Chalkbeat

Report: Michigan teacher salaries aren’t keeping pace with other states

2024-05-15T13:47:41+00:00

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Average starting salaries for Michigan teachers lag behind most other states at a time when many school districts in the state are struggling with teacher shortages and the profession is becoming increasingly unappealing to those seeking careers.

That is one of the key findings in a new report from Michigan State University researchers that also finds that the average overall salary for Michigan teachers is now below the national average, after many years of being among the highest in the U.S.

The report, “Teacher Compensation in Michigan: Recent Trends and Public Opinion,” was released last month by the Education Policy Innovative Collaborative. It includes results of a public opinion poll of Michigan residents that shows wide support for increasing pay for new teachers.

Teacher pay is a critical issue in Michigan, as it is elsewhere in the country. There are wide disparities in pay between districts, with wealthier districts able to pay their teachers more. Shortages affecting many districts — especially in science, math, special education, and career and technical education — make it more attractive for teachers to move around in search of higher pay, creating instability. Often, that instability affects the most vulnerable students.

Jason Burns, one of the authors of the report and a research specialist at EPIC, said he hopes the findings will spur “a more informed debate on the topic.”

Here are some of the key findings in the report:

The average starting salary in Michigan was $38,963 during the 2021-22 school year, ranking 39th in the nation.
The average teacher salary in Michigan in 2021-22 was $64,884, 16th in the nation and below the national average of $66,745. During the 2012-13 school year, Michigan’s average was $61,560, 11th in the nation and above the national average of $56,065. That’s a 5% increase for Michigan over that time, compared with a 19% increase nationally.
Adjusted for inflation, Michigan teacher salaries have been on a steady decline. The report says that “if salaries had kept pace with inflation since 1999, the average Michigan teacher would have earned $81,703 in the 2021-2022 school year.”
In a recent survey of Michigan residents, 76% said they believe starting teacher salaries should increase, while 43% felt the same for average teacher salaries.

The teacher salary data is based on 2021-22 data, the most recent available for the report.

Michigan’s average teacher salary ranking has declined in part because many other states have moved to increase teacher salaries. Burns said Maryland, Delaware, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Idaho, and Utah are among those that have moved to increase teacher salaries, mostly by boosting the minimum amount teachers can earn but in some cases raising salaries for all teachers. A Michigan bill last year that would have set a minimum salary of $50,000 for starting Michigan teachers failed.

The fact that this movement to increase teacher pay is happening in both blue and red states is interesting, Burns said.

“In education, a lot of things wind up being partisan these days,” he said. “But looking at what’s happening across the country, it’s been a very bipartisan kind of effort in terms of who is actually taking action on the issue of teacher salaries.”

Chandra Madafferi, president of the Michigan Education Association, heard a presentation on the EPIC report recently. Her reaction? “Coming from the classroom, I knew it was bad. I didn’t know it was this bad.”

She said there is inconsistency in teacher salaries across Michigan, with often a $20,000 difference at the top of the pay scale between those districts that “pay really, really well and those who don’t. So the inequity is still very apparent.”

Madafferi said she appreciates that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made historic investments in public education, “because in many places, things are better than they have been.

“In many places, pay is going up. Things are getting better but there’s still so much that has to be done,” she said.

For instance, Madafferi said many districts are dealing with infrastructure and facility issues that require expensive fixes. If they can’t get that covered through a bond proposal, the money to fix the issues comes out of general funds, leaving less money to cover teacher pay increases.

“I have had multiple superintendents say to me, ‘I want to pay my educators more,’ or ‘I want to pay teachers more, however, we just can’t.’”

The report also highlights research from the Economic Policy Institute that finds that nationally, teachers earn 26.4% less than similarly educated college graduates. In Michigan, teachers earn 21% less. The gap is referred to as the teacher penalty.

Burns said research from the Federal Reserve Bank found a similar gap — 18% to 20% lower pay for teachers.

That kind of data is concerning to people like Armen Hratchian, executive director of Teach For America Detroit. TeachMichigan, a program of TFA Detroit, seeks to recruit and retain educators.

A 21% pay gap “is a real penalty,” Hratchian said.

“We have financially made this uncompetitive, and then we aren’t supporting folks in the way we should be,” Hratchian said. “What we’ve shown is when you do that, well, it strengthens the profession.”

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Advocates ask Michigan legislators to invest in retaining teachers of color

2024-03-06T19:12:54+00:00

With an ongoing educator shortage, Michigan has invested nearly $1 billion in the last two years in recruiting more teachers.

Now, advocates and parents say lawmakers must do more to retain and support teachers of color who work in communities experiencing high rates of poverty.

Among the suggestions made by those who spoke Tuesday during a meeting of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on PreK-12 were higher pay, culturally responsive support, and stipends for teachers in districts that have difficulty retaining staff.

Overall, Michigan had a teacher retention rate of 73% during the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recently available data compiled by the state. For Black teachers, the retention rate that year was 59%.

Renee Morse, director of government affairs and strategic operations for the nonprofit advocacy organization Launch Michigan, said during the hearing that the state has largely invested in educating and recruiting future teachers. A small percentage of funding has gone toward efforts to retain educators.

“Of the $1 billion investments in the teacher workforce the past two fiscal years, approximately 9.8% has been focused on teacher retention,” she said.

Among those investments were $25 million in scholarships for teachers in training who commit to working in Michigan, $175 million for Grow Your Own programs that allow support staff a free pathway to becoming a teacher in the district they work in, and $50 million for stipends for future teachers getting on-the-job training.

