the actual thing they were trying to fix, nothing about teachers and nothing about kids. 

I take that back. They all knew that teachers were the problem.

It was around this time that I remember starting to read about the profession and all the things that were wrong with schooling. All these articles by think tanks and foundations, by researchers, by economists and politicians and "thought leaders"--anyone but teachers.

Articles written by people who have never worked in a school. Articles full of interviews with people who have never worked in a school. These people have ideas about everything!

They have ideas about testing and standards and what the curriculum should and should not be. They have ideas about classroom management and teaching reading. They have ideas about class size and educational technology and how expensive school is. They have ideas about our pensions.

They have ideas about unions. They have ideas about school choice. They have ideas about the teacher shortage.

And they have power. They flood the zone with their essays and reports and studies that reflect their specific agendas and those of their funders. Do a Google search on topics like teacher pensions or school choice and the first ten or thirty results will be from one of these experts giving you their slant, and creating impression that theirs is the one true way to think about it. Look up one of their organizations and try and find information about them that doesn't come from them. They are a well-funded, committed bunch.

From the numbskulls that used to come to a room full of English teachers to offer advice on quick writes, to the motivated thinkers suggesting that the problem right now is too many teachers, it's no wonder that teachers continue to feel that their experience, intelligence, and expertise are not valued. And just try and ask a penetrating question or propose an answer that conflicts with the program of the day.

I write all this because I'm feeling it right now. As I've been looking at what Big Thinkers are saying about the teacher "shortage." As I'm now researching what some educonomists are saying about teacher pensions. These people have ideas.

Anybody who is or has been a teacher knows what is true and what is not. We are the ones who have asked the questions and dug deep to find real answers.

I can't help but think that we've had about all the help we can stand.

*h/t John Sayles, Matewan

Teacher Shortage? Don't disbelieve everything you hear. (part two)

Sorry it has taken so long to post part two of my response to cynical media denials of the "teacher shortage." Life intervenes, as they say. 

Anyway, although the actual articles critiqued here might now seem outdated and irrelevant (I hope that's true), the bad reporting that birthed them is certain to resurface, and so this post.

Update: It's already happened. See this from the AP today.  Similar to what I detailed in my last post, again we hear that the problem is only in "certain subjects, certain places, certain kinds of schools." Again we hear that "it's always been hard, and then the pandemic." And again we hear that "it's not a quitting problem" without hearing about the collapse in numbers of new teachers. And AGAIN we hear from the RAND Corporation.

We do get story after story of schools scrambling for staff, but this time we're also treated to a little "bright spot" at the feel-good ending where, in spite of the challenges, a student teacher, newly hired using "federal relief money," is "confident she is meant to be a teacher." I know the feeling, and I hope it's as true for her as it was for me.

There is no mention of the changes her school district intends to make in order to keep her, however. And that brings me to this: I've tried to figure out why all the deniers are so committed to this "no shortage" narrative. I even made a big long list, but maybe it's much simpler than that. Now I'm thinking that the objective is to pretend there's no problem until it's too late to fix it. (h/t Peter Greene here)

Now the post.

Yes, Virginia, there is a teacher shortage. 

The discussion around the shortage is lively among the researchers and writers who cover this beat, and of course among the students and teachers and other educators who are looking around and wondering, "Where'd everybody go?" and trying to survive and thrive in this macerated world.

Lots of this talk and work and even more talk is honest and dedicated to figuring out what's really going on, why it's going on, and what to do about it.

However, there is another side of the shortage "debate" that is definitely not honest, not well-supported by what little data is available, and often relies on the wishful thinking and pre-set agendas of academics and the ideologues who cite them. At best, these are savvy contrarians looking for attention. At worst, they are the enemies of public education working toward its destruction. These are the shortage deniers. 

A prime example of shortage denial is this piece from Jill Barshay and the Hechinger Report. Titled "PROOF POINTS: Researchers say cries of teacher shortages are overblown," it is a medley of selective quotation, deflection, and hyperbole. And I'm saving the subtitle for the punchline. 

Start with the title and the "overblown" "cries" of teacher shortages. That is not neutral language and neither is this article. From there Barshay acknowledges that "the stories are scary" but asserts that "education researchers who study the teaching profession say the threat is exaggerated."

