Teaching on demand

When Chris Wagner was studying to become a history teacher, his college called together the education majors for a meeting. Professors told him, “For those of you in art or history education, get out now. You’re not going to find a job.”

“I didn’t care,” Wagner said. “I knew this was what I wanted to do.” So in 2009 he graduated, ready to teach social studies in his home state of Pennsylvania.

Five years later, he still hadn’t found a job in his field, despite expanding his search outside Pennsylvania’s borders to nearby Maryland and Delaware, then beyond. He ultimately applied to teach American history to Chinese children in Nantong, a city just north of Shanghai. This August, he finally taught in his own classroom, albeit on the other side of the planet.

Meanwhile, U.S. media were reporting teacher shortages everywhere. “Teacher Shortages Spur a Nationwide Hiring Scramble (Credentials Optional),” wrote The New York Times in August.

Was Wagner just an outlier? The short answer is no. The United States currently has nearly twice as many teachers per student as it had in the 1950s. The 2008 recession slowed teacher employment growth, but didn’t stop it.

The longer answer is more complicated. Take one example: After Indiana lawmakers proposed sending public schools more money to address reports of teacher shortages, Ball State University economist Michael Hicks released a study on Oct. 26 demonstrating a teacher surplus.

Hicks found Indiana has approximately 64,000 working teachers, and another 39,000 residents with teaching degrees who are working in other fields. Hicks did find a teacher shortage—but only in math, science, and special education.

Indiana’s situation mirrors the nation’s, said Carrie Murthy, a researcher who manages federal data on teacher training: “Nobody is having difficulty finding elementary teachers. But schools are having a hard time finding secondary math and science teachers, special ed teachers, some of the unique languages or bilingual teachers. There has been a very regular teacher shortage in these areas for years.”

Brian Cesare has been conducting perhaps the nation’s only experiment to find out why. Cesare runs human resources for the Douglas County School District in Colorado. Three years ago, after a series of political squabbles, the district school board dropped its union contract. That allowed the district to rethink how it paid teachers.

Union contracts typically require paying teachers solely according to credentials and longevity. This pay scale has prompted lawsuits in California and New York that claim it sends the worst teachers to the neediest students by keeping schools from paying more for high-demand positions.

Douglas County schools were inundated with elementary teacher applications but could hardly get even one for positions such as autism specialists, school psychologists, and speech therapists.

When Cesare worked for companies such as Microsoft and General Electric, water-cooler chitchat and Labor Department data briefed him on market rates for specific positions. But in the public education sector, there was no market: The pay scale fixed prices.

So Cesare triangulated by asking principals to rate their hardest- and easiest-to-fill openings. That led to Douglas County’s current pay scale, which pays teachers according to a school’s need for their specific skills and how well the principal thinks they teach. Three years later, after some pay scale tweaking, principals can actually choose among several applicants for competitive jobs such as high-school science teacher and school nurse.

At first, some principals objected to the arrangement, since it conflicts with the culture of public education. But now that they’ve tried it—and the ones who really hated it have moved to other school districts—Cesare said principals are “very grateful” because “now they have some tools to keep the superstar.”