Other speakers told the committee that programs designed to support Black teachers and keep them in the profession would help reduce the achievement gaps in the state.

Data shows Black students in Michigan have lower rates of reading and math proficiency in all grade levels as well as high school graduation compared to their white peers. They are also more likely to be suspended and placed in special education.

“These facts are not indicative of Black students’ abilities or potential,” said Autumn Butler, co-executive director of nonprofit community group Oakland Forward. “But, it is evidence of a system that does not work for the majority of Black students here in Michigan.”

Years of research suggests that all students perform better in schools with a racially diverse teaching staff. Students of color, in particular, have improved attendance, behavioral outcomes, academic achievement, high school graduation rates, and likelihood of enrolling in college when taught by diverse educators.

“Having teachers immersed in the culture of their students means that it is more likely that the teachers have greater sense of cultural competency through their own lived experiences and may have greater sense of connection because often they come from the same communities in which their students live,” said Butler.

Elnora Gavin, a mother and member of the Benton Harbor Area Schools Board, asked legislators during the hearing for equity in funding teacher shortage initiatives.

“Many funding initiatives have produced inconsistent results because they do not account for the structural barriers that Black and brown students and teachers face before they even step foot into the classroom,” she said.

Angela Wilson-Turnbull of the Michigan Education Justice Coalition asked the committee for $600,000 in funding for a research study on teacher retention and recruitment for Black and brown educators in districts with high concentrations of poverty. The MEJC also asked for $15 million to fund a “culturally responsive education toolkit” to address the racial disparities of Black students’ outcomes.

Armen Hratchian, executive director of Teach For America Detroit, which oversees Teach Michigan, a nonprofit that has received state funding to recruit and retain educators, proposed the state create and invest $100 million in programs to support 2,000 teachers and school leaders who are already in high-poverty Michigan schools.

“As you’ve made a nearly $1 billion bet on all those those pipelines and aspiring educators – that’s a good bet – this is the time to make sure these novice teachers have the mentors, the leaders, so that they stay and develop and that they don’t walk that $1 billion out of this profession in five years,” he said.

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

March 7, 2024: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Armen Hratchian’s title. His title is executive director of Teach For America Detroit, which oversees Teach Michigan.

March 7, 2024: A previous version of this story incorrectly said Teach Michigan asked legislators for an additional $100 million. Armen Hratchian proposed the state create and invest $100 million in programs that would support teachers and school leaders already in high-poverty Michigan schools.

Whitmer wants to extend help for future educators, but drops teacher retention bonus plan

2023-02-06T13:00:00+00:00

During her reelection campaign, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer promised to prioritize teacher recruitment and retention, but the budget she will unveil on Wednesday includes just $100 million for it — a small fraction of what she proposed last year.

Her proposal last February called for spending $1.5 billion on teacher retention bonuses over four years. Republicans wouldn’t support that. This year, Whitmer’s own party is in charge of the Legislature, but the bonuses are no longer a budget priority.

Instead, Whitmer’s education agenda is focused on tutoring and preschool. During her State of the State address last month, Whitmer said she would work to provide free preschool for all 4-year-olds and to provide one-on-one tutoring for all students who need it.

How much she intends to invest in those initiatives will become clear Wednesday during a budget presentation to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.

Those measures are part of the school aid budget that Whitmer will present along with a broader general fund budget proposal to invest in everything from agriculture to workforce development.

The governor’s office provided an early peek at her plan to continue the MI Future Educator incentive program, which was created in last year’s budget to help attract teachers. It provides $50 million in stipends for student teachers and $25 million in scholarships for education majors. Her new budget proposal would maintain those spending levels and add $25 million to “ensure sustainability of the program,” spokesman Bobby Leddy said.

“This is everything on recruitment and retention” in the budget, Leddy added in a text message Sunday. He did not provide details on how the additional money would be spent.

“In the best of years, education is a tough job, but the last few years have been historically challenging,” Whitmer said Sunday in a written statement. “Let’s build on our work last year to establish education fellowships, pay student teachers, boost teacher recruitment, and create more paths to the profession so every classroom has a caring, qualified educator.”

MI Future Educator provides up to $9,600 per semester for student teachers and up to $10,000 per year in tuition for Michigan residents who are enrolled in eligible educator preparation programs and working toward their first certification.

Education advocates including Launch Michigan, which first proposed the MI Future Educator program, are glad Whitmer wants it to continue.

“It clearly indicates that the governor recognizes that the solution to (the teacher shortage) is of a long-term nature,” said Adam Zemke, who was president of Launch Michigan when the program was conceived. “These are recruitment strategies that work.”

The Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals supports the initiatives, too.

“We have a massive educator shortage in the state of Michigan, and we need to address that shortage,” said spokesman Bob Kefgen. “Helping people become teachers will certainly help.”

Leddy did not respond to questions about why retention bonuses aren’t part of Whitmer’s new budget.

Others say that the moment for them may have passed. Last year at this time, COVID cases were spiking, and teachers were struggling to manage student behavior as students readjusted to in-person learning.

When Whitmer proposed the $1.5 billion in bonuses last year, “that felt like a one-time thing,” said Bob McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan, which represents school administrators in six counties. “It’s not sustainable, to be honest.”

And, McCann said, bonuses aren’t the only way to support teachers.