Do they, though? Everyone acknowledges that the data are incomplete and inconclusive. That doesn't prevent some people from cobbling together selected quotes and favored statistics to draw definitive conclusions.

In what will become a recurring theme of hearing from the same Big Brains over and over, we again hear from economist Dan Goldhaber, who observes that “Attrition is definitely up, but it’s not a mass exodus of teachers," a quote Barshay uses to support her "overblown" claim. 

However, Barshay's next two paragraphs are apparently built on this paper, from a study that examined only one out of fifty states: Washington. And in that paper, Goldhaber described the situation in slightly less confident terms: "In sum, our opinion is that many of the recent media stories about rising teacher attrition rates are accurate in direction but, arguably, not in magnitude." I guess arguable doesn't tell the right story. 

We also once again hear from Heather Schwartz, RAND Corporation researcher, who offers no evidence but says, “Among researchers, I think we’ve reached a consensus that there hasn’t been an exodus of teachers during the pandemic.” That's what she thinks anyway, as she speaks for all researchers. 

We talked last time about the redefiners who dismiss the shortage as impacting only certain subject areas for certain kids in certain states. Now cue the pivot to the story Barshay's article is dying to tell: The real problem with the shortage--such as it is--is all that pandemic money rolling in. I kid you not. They want to argue that there's a "hiring spree" that only makes it look like there's a shortage. 

Barshay describes it this way:

Imagine that Google decided to expand its ranks of computer programmers. It might be hard to find so many software engineers and it would feel like a shortage to IT hiring managers everywhere. That’s what’s happening at schools. 

All this certainty--based on a feeling. Barshay reports that    "Schwartz doesn’t yet have data on the exact number of new hires, but she is confident that schools have increased head counts." Is that Schwartz's confidence? Or Barshay's?

Anyway, the problem isn't too few teachers; it's too many. 

So we end up where we were headed all along--The punchline. 

Here's the subtitle of the article: 

Schools are going on pandemic hiring sprees and overstaffing may be the new problem

All that free money juicing up the schools, see? All these "educators" rolling in dough and hiring all these teachers willy-nilly. 

I guess we're supposed to disregard the fact that (apparently based on the RAND study, though Barshay doesn't specify) "[t]he biggest areas of staff expansion were among substitute teachers, paraprofessionals or teachers’ aides, and tutors" which schools "lured" by increasing daily pay from "$115 a day to $122 a day." That's about 15-20 bucks an hour. 

I'm thinking this is not a solution to the teacher crunch.

Barshay gets to the point:

Schwartz says her biggest worry isn’t current teacher shortages, but teacher surpluses when pandemic funds run out after 2024. School budgets will be further squeezed from falling U.S. birth rates because funding is tied to student enrollment. Schools are likely to lay off many educators in the years ahead.  “It’s not easy for schools to shed staff and maintain quality of instruction for students,” said Schwartz.

Barshay finishes with: "That won’t be good for students."

No. No, it would not. You know what else isn't good for students? The chronic underfunding that existed before the pandemic. The constant churn in the schools The Economist called "the usual suspects."

Oh, and if you're waiting for any mention that schools were understaffed before the pandemic, or that the teacher "pipeline" is down to a trickle, don't hold your breath. Doesn't fit the counternarrative.

If the Hechinger article is full of stats and quotes cherry-picked to make the counter-case, Derek Thompson's article in The Atlantic, the one that started me down this road, is mostly just selected "experts" bloviating and Thompson hearing what he wants to hear. 

We get the busy Heather Schwartz again, and school choicer    Chad Aldeman, who "writes about education finance at Edunomics Lab" and is a critic of teacher pensions as well as an experienced skeptic when it comes to teacher attrition. We also get Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat and previous staff writer for The74. 

There is the usual proviso about inadequate data, the real shortage, according to Thompson, as he quotes Brown University associate professor of education Matthew Kraft's acknowledgment that his team couldn't draw conclusions "because of the weakness of the existing data.” However, that doesn't stop Thompson from somehow twisting it into support for Thompson's own claim that the "dreaded teacher shortage that so many educators had warned about" is exaggerated.

