Teaching conference discusses building a better teacher preparation pipeline

Center for Black Educator Development Founder Sharif El-Mekki presents on educator diversity at the “Strengthening Pathways into the Teaching Profession” convening August 22. (Ryan Collerd for Penn GSE)

Severe teacher shortages are bedeviling America’s public schools. But hiring difficulties are just the start of a multilayered problem with huge consequences.

Low pay and inordinate certification costs mean that thousands of individual teachers carry massive debt loads. Poor working conditions contribute to relentless labor churn for school systems desperate for continuity. And thanks to persistent structural racism, the national teacher workforce remains overwhelmingly white, female, and unrepresentative of the nation’s public school children.

As a result, the entire K–12 sector faces a thorny dilemma: how to expand access to the teaching profession without lowering the standards for becoming a teacher?

“When the need for teachers is so great, how can we continue to ensure that we have great teachers?” asked Penn GSE Dean Katharine Strunk.

The question came during Strunk’s opening remarks at an August convening titled “Strengthening Pathways into the Teaching Profession.” Organized by Penn GSE’s Collaboratory for Teaching and Teacher Education, the gathering brought together more than three dozen of the nation’s leading experts on teacher preparation. It was the second talk in the series and made possible by funding from the Hewlett Foundation.

The numbers are grisly: Nationwide, an estimated 400,000 teaching positions remain unfilled, and roughly 360,000 classroom teachers are not currently certified for their assignments. In recent decades, the number of high school students interested in pursuing a teaching career has plummeted by half.

But that’s why, Strunk told the assembled crowd, Penn GSE is poised to make “preparing and sustaining the teaching workforce” the first priority of its forthcoming strategic vision.

“We are committed to addressing this challenge head-on,” she said.

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Efforts to diversify the teaching force of America’s public schools — still 80 percent white, despite a student body now just 44 percent white — highlight the barriers.

Take, for example, the experiences of many Black youth who are interested in teaching but wary of public schools because of their own experiences as students. When surveyed, these young people relayed two devastating concerns, said Sharif El-Mekki, a panelist at the convening and founder of the nonprofit Center for Black Educator Development.

“One of the things that gave them pause was they could not imagine being colleagues with some of their current teachers. That shook me to my core,” El-Mekki said. “And the second thing that gave them pause was they see how teachers of color are treated.”

The impact? In Philadelphia alone, the number of Black teachers working in district and charter schools declined by nearly 1,200 people between 2000 and 2020, according to a recent report by the nonprofit group Research for Action.

But all hope is not lost. Joining El-Mekki as a panelist was Keilani Goggins, director of the Black Educators Initiative at the National Center for Teacher Residencies, which Goggins told the convening has prepared 9,000 teachers of record, with another 2,225 aspiring teachers currently enrolled in residency programs.

Also on hand was Cassandra Herring, president and CEO of the Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity, dedicated to improving the teacher workforce by partnering with teacher preparation programs to implement lessons learned from highly successful minority-serving institutions such as HBCUs.

“We don’t sanitize out culture from teacher prep,” Herring told the group.

During another panel, researchers from the University of Virginia, the Learning Policy Institute, and elsewhere said related efforts are underway at the institutional and policymaking levels.

“We have moved from compliance of traditional practices to continuous improvement for accessible, personalized, transformative approaches across given systems of educator preparation,” Arizona State Professor and Vice Dean of Teacher Preparation Nicole Thompson said of her university’s efforts to dramatically change the structure of its teacher prep programs.

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Penn GSE plans to head in a similar direction. Central to that effort will be the on-campus research center known as the Collaboratory for Teaching and Teacher Education, headed by Associate Professor Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, who stressed the importance of laying out a positive vision for the future of the profession.

“It’s not only about filling shortages,” Kavanagh said. “It’s actually about changing the culture of schools so that people want to be in them because they’re happy, joyful places where they feel like they belong.”

Too often, spurring that sort of shift feels impossible, especially in a landscape where attention, resources, and the teacher candidates who remain are flowing disproportionately to for-profit and alternative certification programs. Those programs’ operations generally remain a mystery, and their early outcomes inspire little confidence in long-term change. That approach amounts to a strategy of “open the doors and let in people who have less than adequate preparation,” Penn GSE Professor and former Dean Pam Grossman, one of the event’s lead organizers, told the convening.

But that’s no longer good enough, Grossman and the other panelists agreed. America’s public school teaching force needs a major injection of talent, money, and creativity — a reality both daunting and exciting for those on the front lines of trying to make it happen.

“How do we use this moment of crisis to create that kind of opportunity?” Grossman asked.