“What we should be doing to keep teachers invested in staying in school starts with investing in classrooms,” he said. That means “putting more money into reading coaches, social workers, and things that help teachers to do their jobs and be successful in the classroom. That’s what’s critical in retaining teachers.”

The budget request comes as the state considers what to do with a projected $9 billion budget surplus. Whitmer and fellow Democrats want to use some of that to distribute inflation-relief checks to all taxpayers.

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan teacher shortage prompts superintendents to propose new certification route

2022-12-06T21:41:47+00:00

After scouring the state’s pipeline to find more certified teachers, a group of Michigan education leaders are now looking to create a pipeline of their own.

Regional superintendents across the state are banding together to develop an alternate route to certification that emphasizes early on-the-job training and income opportunities for prospective teachers.

The initiative, called Talent Together, is just the latest in a series of efforts by stakeholders across the state who are working to mitigate a looming shortage of teachers, especially in areas such as special education, math and science. The efforts include initiatives to provide stipends for student teachers, shorten teacher preparation programs, offer scholarships to education majors, create programs for high school students interested in the profession, and more.

Talent Together’s goal is to provide employment in schools for teacher candidates so they can be paid while fulfilling student teaching requirements.

“The current model is when you go to a university, it’s theory, theory, theory, then practice,” during a concentrated internship period, Eric Hoppstock, superintendent of the Berrien County Regional Educational Service Agency, said during a press conference Tuesday. “We’re really promoting practice, theory, practice, theory, practice, theory” under the supervision of an experienced teacher.

That sort of path allows people to earn a living while working toward certification, said Kevin Oxley, superintendent of Jackson County Intermediate School District.

“We don’t want people to quit their lives and have to go back to school,” Oxley said. “They can’t do that, so we are going to meet people where they are and remove barriers so they can become certified.”

The program would be similar to On the Rise Academy, an alternative route program offered by Detroit Public Schools Community District that pays candidates to work in support staff roles while working toward certification. Nine other alternative route providers are approved in Michigan for teacher certification.

Talent Together expects to start enrolling students next September, but it still needs three things: funding, approval from the Michigan Department of Education, and responses to requests for proposals from universities that would provide the coursework.

Elizabeth Moje, dean of the University of Michigan School of Education, said she has been approached by Talent Together organizers and is still trying to learn more about their plans.

Talent Together could not say how much the program would cost. Organizers plan to apply for a share of $175 million the Legislature budgeted for grow-your-own programs that provide free tuition for school staff members enrolled in teacher preparation programs.

The length of the program would depend on each candidate’s background, said Jack Elsey, founder of the nonprofit Michigan Educator Workforce Initiative, which is helping design the program. It might take a year for someone who already has a bachelor’s degree in another field, for example, or several years for someone who enters without any degree, he said.

The idea for Talent Together came out of a meeting of seven regional superintendents in October. Since then, the consortium has grown to 39 of the state’s 57 regional educational service agencies, and more are expected to join. The agencies, also known as intermediate school districts, provide consolidated support to local districts. For example, they provide teacher training and coordinate early childhood, vocational, and special education programs for the districts they serve.

“Together, we are asking for the opportunity to be utilized differently,” said Kyle Mayer, superintendent of Ottawa Intermediate School District. “Imagine if Michigan, as a state, were to have an ISD hub that works in partnership with higher education and has resources to expedite the certification process for high-quality teachers.”

The group expects its program will produce hundreds of teachers over the next five years.

The Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, is still learning about Talent Together and hopes its members will be asked to shape the program.

“It’s important that any efforts include frontline educators at the table,” said MEA spokesman Thomas Morgan.

“We are willing to work with anyone who is committed to ending the educator shortage,” he added.

At least one local superintendent is grateful for the consortium’s work.

“Ypsilanti Community Schools is facing the teacher shortage crisis,” Superintendent Alena Zachery-Ross said.

“This is real for districts, urban and rural,” she said. “We’ve been creative. We’ve been doing our recruitment and retention strategies. Even though we can try to do this on our own, the solution is bigger than us at the local level.”

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan State condenses teacher preparation program from five years to four

2022-12-02T15:00:00+00:00

Michigan State University will shorten its teacher preparation program from five to four years, saving education majors $16,700 in tuition and awarding them a credential more quickly.

The change alleviates a financial burden on students and addresses an educator shortage by getting teachers in classrooms faster, said Tonya Bartell, MSU’s associate director of elementary programs.

Revamping the program is one of several efforts in Michigan to help produce more teachers, particularly in hard-hit areas such as math, special education, and world languages. The state and education officials also are providing alternative routes to certification, stipends for student teaching, scholarships, and more.

The program change takes full effect with students enrolling next fall.

MSU graduates about 300 certified teachers per year, more than any other university in the state, according to the Michigan Department of Education’s 2022 workforce data report.

The vast majority of teacher preparation programs are four years. MSU adopted a five-year model in the 1990s to provide a year of student teaching to build up students’ preparation and confidence to manage their own classrooms as first-year teachers.

“We recognized that having a five-year program put a financial burden on students who were going into a field that was not a high-paying field,” Bartell said in an interview Thursday. “We’re trying to continuously think about that balance between preparing high-quality beginning teachers and not having them bear too much of a cost in the process.”

That’s a consideration for Jecholiah Marriott, a senior at Detroit’s Cass Tech who plans to become a teacher. She already has been accepted to Michigan State and several other colleges. She isn’t yet sure where she’ll go.

She knew MSU was a five-year program when she applied. Now the condensed program makes the university even more appealing.