Next we get Barnum again and some stats cherry-picked to enhance the picture, and then we hear from Chad Aldeman again, and this time both he and Thompson want us to know that what we're seeing is a drop in enrollment and... wait for it... an increase in hiring. According to Aldeman, who is not sure but "think[s]" this must be true:

“I’m not confident about the education data, but I think we’ll eventually discover that public-school enrollment declined in the 2022–2023 school year even as districts hired more teachers than they had before the pandemic,” Aldeman told me. “If the student ratio goes down, it’ll be very hard to call that situation a ‘teacher shortage.'”

All this is asserted and used by Thompson to bolster his claim, even though Aldeman himself admits he is "not confident" in the data.

There is so much wrong with the article that it's honestly hard to know where to stop. There's some nonsense on teacher mental health and stress and how it's not yet a problem.    There's the requisite "not a shortage everywhere" and the obligatory and insidious "teachers just say they're going to quit." 

And from the use of "might be" and "I think" to suggest a conclusion for which there isn't sufficient evidence, to the selective omission--again--of the supply side of the teacher equation, it's hard to tell how much of this is dishonest, how much is glib savviness for the next cocktail party, and how much is just laziness. 

There are people who will do anything to avoid the obvious: People are not excited to teach anymore. 

So don't make yourself crazy (like I did) by reading their crap. Instead, for an honest look at teacher flight--which is real--and the reasons and solutions for it, read things like:

This, from Peter Greene, who spent almost forty years in the classroom and is now a writer for Forbes and his own blog, Curmudication. He starts with the standard "There Is No Teacher Shortage" as a hook, but immediately and thoughtfully cites both the durability of the shortage and the conditions that cause it (including the strained pipeline). 

He doesn't redefine the shortage but he does rename it, instead preferring to call it "an exodus, a slow-motion strike." His point is that referring to it as a "shortage" implies that "all of the nuggets have been pulled from the mine," and absolves us of the responsibility to find ways to improve conditions and attract teachers to the profession. Greene also gives his thoughts on why the "shortage" narrative persists and whose interests it serves.

Another writer who you should know and probably do is Anne Lutz Fernandez. I first encountered her work when I was working on a previous post about the shortage, in the form of her tweet in response to this article in the Washington Post:

They are leaving because teaching has been made unattractive and unsustainable. The drain won't stop until compensation, micromanagement & management through fear, de-professionalization, overwork & make-work, politicization of curriculum are addressed.

— Anne Lutz Fernandez (@lutzfernandez) August 4, 2022

Of course we are. 

I encourage you to read this piece of hers from the Hechinger Report. It contains an excellent breakdown of the reasons for the present crisis--yes it is--and some solutions that might help. You won't find any gaslighting, no denial or redefinition. Just an honest assessment of where we are and how we might get out of this jam. And she even suggests listening to teachers!

Attrition isn't the only way we lose teachers. We lose people who are trained but no longer want the job. We lose people because they hear and read what it's like and they wouldn't take the job in a million years. And talking to a bunch of Big Brains to "prove" teacher attrition isn't sooooo bad does not mean there's no teacher shortage. 

If you really want to know what's going on in schools, go to a few. Talk to people who work there. Most teachers are not shy about telling you what's happening and, as Greene notes, you're likely to hear, “We’ve been trying to tell you the house was on fire for years, and now you’re finally noticing something’s wrong??!!” 

We lose teachers--and pre-teachers--for the same reasons Greene and Lutz Fernandez and Waid and thousands of others have been talking about for... a while. The deniers can cherry pick all they want, but it won't fix the problem.

I'm retired. Greene and Lutz Fernandez are out of the classroom, but you don't have to take anyone's word for what's happening. If you want to hear from teachers who are quitting today, just go on YouTube or TikTok and search "teachers quit." You'll find hundreds of videos like this one, or this one, from teachers who have just recently been driven out of the classroom. 

And for those of you who say to us that these problems with schools aren't new, and if Waid or Greene or Lutz Fernandez can take it for twenty or thirty years, these other teachers should also be able to do it, just shut up.

The point is they are not taking it. And they shouldn't have to. 

