Sharp Nationwide Enrollment Drop in Teacher Prep Programs Cause for Alarm

Julia Alvarez, A 21-year-old senior at Michigan State University, is part of a disappearing demographic: those pursuing a career as an educator.

"Why I really want to become a teacher is because I want to go back and make my community better," says Alvarez, who grew up just east of Los Angeles. "But I was afraid of going into it because there were so many reasons not to."

Teacher preparation programs have experienced sharp enrollment declines over the last eight years in nearly every state across the country, a new analysis shows.

In Oklahoma, college and university programs designed to prepare educators for the classroom saw an 80% drop in enrollment since 2010 - just one of nine states where enrollment has nose-dived by more than half.

Coupled with low pay and historic levels of unrest among educators, the long, stubborn downward trend line has those responsible for building the next generation of teachers wondering whether the profession can overcome its sullied reputation.

"The minute I decided to do it, my mom was like, 'Are you sure?'" says Alvarez, whose mother worked in a school. "People were like, 'You don't get paid right. You don't get good benefits. It's long days and emotionally taxing.'"

"So there's a lot," she says. "Most of it comes down to there are just so many responsibilities and not enough time given."

Since 2010, enrollment in teacher preparation programs nationwide has declined by more than one-third, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress, meaning approximately 340,000 fewer students are enrolled in teacher preparation programs today.

Along with Oklahoma, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Illinois, Idaho, Indiana, New Mexico and Rhode Island all notched enrollment declines of 50%. And in nine states - California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania - enrollment dropped by more than 10,000 students.

The declines are notable on their own, but even more so considering they occurred alongside increasing enrollment in bachelor's degree programs over the same time period.

"This is going to take a decade to turn around if we act now," says Bryan Duke, interim associate dean in the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma, as well as the director of educator preparation.

Duke has seen Central Oklahoma's enrollment fall off a cliff since 2012, when the school enrolled about 1,800 students. Last year, it enrolled just 856, a 49% decrease.

"We have made it flat-out unattractive to be a teacher," he says. "That message is not going to change overnight."

Perhaps most alarming, when researchers disaggregated the enrollment data by race, they found that the number of black and Latino students enrolled in teacher preparation programs had decreased by 25%. The teacher workforce, in which 80% of educators are white, 9% are Latino and 7% are black, is already less racially diverse than the overall U.S. labor force, despite bring a profession in which the importance of teachers of color cannot be overstated.

Recent research has shown that for black children, having just one black teacher in elementary school are more likely to graduate and more likely to enroll in college. But teacher preparation programs enrolled nearly 15,000 fewer black students in 2018 than in 2010.

Mirroring the drops in enrollment, researchers also discovered a 28 percent decline in the number of students completing teacher preparation programs across the same years. Though the decline was less drastic than enrollment figures, and only four states experienced a drop in completions greater than 50% compared to nine that did with enrollment, the metric is an important indicator of the potential supply of new teachers.

Given the public outcry over low salaries, budgets stretched thin and the number of expectations heaped on teachers, the decline in enrollment isn't entirely unanticipated. In 2018, PDK's annual poll showed that 54 percent of adults said they wouldn't want their children becoming teachers and half of teachers themselves said they've considered quitting the profession in the last two years.

"Some of the broader context nationally is extremely relevant," says Lisette Partelow, the senior director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at the Center American Progress and author of the report.

"There's been two years of teacher strikes and walkouts across the country and there's a lot of thinking about that and the state of teaching," she says. "There is a clear unrest in the career of teaching, especially in these low-pay states, including Oklahoma."

Indeed, Oklahoma, with the third-lowest average teacher salary in the country even after teachers there staged a historic, nine-day statewide strike in 2018 that bumped up pay by $6,000, has become the poster child for the crisis.

A handful of educators elected to the state legislature on the heels of the strike has pushed K-12 education issues, including the state of the teaching profession, to the top of the legislative agenda, but some say those efforts have been crippled by unintended consequences.

"They worked really hard to try to incentivize teaching and they did," Duke says. "They have made the profession much more attractive. The problem is that they didn't do this concurrent with ensuring that we pay attention to teacher quality."

Instead of incentivizing students to enroll in teacher education programs, he says, they've instead incentivized them to nab emergency certifications, which were created to address teacher shortages and allow school districts to hire almost anyone with a bachelor's degree for short-term positions.