“College is extremely expensive, so the financials alone make it extremely easier and kind of like a weight lifted,” said Marriott, 17. But she also sees value in a full year of student teaching. “It’s a trade-off,” she said.

Under the revamped program, students will be able to earn 16 general education credits through education courses that cover required subjects through a teaching lens, Bartell said. That shift will free up credit hours for student teaching.

Requirements for student teaching will vary.

Elementary education majors will student teach for a full year. At least eight weeks will be full time. The rest of the time, they will student teach three days per week, leaving time for coursework or paid substitute teaching, Bartell said. Students also will spend time in schools earlier in their education — one half day per week as sophomores and two half days per week as juniors.

Secondary education majors will student teach one day per week during the fall semester of senior year and five days per week during the spring semester, said Kyle Greenwalt, associate director for teacher preparation.

That’s more than the 10 weeks the state requires for certification.

Student teaching time is important, said Jasmine Ramahi, who runs Educators Rising, a grow-your-own program for East Kentwood High School students who aim to become teachers.

“The thing that makes you the most confident taking over a classroom is your exposure of being in a classroom,” Ramahi said in a telephone interview. “So, as long as the program has a lot of clinical hours or field work hours, I think students will feel supported.”

She said the truncated program will be more accessible to students who are unable to afford the longer program.

“Student loan debt is a real concern for a lot of students, and an extra year of student loan debt is pretty hefty, so being able to minimize that as much as possible does create more equitable outcomes,” Ramahi said.

That was one of the goals, Bartell said.

“We are very much committed to diversifying the teaching workforce and we have a focus on justice and equity,” she said. “If we want to live up to those ideals we have to [serve more than] students who are privileged enough to go through the five-year model. That isn’t creating the workforce we want.”

Accessibility and inclusivity were at the forefront as College of Education leaders revamped the program’s timeline and curriculum, Greenwalt said.

“We wanted to identify and eliminate every barrier while maintaining the strength of our program,” he said.

A five-year program made sense in the 1990s when there was more interest in the field of teaching than jobs available, Greenwalt said, but times have changed. The restructured program is more responsive to current needs.

“Having that fifth year is a luxury,” he said. Graduates of the five-year program “probably entered their first year of teaching with more confidence than people who’ll do four years, but I think they’ll probably still be plenty good.”

Graduation requirements and state certification exams will ensure that, he said.

“We’re trying to balance needs here,” he said. “There are people who never even applied” because of the program length.

“When you have the imperative to increase the racial diversity of our teaching force, we can’t be creating these barriers,” he said.

Current freshmen and sophomores have the option of switching to the four-year model now.

“Some of our current juniors are a little upset because they felt like they had missed the boat, being right on the cusp,” Bartell said. “The tenor I get from them is, ‘We think it’s great you’re moving to four years. And, wow, I wish I could have.’”

Chalkbeat staff writer Ethan Bakuli contributed. Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

16 back-to-school stories with news you can use

2022-09-06T14:28:12+00:00

Hey, Michiganders (er, Michiganians)! It’s officially the first day of school in Michigan for districts and charters that didn’t get the OK from the state to start early. The back to school shopping is all done, all the supplies are in the backpacks, and the kids are back in the classroom. Now it’s time to turn our focus to news you’ll need to know heading into this 2022-23 school year.

Here, we’ve compiled some Chalkbeat stories with important information on some key issues, such as COVID safety protocols, test score performance, third-grade retention, chronic absenteeism, and staffing challenges.

Also, be sure to sign up for our newsletter here, and read more about our team here.

COVID safety protocols

Where Michigan school districts stand on COVID protocols

Masks are now optional for Detroit district students

Attendance/Chronic absenteeism

Detroit launches attendance initiatives as rising absenteeism threatens pandemic recovery

Detroit’s back-to-school enrollment efforts take on new urgency

Staffing vacancies

Michigan’s teacher shortage: What’s causing it, how serious is it, and what can be done?

Michigan programs provide route for second-career teachers. Are they rigorous enough?

Detroit school district moves closer to being fully staffed

Legislative action

5 policy changes affecting Michigan classrooms, cafeterias, and school buses

Betsy DeVos-backed school voucher-like initiative submits Michigan petitions

6 Michigan education proposals that lawmakers punted to the fall

COVID relief spending

COVID aid is a lifeline for financially troubled Michigan districts. Can they stay healthy?

Without state leadership, Michigan’s patchwork tutoring programs struggle to address learning loss

Gov. Whitmer proposes $280 million tutoring investment for Michigan

Michigan student test performance

Michigan test scores down sharply from pre-pandemic

Reading skills gap grows in Michigan

Detroit district students slide back on M-STEP tests as pandemic challenges linger

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan programs provide route for second-career teachers. Are they rigorous enough?

2022-08-12T20:30:49+00:00

Smitha Ramani leaned over a folding table to whisper encouragement to a student about to give a presentation on her summer school invention: a device that smashes pretend guns and transforms them into pretend cotton candy.

Ramani, a student teacher in the Michigan Alternative Route to Certification program, had been helping summer school students write presentations, create posters, and fill out mock patent applications.

“It’s very difficult for children to articulate what they want to say, so the best way to help them is to ask a lot of questions,” Ramani explained after the Parade of Inventions in the hallways of Willow Run Middle School in Washtenaw County last month.

Three weeks earlier, Ramani’s day looked much different. She was behind the pharmacy counter in a Livonia Rite Aid, juggling phone calls from doctors’ offices, answering patient questions about drug interactions, and filling prescriptions for azithromycin, Adderall and all sorts of other medications.