Teacher Shortage? Don't disbelieve everything you hear. (part one)

Apparently there's a debate over whether or not the teacher shortage is real. As someone who retired in 2021 and contributed to the present situation--regardless of what you call it--I must say I'm surprised by that. 

We didn't have enough teachers when I was still in the classroom, and that was only halfway through the pandemic lockdown and before the ginned up don't-say-gay / CRT bs and book banning, and before Uvalde and the predictable "arm the teachers" plan. I've written about this before, here. I don't see things as being any better, and my friends who are still in the game tell me it's worse.

For whatever reason, a bunch of Big Thinkers in and around education have discovered they can get clicks by stringing together the musings of a bunch of "experts" and then putting the title "There Is No Teacher Shortage" above it all. I thought it would be fun to look at the different teams playing in this league and see if anybody knows what the heck they're talking about.

First up, we have the researchers themselves. These are organizations like the RAND Corporation, which launched its American Teacher Panel in 2014 and produces the State of the American Teacher Survey, the 2022 version of which seems to be the catalyst for lots of the discussion. 

RAND has been doing this for a while, and the latest survey has been interpreted to suggest that the "teacher shortage" narrative is an exaggeration.

However, in a classic case of "I don't think this means what you think this means," when I look at the survey results they do not support the sweeping "nothing to see here" conclusions of the deniers. First there are the limitations of the survey itself, beginning with the obvious challenge of using a sample size of 2,360 point-in-time responses to generalize findings to more than three million teachers. Then the researchers acknowledge a critical underrepresentation of novice teachers (first or second year). This is a serious hole in the data considering the propensity of newer teachers to leave the business at a higher rate relative to more experienced teachers.

With respect to indicators of a teacher shortage, the actual data from this survey reveal that "74% of respondents answered yes to the question: Have You Been Asked to Assume More Responsibilities Than Normal This School Year (2021–2022) to Make Up for Teacher or Substitute Staffing Shortages?" with 41% saying they've had to make up for "Shortages of Nonteaching Staff." Furthermore, 52% listed "Taking on extra work because of staff shortages" as a source of stress with 47% listing it in the top three sources. That sounds like a teacher shortage to me.

In addition, there is this report from a bunch of RAND Big Brains including Heather Schwartz, who we'll hear from again. The report, based on the State of the American Teacher Survey and titled "Restoring Teacher and Principal Well-Being Is an Essential Step for Rebuilding Schools," offers a clue to how we get to "no shortage." 

In a section titled "Poor Well-Being and Adverse Working Conditions Were Associated with Intentions to Leave," (resist the "duh"), researchers found that, indeed, stress from long hours, more responsibilities because of staffing issues, crappy pay, "exposure to school violence," racial discrimination, and harassment over Covid "safety policies" and "teaching about race, racism, and bias" were factors in teachers and principals expressing a desire to leave.

How many teachers and principals wanted to leave? According to the report, "In January 2022, about one-third of teachers and principals reported that they were likely to leave their current teaching or principal job by the end of the 2021–2022 school year," a number "up from about one-quarter of teachers and 15 percent of principals in January 2021." 

Nothing to worry about, though. Only about a third of the third actually leave--at least in the first year. From the report:

Although these rates are concerning, we hypothesize that they reflect some teachers’ and principals’ job dissatisfaction rather than a major disruption in the workforce. Although teachers who state an intention to leave are more likely to resign than those who do not state such an intention, intentions to leave are an imperfect predictor of whether educators actually resign. One pre-pandemic estimate found that one-third of teachers who stated an intention to leave resigned within the next year (Nguyen et al., 2022).

It's troubling that shortage deniers don't think that 10-12% of teachers leaving every year would be troubling. But this "sense" that teachers are dissatisfied, that they express that dissatisfaction in their intention to leave the business, and that they may threaten to quit but really won't, is at the heart of much of the "no crisis to see here" reaction. 

Most researchers point to the dearth of clear, comprehensive data. I would note that a lot of the data has been produced by economists and a good deal of it seems cherry-picked and massaged to serve an agenda. Nevertheless, several Big Brains have made noise recently by making categorical pronouncements like "There is no shortage." Let's take a look.

