Why is there a teacher shortage in Arizona?

It's not just about the money

It’s a stubborn fact that not enough people in Arizona want to teach for a living. In the years leading up to the pandemic, teacher vacancies hovered around 20%, measured in the first month of the school year, according to the Arizona Schools Personnel Administration Association. This past year, that number reached 28%. In real numbers, this amounts to about 1,700 vacancies, or about 39,000 Arizona students who started their school year without a permanent teacher in the classroom. 

When you read about this issue in the news, the explanation is usually some combination of these factors: low salaries, lack of resources, lack of school counselors and other wraparound support staff, class sizes too large, not enough support for new teachers.  

I agree that ramping up school funding — and using that funding to increase teacher salaries — would make a dent in the teacher shortage. But I think there are more fundamental problems facing our school system — problems that money can’t solve.

Let’s start by talking about why teaching should be an attractive profession.

First of all, it’s an intellectual field. At any level of teaching, your job is the intellectual development of young people. This is an inherently interesting task for those who gravitate toward the world of ideas. The teacher’s life can be immersed in poems and novels; history and geography; reading and writing; math and science. Sprinkle in the arts, physical education, electives and extra-curriculars, and you’ve got a recipe for a vibrant and stimulating workplace. 

Also, teaching is a hope-filled profession. A teacher is playing a role in shaping future generations. The impact of a teacher isn’t easily measured, because a lot of the outcomes are intangible. Education is a multidimensional long-game. Teaching is a profession of laying foundations. The outcomes will be manifest somewhere else, at a later time. The teacher’s focus is on a developmental stage, year after year. Cultivating minds. Planting seeds. 

There should be plenty of people willing to forgo the “real world” to work in this field, even if the paycheck is lower than the fields of business, law, medicine, engineering, etc.

About the money

In Arizona, the average teacher salary is $52,172, according to data compiled by the National Education Association. That number is close to the mean salary in the state if you compare all occupations, but — no surprise — it’s lower than the mean salary for many other professions that require a college degree or higher. 

Additionally, the earnings ceiling for a teacher is lower than other jobs — even other jobs in education. The only way to make good money in education is by leaving classroom teaching and going into administration or selling curriculum or getting into consulting or something like that. There’s actually a lot of ways to make decent money in education. But in the classroom, your fate is sealed. 

The average teacher salary is also a bit deceptive because of the pension system. The pension is an incentive for many teachers to stay in the profession, but it’s a disincentive for many others because it significantly reduces take-home pay. The contribution rate is currently 12%. For new teachers starting at the lowest end of the salary scale, take-home pay might be as low as $30,000 per year. Not the most attractive financial decision for new graduates who still owe college debt and aren’t sure whether they want to teach for their entire lives. Also not the most attractive decision for middle-career folks who want to keep contributing to a 401k. 

Gov. Ducey’s plan to give teachers a 20% raise by the year 2020 was an important move to boost teacher pay. There are arguments over whether this goal has truly been reached, and if not, who’s to blame for the shortfall. But nobody can deny that Arizona teachers are getting paid much better than they did before the #RedforEd pressure campaign. Still, it’s not been enough to dent the teacher shortage. 

Two things can be simultaneously true about teacher salaries: 1) Arizona schools need more funding, and 2) school districts and charters can do a better job prioritizing teacher pay with the funding they currently receive. I’m sympathetic to the argument that we need to completely reform the school finance system, but I won’t get into that tangent here. 

If salaries were increased an additional 20%, bringing the average salary to $63,000, I think we would start to see a measurable difference in filling classroom vacancies.

But the money isn’t everything. If everything stayed the same within the school system, and the only thing to change was the money, my guess is that it would take an average salary of at least $90,000 to solve the teacher shortage. 

The workload is both unmanageable and counter-productive

I saw this meme during teacher appreciation week: “Dear Tired Teacher, When the expectations begin to feel impossible, remember that because of you, today someone smiled, learned something new, became more confident, and felt love. Don’t give up.”