She’s giving up her career in pharmacy to do something she believes will be more rewarding: teaching.

Smitha Ramani is transitioning from a career in pharmacy to teaching through M-ARC.

Ramani is among 39 students in a new Initial Certification Pathway, an expansion of the Alternative Route to Certification program at the University of Michigan that previously prepared teachers only in the Detroit metropolitan area. The new pathway serves prospective teachers from all areas of the state. It’s one of a growing number of programs in Michigan to help people with bachelor’s degrees in other fields quickly become certified educators.

Alternative certification programs are becoming more common nationwide partly as a response to concerns about a potential teacher shortage. In Michigan, two new programs opened last year, bringing the total number of state-approved programs to 10.

The number of prospective educators enrolling in these programs is growing, too. There were 1,935 students enrolled in Michigan programs in 2019-20, according to the most recent data available. Five years earlier there were just 95 enrollees.

The programs provide expedited routes to certification, sometimes in as little as six weeks.

Program completion, along with passage of the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification, qualifies participants for interim teaching certificates, which carry the same rights and responsibilities as standard certificates. After three years, during which the teachers receive additional mentoring and professional development, they can be fully certified.

In the Michigan Alternative Route to Certification, known as M-ARC, candidates spend five months in online courses and two weeks student teaching under the watch of field instructors, who provide daily feedback.

That’s a fraction of the time required to complete a four-year education degree. At $9,000, it’s also a fraction of the cost.

“We’re opening access to teacher certification to people for whom a traditional pathway isn’t accessible, either for geographic reasons, for financial reasons, or for time reasons,” said Jean Mrachko, the M-ARC program’s associate director. “It allows people to be working in the field while they are completing the program. That really opens access.”

Alternative teacher certification programs have grown in recent years. Proponents view them as a way to mitigate difficulties principals have in hiring enough teachers.

Critics wonder if expedited programs shortchange teachers and the children they will later serve. They worry that such programs compromise standards and dilute teacher preparation curricula.

“Are they looking to make it easier and quicker to become a teacher?” asked Thomas Morgan, spokesman for the Michigan Education Association. “If that’s the case, it’s not rigorous enough. … We believe there needs to be a hill to climb to become a teacher.”

The National Council on Teacher Quality does, too.

“We should not be lowering the bar for getting into teaching right now,” said NCTQ President Heather Peske. “Given the data we’re seeing on learning loss during the pandemic, we need the most skilled, the most qualified, the most committed teachers entering schools right now.”

Proponents including state Superintendent Michael Rice see alternative route programs as a key part of the solution to the shortage of teachers plaguing many districts across the state as they work to make up for lost learning opportunities during the pandemic.

“I view it as responding to the moment,” Rice said. “If the question is whether we have a teacher that is certified through (an alternative route) or have Mikey from the curb teaching a child — a person who has no experience whatsoever and is simply an adult substituting in a classroom for a long period of time because there isn’t a math teacher, there isn’t a social studies teacher, there isn’t a science teacher — the teacher that is developed through an alternative route program or expedited program is going to be preferable.”

That’s not to say they are preferable to someone with a four-year teaching degree, he added.

“People have to have ways to break into the profession” that don’t require four years, Rice said. “There have to be multiple onramps to the profession based on multiple sets of experiences, competencies, and knowledge bases.”

Providers say their training programs are comprehensive.

“We are not sacrificing the quality of the preparation. We’re doing it on a different timeline and at a different price point,” Mrachko said.

She said students said course content is comparable to traditional education classes at the University of Michigan, but M-ARC participants are relieved from taking courses in content areas because they already have bachelor’s degrees and have demonstrated competency on Michigan Test for Teacher Certification subject-area tests. Many also have work experience in the fields they want to teach.

“There are benefits to doing four years of an education program and then becoming a teacher, but why would you think that people like me won’t be successful?” Ramani asked. “We are coming into the profession with not a lot of school experience but with other experiences, life lessons, and passion most of all.”

M-ARC administrators know Ramani and her classmates will need intensive ongoing support during the three years they will work under interim certificates.

“We don’t just drop them off at a school door and wish them luck,” Mrachko said. “We hold their hands and walk in beside them.”

Students undergo six classroom observations a year, continue to attend twice monthly M-ARC seminars, create teaching portfolios, and complete assignments that ask them to reflect on their teaching, Mrachko said. They also have experienced colleagues in their school buildings who serve as mentors.

Academics like Brent Maddin acknowledge the tension between resolving the teacher shortage and maintaining standards.

“It’s really complicated because at this moment in American history — world history — we need to ensure that all students have access to the best educators they’ve probably ever needed,” said Maddin, a professor and director of Next Education Workforce at Arizona State University.

Sarah DePriest, a student teacher in the University of Michigan’s Alternative Route to Certification program, works with summer school students at Washtenaw International High School and Middle Academy in Ypsilanti.

Sarah DePriest, 46, of Willis in Washtenaw County has felt that tension.

While working a part-time job in the office at Lincoln Consolidated School District near Ann Arbor, she saw how desperate administrators were to staff classrooms. So she pitched in as a long-term substitute teacher. She soon realized she could contribute more as a full-time teacher, but only if she could find a certification program that would prepare her quickly enough to help but also well enough for her to feel confident leading her own classroom.

M-ARC seemed to fit the bill, although she still wonders if two weeks of student teaching would have been enough if she hadn’t already had experience as a sub.