First, there are what I will call shortage redefiners. These commentators seem to be operating in good faith, observing--rightly--that there are thousands of teachers out here who have left the business because of untenable conditions. Some of those conditions are the result of the pandemic, but some have been festering for years. Still others are the result of bullying based on ideology and politics.  

These commentators offer an honest reminder that schools have been difficult to staff for a long time, and with all the present stresses on teachers, lots of us have simply declined to continue. Add that to a depleted pipeline--for the same reasons--and you get places like Arizona and Florida inviting folks to "come on down" and join the team. Lots of teachers have decided not to teach, these folks argue, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.  

Petula Dvorak, columnist for the Washington Post, is a redefiner, and she does it in her article "There’s no shortage of teachers. We’ve just driven them out of schools." The first sentence? "There’s no teacher shortage." 

She goes on to discuss the challenges of working the classroom in 2022 and gives important attention to the role the gender shift from male to female has had in licensing the present public contempt for teachers. She ends with: "The crisis isn’t the lack of teachers. It’s the nationwide disrespect for those in the profession." I don't exactly agree, but at least she did talk to a couple of teachers.

I find this argument curious and wonder if it would be made in any other area. If suddenly all the surgeons in the country decided they couldn't take it and became gardeners, would they simply be surgeons in waiting? Wouldn't we have a surgeon shortage? I think people waiting for operations might think so.

Or if people thought soldiering was too dangerous and stopped believing the patriotic hype and opted to sell shoes instead, we would certainly be hearing about a soldier shortage and worrying about national security.

I'm also fascinated by the claim that there isn't a "national" shortage, but merely an uneven distribution of teachers and teacher candidates across districts and states. In what other area would we say, for example, there may not be any plumbers where you live, but there's lots of them in a big city in the next state over, so you're all set. 

You can't take your pipes to them, so unless you can convince the plumbers to come to you, you've got a plumber shortage. And a problem.

In other words, for people making this argument, there continues to be a theoretical reservoir of teachers out there who are just in the wrong place, or who may be temporarily disenchanted with the profession but would certainly return if we'd just treat them better. As one of those whose disenchantment led to retirement at the first opportunity, I find this argument unpersuasive. 

It is important to examine the conditions that lead teachers to avoid a subject area, or a geographical area, or leave the business altogether, or that discourage people from becoming teachers in the first place. However, to the extent that this line of argument disguises and even minimizes the challenges of staffing today's schools, I find it counterproductive. 

I can tell you from my own experience that people who leave the classroom find other jobs and discover other things to do. We are no longer teachers and to define us as such and thereby lessen the gravity of the situation is naive at best and destructive at worst.

There is also a subset of the redefiners that is not operating in good faith. They maintain that any shortages are "only" in certain specialties, only in certain areas of the country, only in low income schools. It's difficult to ascertain whether they are arguing that these conditions disqualify the shortage from being "national," or that because the conditions only exist in these schools the shortage isn't as important.

The Economist, for example, called the concern over the shortage "hysteria" and suggested we not get too excited because "most pupils will have a teacher" and the schools experiencing shortages are just "the usual suspects." I'm not kidding.

And in a May 2021 article for school choice champion The74, Dan Goldhaber, an economist with the American Institutes for Research (and someone who has been on the too-many-teachers train for a while), writes that "there is not an overall teacher shortage. Nationally, each year, there are tens of thousands more people prepared to teach than there are available teaching positions." 

He does, however, acknowledge that there are "more specific challenges to staffing classrooms in particular schools and subjects." Among the usual suspects? Goldhaber finds that "high-poverty schools in Washington need to replace about 400 more teachers every year than do low-poverty schools."

Even so, his big worry is money.  "If the message is that people en masse are turning away from teaching as a profession, it might push policymakers toward generic solutions to the problem, such as across-the-board pay increases." A terrifying thought, apparently.

Just a side note: In what other pursuit do we question whether paying someone more results in more people wanting to do a thing? 

So we've got researchers and redefiners, and many of them are honest, and some of them are wrongheaded, and some just see what they want to see. 

But there is another side of the shortage debate that is definitely not honest. These Big Brains set out to "prove" what they want to be true. They pick and choose their “experts” and massage what little data is available to support their claims. Their team includes academics and the ideologues who cite them. They are the shortage deniers. 

We’ll get to them. Next.