However well-intentioned this kind of message might be, the effect is tantamount to psychological manipulation. The expectations feel impossible because they are impossible. We need to reduce the workload and make teaching a more sustainable profession. Why is this so hard?

One typical example. Before the school year starts, a teacher needs to organize curriculum, organize the physical classroom space, stock up on supplies, write and print syllabi, make seating charts, make lesson plans, etc. It takes a lot of time. So what do most schools do in the week before class starts? Pack the days with required meetings, a small fraction of which are necessary for a successful launch to the school year. When are teachers supposed to prepare? Their own personal time. Because … don’t you care about your students?

(What about the free time during summer vacation? It’s awesome. The ability to decompress over the summer has been critical for me, personally, to sustain myself as a teacher. But I would easily trade the long break in exchange for a more balanced daily schedule. Many teachers need to work during the summer for financial reasons, and, obviously, the existence of summer vacation is not drawing enough teachers into the profession.)

Lesson planning. Teaching. Providing feedback. This is the heart of a teacher’s job. The job needs to be whittled down to this essence. 

Don’t make teachers fill out five pages of paperwork to send an egregiously misbehaving student to the principal's office. Don’t make teachers write out their daily lesson plans in complex formats to submit to administrators. Stop using evaluation tools that expect teachers to jump through convoluted, time-intensive pedagogical hoops. Stop holding mandatory meetings to promote the latest pseudo-scientific teaching method.

It’s natural for teachers to want to put extra hours into the craft. Good teachers are passionate. What’s happening, though, is that because so much time is spent on administrative compliance, teachers are doing their day jobs on their personal time.  

When teachers get overwhelmed, the quality of their work — the essential work of planning, teaching, providing feedback — decreases. This is bad for teachers, because it hurts morale;  and it’s bad for students, who get a worse learning experience.

Until the essence of a teacher’s work is jealously protected, teachers will continue to get burnt out and quit. No amount of psychological manipulation will prevent this outcome. Everyone knows they can make more money with less hassle in a different job. 

Standardized testing has sneakily ruined teaching

The influence of standardized testing on teaching practices has increased dramatically since the 1970s. Like the case of the boiling frog, we didn’t really notice the gradual changes to the teaching profession, but it’s time to recognize how bad the situation has become.

Before 1980, Arizona students were required by state law to take a grand total of two competency tests in their academic careers. One short test in the 3rd grade covering reading and math. Another short test in the 5th grade.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, students were required to take nationally-normed tests in most grades K-12. At first it was the Iowa test, then it was the Stanford test. The entire test would take a couple hours, broken up into the categories of language and math. The tests were used as a general barometer of learning. People debated what the test scores actually signified, and whether schools should “prep” students for the tests.

A big change happened with the introduction of the AIMS test in the late 1990s. This was the first high stakes test, designed to be a requirement for high school graduation. The test also heightened state standards, because it included material above and beyond the existing standards. Pre-AIMS testing, only two years of high school math and two years of high school science were required in Arizona. With the introduction of AIMS, every high school had to implement a college-prep curriculum for everyone. 

Proponents of the AIMS test would argue things like: How could you be opposed to higher standards? Are you afraid of teacher accountability? Which one of these new standards do you think students shouldn’t know?

These arguments put the opponents of AIMS in the unpopular position of defending lower standards. In my view, the opponents were simply recognizing the reality of human nature. You can’t just arbitrarily raise academic standards and expect every teenager in Arizona to master the standards. If you could, why not raise the standards even higher? Why not require mastery in philosophy, law, engineering, and medicine? 

AIMS proponents were also misguided, in my opinion, by placing an undue emphasis on academic knowledge. The public school system —  if its goal is to serve the entirety of Arizona students — needs to be versatile, not standard. Why require every student to master advanced mathematics, but not require every student to master the mechanics of a car engine? 