In the 2013-14 school year, the 23 colleges and universities in Oklahoma that offer teacher training programs graduated about 2,400 students, and school districts approved 190 emergency certifications. But last year, the colleges and universities graduated a combined 1,200 students from their training programs while school districts issued more than 3,000 emergency certifications.

"We focused on numbers and getting more people there without ensuring the people who fill these positions have the training and demonstrated the quality to match that compensation."

In doing so, he says, the state has accidentally painted the picture that anyone can be a teacher.

"The big thing is the deprofessionalization," Duke says. "Even though the salaries have increased, now they don't see teaching as something you need to be trained to do. If you love children, you should be fine - that's a problem, especially when we're looking at it from an equity perspective and most of the emergency certified teachers are hired are in the urban districts where we face great challenges."

Duke says he and other leaders in college and university teacher preparation programs have state legislators' attention and are working with school districts to find alternative paths to provide the type of essential educator training those hired with emergency certifications likely never had.

Among other things, they are providing stipends for student teaching, student loan forgiveness for those enrolled in teacher training programs and covering the costs of certification tests.

Similarly, Michigan has seen an explosion in so-called long-term substitute teachers and is on pace this year to hire more than 2,500 - 10 times as many as schools hired just four years ago.

"We know labor markets," Robert Floden, dean of Michigan State University's College of Education, says. "Things go up and down, but this has been a significantly long trend down and it's a concern."

Michigan has experienced at 67% decline in enrollment among its teacher preparation programs. Michigan State itself has seen enrollment drop 48%.

"We're all trying to do what we can to help the students think that this would be an attractive occupation and to let them know a little bit about the labor market," Floden says. "Particularly science, math and second language and special education are the areas where you can really write your own ticket."

Despite the overwhelming negative trends in teacher preparation enrollment, five states experienced increases. One of those states, Utah, experienced a 65% surge in enrollment.

Part of the most recent enrollment increase can be traced to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints changing the age for the mission it requires young people to complete, but the longer upward trend line is directly related to changes made by state and district policymakers and administrators at schools of education.

Last year, for example, Canyons School District approved an 11% salary increase for teachers, prompting other surrounding districts to green light similar salary boosts.

"It's really made a difference in folks seeing teaching as something that's viable, but we still fight against a prevailing attitude that a teaching salary is the second salary in a family, not a prevailing salary," says Sylvia Read, associate dean for teacher education at the College of Education and Human Services at Utah State University, as well as a professor and assistant department head in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership. "That makes it difficult to attract men who are supposed to be the breadwinners, especially in a conservative and religious culture."

The state supplements salaries for math, science and special education teachers in order to attract educators to the state's hardest-to-staff positions. The state also relaxed its requirements for admission into teacher preparation programs, including nixing a minimum score on the ACT college entrance exam and minimum GPA from applicants.

"For certain students who were scared off by having to have a particular ACT score, that's not a barrier for them anymore," Read says. "We're trying to be sure that we're not putting up extra artificial barriers that are above and beyond what the state requires without sacrificing quality. It did strike us that if you focus on inputs instead of outputs then you're artificially restricting your pool of really great teachers."

Utah State University, which has had a 13% bump in enrollment since 2012, kept a minimum 3.0 GPA as a requirement but no longer requires students submit an ACT score.

Utah State has also been experimenting with a video broadcast system they use to deliver courses to counties all across the state, allowing students to move through the program more efficiently. It's also providing an alternative certification program for special education teachers hired with emergency certification that allows them to complete courses while also teaching.

"It's been very helpful," Read says. "It's not like a flood of people coming in, but it does make a difference."

Those are exactly the types of policies states and schools have at their disposal to attract more students into the teaching profession, Partelow says, especially if they're collecting state- and local-level data on the state of the teaching workforce.

"What's happening in your state," she asks. "What's good? What's the supply and demand in your state, and can you project out what it looks like in the years out? Who is getting hired and how many vacancies do you have?"

"This is information that we really don't have yet," she says. "We need to know more in order to know who has shortages, where are they and what are the right policy solutions and levers for them."

As for Alvarez, who will be graduating from Michigan State this spring, she says she doesn't worry much about the low pay.

"I can figure that out," she says. "The stuff that really worries me is the burnout aspect because I know that I care so much and I want to help. I'm so afraid of being five or 10 years in and being like, I can't do this anymore. That's the worst thing: wanting to help but not feeling like you can."