“It was a great experience, but it wasn’t like having your own class,” said DePriest, who previously worked in restaurant management and as associate director of a nonprofit humanitarian organization, MOST Ministries. “Being in a classroom is different than any job I’ve ever had.”

She and other M-ARC participants said they wish they’d had more practice teaching students, managing classrooms, and writing lesson plans. Even during their student teaching, practice was limited. They worked in teams of three or four with a certified teacher and a field instructor from the university who critiqued their teaching and offered suggestions for improvement.

Mark Smith had careers in sales, marketing, and mental health before enrolling in the University of Michigan’s Alternative Route to Certification program.

Critics of alternative route programs say students deserve teachers who’ve had more practice than that.

“I would absolutely acknowledge that as a valid point,” said M-ARC student Mark Smith, of Grand Rapids. “On the other hand, I have experienced so many different areas of life, that I have a lot more reference points to connect with students” than most traditionally prepared teachers, he said.

Before enrolling in M-ARC, he spent decades working in sales, finance, marketing, SAT tutoring, and most recently as a behavioral health technician in a mental health program for teens.

Classmate Edgar Watson, 53, of Ann Arbor, knew from a young age that he wanted to be a teacher like his father, but his dad and other teachers he knew dissuaded him. They said the job is stressful and not well paid.

So he stayed away from teaching. Instead he earned a degree in computer engineering and then took a series of jobs leading his church’s music ministry, photographing weddings, and working as a chemical operator in an ink plant.

When he learned that districts near him were struggling to staff schools after last year’s return to in-person learning, he signed up as a substitute. He spent his days following lesson plans other people had written, and doing his best to manage a different class of students at a different school every day.

“It got me thinking,” Watson said. “I said, ‘I wonder what would be different if I were the real teacher in this room? I wonder what the dynamic would be if I had access to the grades, and the parents, and the union for that matter — everything. What could I really do?’”

That’s what led him to M-ARC.

Edgar Watson grew up wanting to teach, but was dissuaded by people in the profession. He was drawn back as nearby schools struggled through staff shortages.

His classmates have worked in construction, food service, journalism, library science, and more. Eleven have master’s degrees and one is a step away from having a Ph.D. Their average age is 39.

“It’s courageous, what they’re doing, especially people who have previously been near the top of their field or have been in leadership positions,” Mrachko said. “To step back and be the new guy who doesn’t know as much as the (colleagues) who are much younger, it’s a potential challenge, and it’s humbling. It takes a particular mindset.

Ramani, 43 of Ann Arbor, said she and her M-ARC classmates have that mindset.

“We know what we’re getting into,” she said. “We’re getting into it because of a passion for the idea of inspiring someone — building the next generation of humans.”

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Short on teachers, Michigan schools try to grow their own

2022-05-25T14:00:00+00:00

Logan Welch, 18, sat in the back of a high school English class typing on his laptop, but he wasn’t taking notes on the poem like everyone else.

Instead, he recorded observations of the teacher, noting the way she quieted a disruptive boy, used sarcasm to relate to students, and engaged students by asking them to rank poems.

And he gained new perspective on what it might be like for him to be at the front of that classroom someday — as a teacher, with his own group of high school English students.

“When you’re in school it seems like teachers just give a lesson, but there’s so much that goes into it, so much thinking they have to do about different learning styles,” said Welch, a senior at East Kentwood High School in the suburbs of Grand Rapids.

Welch is one of 20 students in Educators Rising, a national program offered as an elective for high school juniors and seniors considering careers as teachers. The hope is that some of them go on to study education in college, then return to teach in East Kentwood.

State Superintendent Michael Rice sees such grow-your-own recruitment programs as an important part of his multi-pronged strategy to expand the teaching pool in Michigan. The state faces a teacher shortage at a most inopportune time: when students need more educational resources to catch up academically after two years of pandemic-related disruptions.

Although Michigan’s teaching force is larger than it was a decade ago, and the student population is smaller, administrators struggle to get fully certified teachers in classrooms where they’re most needed, especially in disciplines such as special education and world languages.

Another challenge: Diversifying the pool of future teachers so it’s more representative of the student population.

The grow-your-own strategy can help with that, too, Rice said in an interview Tuesday.

“Our student body is more diverse than our teaching staff, so not only does this help in terms of recruitment, it provides the opportunity to diversify the workforce as well,” he said.

Senior Rodnika Dickens, left, talks with Educators Rising teacher Jasmine Ramahi after returning from observing a freshman English class at East Kentwood High School. Dickens is among 20 students in a course for students exploring careers in education.

Helping students see themselves as teachers

Jasmine Ramahi has been teaching East Kentwood’s Educators Rising course for two years. She believes more people would enter the education field if they could picture themselves as teachers. Sometimes, she said, someone else has to see them that way first.

What makes a good teacher is not just about academic achievement, she said. “Teaching is about: Do you understand empathy? Do you like to be around people? Do you like to empower people?”

For senior Shawn White, the answers were yes, yes and yes.

Ramahi, who had been White’s Spanish teacher, saw promise in him. She encouraged him to sign up for the Educators Rising course.

“When she told me this class revolved around teaching, I didn’t really see myself in that field,” he said, adding: “I didn’t think I would have the nerve” to teach.

That was a year ago.

Two weeks ago, he was teaching a lesson about common grammar mistakes to a high school class of English language learners. It was the culmination of a year of observing other teachers and studying learning styles during Ramahi’s course.