Every student should have the opportunity to advance to high levels of academia, but not every student should be required by state law to master advanced academic coursework. The cutoff point for what should be required for a high school diploma is, of course, subjective — but it’s obvious that the AIMS test took the academic requirements too far. 

The AIMS test ended in a predictable way. The state had to waive the graduation requirement, year after year, because of the failure rates. The test was scrapped after five years, replaced by AZMerit in 2014. 

In 2013, the dawn of the AZMerit Era, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer proclaimed: “It’s not enough to merely measure our schools. We must fund the academic results we want, rather than continuing to feed our current system.”

She had just signed a bill to launch a pilot program to tie test scores to school funding. It was a continuation of the AIMS mindset.

Today, Arizona’s public schools are assigned a letter grade, determined primarily by the scores students receive on the AZMerit test. Every school strives to be an ‘A’ rated school. If a school is a ‘D’ or ‘F’ rated school, they’re probably launching a new initiative to try to increase test scores.

I don’t oppose this testing system because I’m afraid of “accountability.” I oppose this testing system because the tests have incentivized a soul-sucking, counter-productive approach to learning that’s causing misery to everyone involved. 

Here’s what’s happened. We’ve done a clumsy autopsy of the “important” content areas, and produced several pages of sterile, itemized standards. We’re drilling these standards, starting in the early grades. The only way to measure these zombie standards is to use a mind tranquilizer known as the AZMerit test. The number one goal of public school administrators is to get students to answer questions correctly on the AZMerit test. 

So, rather than reading and discussing interesting books and articles, and teaching the context, we’re teaching kids how to find the main idea of randomly chosen excerpts. Instead of positively reinforcing reading as a means for enrichment, we’re drilling these zombie standards. This is the exact opposite of the approach we should be taking if we want our students to be better readers. 

In the early 1990s, standardized tests were present, but they were not a dominant force in the school system. They were used as a barometer of general academic knowledge. When school results were published in the newspaper, they were fodder for debate.

Today, the demands of standardized tests are felt in every aspect of a public schoolteacher’s job. From staff meetings to the school schedule; from teacher evaluations to performance pay.

On top of that, the testing obsession has narrowed the average school’s curriculum. The more time schools spend drilling zombie standards, the less time they spend teaching civics, drama, shop class, or other interesting things that teachers want to teach and students want to learn. Squeezed out is the vibrancy that makes schools interesting and desirable places to be. 

I’m not opposed to standardized testing in all forms. For example, I don’t think the SAT should be abolished as a tool for college admissions. I’m not opposed to schools implementing a structured curriculum. We don’t need every teacher to reinvent the wheel in their classrooms.

But we need to open our eyes to the corrosive influence our testing obsession has had on the learning environment.  

Final thoughts: the post-pandemic challenge

The pandemic’s main effect on the education system has been giving teachers, students, and parents a glimpse of what life would be like without traditional public schools. Now that people have seen the alternative, they’re not going to be as willing to return to the status quo. Students are already showing resistance to going back to school. My guess is we’ll see an even worse teacher shortage next school year, despite the raises, and despite the support programs now being launched by the Arizona Department of Education.

Pandemic teaching conditions were miserable. The teaching profession is becoming increasingly politicized. And again, everyone knows they can make more money with less hassle in a different job.

Online schools and microschools are proliferating, offering alternatives to the traditional school system. This phenomenon is squeezing public school budgets by reducing enrollment numbers. Several districts in Arizona were forced to lay off teachers this past year due to budget restrictions. These teachers won’t have trouble finding other jobs due to the state’s teacher shortage, but the deeper problems remain. 

The bottom line is this:  Increasing school funding won’t change the unpleasant dynamics driving the teacher shortage. We’ve tried top-down reforms and it doesn’t work. We’re not going to find enough teachers to work in our schools unless we reform the system from the ground-up.