Now White can envision himself leading class discussions, crafting lesson plans, and building relationships with students.

“This class opened another door, another opportunity,” White said. “Teaching is something I could see myself going into.”

As graduation approaches, White has been thinking a lot about the teachers he’s had over the years. Only one looked like him: male and Black.

That thought makes the idea of going into teaching — particularly at a diverse school like East Kentwood — feel even more impactful.

Senior Shawn White, foreground, tells classmates what he learned from observing a freshman English class. Behind him, left to right, Xander Schall, Olivia Martell, and Logan Welch listen. The students are in East Kentwood High School’s Educators Rising class for students considering teaching careers.

“Being able to see someone like me, the students might get a deeper connection,” White said. “If they have that trust, if they have that relationship, it motivates them to learn more and really enjoy the class.”

Equity, diversity, and representation are topics that come up often in Ramahi’s class.

“We talk very openly about the need for our teaching staff to look like our hallways,” Ramahi said. “We talk about the power it has to have students who look like you.”

Statewide, 17.7% of students are Black, but only 6.6% of teachers.

Rice, the state superintendent, wants to do better.

Programs like Educators Rising could help. Nationally, 52% of students in Educators Rising courses are people of color.

The growth of Educators Rising

The grow-your-own concept isn’t new, but programs have proliferated over the last few years as a response to the teacher shortage.

Eighty-five years ago, Future Teachers of America chapters began cropping up in high schools to help inspire promising students to become teachers. The group morphed into the Future Educators Association in 1994 when the professional organization Phi Delta Kappa International took it over from the National Education Association.

Seven years ago, Phi Delta Kappa relaunched the program under the name Educators Rising. Seventeen schools used the curriculum that first year. Now, 11,180 high schools across the country use it. Thirty-one of them, including East Kentwood, are in Michigan.

Participating districts pay $6,500 for each classroom using the curriculum.

In addition to the classroom observations, the curriculum includes lessons on professionalism, bias and equity, small group instruction, classroom management, lesson sequencing, culturally responsive teaching, and assessing learning.

About half of Educators Rising’s students have always had teaching on their minds — the kinds of kid s who used to line up their stuffed animals and play school, said Joshua Starr, executive director of Phi Delta Kappa and former superintendent in Maryland and Connecticut. The other half are teenagers who didn’t consider the profession until they learned their school was offering a course on it.

So far, 103,000 students have completed Educators Rising courses. It’s unclear how many of them enrolled in college education programs or have become certified teachers. Starr said it has been difficult to track students once they’ve graduated high school, but Phi Delta Kappa is hoping to work with states to collect data.

Sixty percent of teachers already end up working within 20 miles of where they went to high school, according to Educators Rising.

Starr urges districts to reaffirm the grow-your-own philosophy by guaranteeing jobs to their Educators Rising students who become certified teachers. “We’d like to have signing days with graduates signing letters of intent to come back,” he said.

His organization also is working to connect graduates of the program once they arrive on college campuses. About three dozen chapters of Educators Rising Collegiate have cropped up in the last year as student organizations, Starr said.

“We offer some programming and support, but it’s really student-driven,” he said. “It started because our kids actually asked us after they graduated. They said, ‘Hey, we’re in college now, and we’d love to network.’”

Other grow-your-own programs take root in Michigan

The Michigan Department of Education last year awarded $10,000 grants to help 44 schools develop opportunities for students to explore careers in education.

And more support could be coming.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s budget recommendation included $150 million to support district grow-your-own programs for support staff who want to become teachers. The House budget proposal added $74 million and added eligibility for programs aimed at high school students. The final budget is subject to negotiations between Whitmer and legislative leaders.

Separately, state Rep. Sarah Anthony, a Lansing Democrat, has introduced legislation that would require the MDE to develop or adopt a model “teacher cadet” program that districts could choose to offer to students.

Many schools already are using other curricula or developing their own.

Educators Rising teacher Jasmine Ramahi, right, talks with students KeAvion Buggs, Rodika Dickens, and Abigail Best, left to right. The students, all seniors at East Kentwood High School, are exploring careers in education.

This fall, Detroit Public Schools Community District will launch its Rise to Teach initiative to encourage students to pursue careers in education. The district plans to develop the initiative into a formal pathway to teacher preparation programs. Rise to Teach students who go on to become certified teachers will be guaranteed jobs in the district, said Assistant Superintendent Ben Jackson.

Wyoming High School near Grand Rapids started offering an exploratory class this school year to 17 students who expressed an interest in teaching.

And Charlevoix-Emmet Intermediate School District plans to launch its Future Educator Academy in September. Teacher Erin Luckhardt’s goal is to help students in Charlevoix and Emmet counties determine early on whether the educator profession is a fit for them, to provide them opportunities to observe high-quality teachers in their own districts, and to encourage those who go on to receive education degrees to return to teach in the area.

Luckhardt is working with districts within the ISD to guarantee job interviews for students who take her class and go on to become certified teachers.

Not all graduates of the program will wind up pursuing teaching, and that’s OK with Luckhardt.

Starr agreed.

“The ideal is that every student who goes through the program is inspired and says, ‘Yes, I’m going to be an educator,’ but the reality is some of them will say this isn’t for them,” he said.

The curriculum is designed to give prospective teachers an idea of what the profession would be like — “warts and all” — Starr said. “We try to make sure their eyes are wide open.”

In East Kentwood and Wyoming high schools, that has meant frank classroom discussions and opportunities to interact with guest speakers who include experienced teachers, principals and superintendents.

East Kentwood High School senior Lisa Ha, center, talks with freshman Tyson Johnson while observing a special education class. Ha is a student in Educators Rising, a class for juniors and seniors exploring teaching careers.

What students noticed when they observed teachers

But a big part of the curriculum is delivered through observation.

One afternoon in April, each of Ramahi’s 20 prospective teachers observed a different freshman class. They took note of the way teachers managed behavior, built relationships, developed lessons that incorporated different cultures, and used alternative instructional methods to reach students with different learning styles.

Welch visited a class tasked with identifying imagery in slam poet George Masao Yamazawa’s piece about growing up as a child of immigrants. Students worked at their desks while their teacher, Jessica Baker, circulated and spoke with them individually.

Welch zeroed in on one such interaction.

“There was a student who kept interrupting and giving answers that were obvious,” Welch recalled. “Instead of telling him to be quiet, she acknowledged him and then moved on.”

It worked, Welch said, because the teacher had already established a rapport with the student earlier in the school year. That’s something he might not have realized before taking Educators Rising, he said.

“I see now that there’s so much that goes into being a teacher and just how heavy the responsibility is for teachers,” he said. “My eyes have definitely been opened to that.”

Another student, Lisa Ha, who is considering a career in special education, visited a class of students who have developmental disabilities. She held freshman Tyson Johnson’s hand to reassure him during an occupational skills activity.

In the band room, Abigail Best noticed how a music teacher sat next to students to be at eye level during one-on-one conversations.

Rodnika Dickens observed an English class full of well behaved freshmen reading at their desks while quiet nature sounds played on a speaker in the background. She attributed their behavior to classroom management skills.

“It wasn’t like the teacher was strict, but they knew when they came in the classroom what they were supposed to do,” Dickens said the next day in a small group discussion with Educators Rising classmates. “They knew the routine.”

Ramahi said her class’s learning objectives are so closely aligned with introductory college education courses that some universities in Michigan are considering granting college credit for the East Kentwood course.

Senior Logan Welch observes a freshman English class at East Kentwood High School. Welch, who hopes to become a high school teacher, is one of 20 students in the school’s Educators Rising course.

Most of the students in her program still haven’t decided for sure what their majors will be, but Welch has made up his mind.

He’s headed to Michigan State University to begin training to be a high school English teacher.

Educators Rising has prepared him well, he said.

“I’m glad for this class,” Welch said, adding: “There aren’t always a lot of classes where you actually get to do something that you’re passionate about and that could help you in the future.”

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan’s teacher shortage: What’s causing it, how serious is it, and what can be done?

2022-05-13T12:00:00+00:00

At a state school board meeting earlier this year, a Muskegon teacher told a story that underscored why education leaders, lawmakers, and the governor are pushing hard to address Michigan’s teacher shortage problem.

Danielle Groendyk, an English language arts teacher at Oakridge High School who is in her third year of teaching, told members of the Michigan Board of Education that when she graduated from a teacher prep program just a few years ago, she was part of a cohort of 10 people.

Today, only three of them are teaching.

Others left, “to pursue careers in other fields where they’re better compensated for positions that have a better work-life balance,” Groendyk told board members in March.

There are many more stories like this across Michigan.

Beginning long before the pandemic started, school administrators have struggled to hire and retain teachers, for a vast number of reasons. The number of people entering teacher preparation programs, which was slightly up over the last two years for which data is available, is still well below levels from a decade ago. Teacher turnover is high. Morale is low. And retirements are up.

There’s a lot at stake for Michigan schools, and there are signs the shortage could get even worse. Shortages used to be largely focused on areas such as math and science, but state officials say they’re now seeing shortages in areas that used to be flush with applicants, such as elementary school and social studies. Meanwhile, the bulk of Michigan’s teaching workforce is over the age of 40, meaning retirements could drive up job openings.

The pandemic, which has upended education since 2020, has worsened years of poor academic outcomes for Michigan students, and brought renewed attention to the social and emotional needs of students that have made learning more difficult and increased the demands on teachers.

“The challenges of being an educator these days are different than they were 10 or 15 years ago,” Michael Behrmann, superintendent of the Harbor Springs Public Schools district, said in an interview. “Students bring more complexities to the school and more issues than ever before.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and lawmakers are searching for solutions. State Superintendent Michael Rice has urged the state to invest as much as $500 million in strategies to address shortages. And the state board of education has taken a particular interest in the issue, discussing it at nearly every meeting in the last six months.

How bad is Michigan’s teacher shortage?

The number of public K-12 teachers has grown by 2% over the last decade while the student population has shrunk 9%, state data shows.

But those numbers don’t tell the whole story about the difficulties districts are having filling teaching positions.

The statistics are more nuanced than they appear, said Leah Breen, director of the Michigan Department of Education’s Office of Educator Excellence.

For example, the numbers don’t differentiate between certified educators and uncertified substitutes working under full-year temporary permits, and they don’t account for difficulties in hiring for specific positions such as special education, or in remote districts that have more trouble attracting candidates.

Just ask superintendents like Alan Tulppo of Gogebic-Ontonagon Intermediate School District in the westernmost part of the Upper Peninsula. It’s been harder than ever to hire there, he told the state Board of Education during a November meeting. Principals have had to rely on their last-resort solution, hiring uncertified educators who have temporary waivers, he said.

Even districts that used to get a lot of applications are having trouble finding teachers now.

“Fifteen years ago we’d get hundreds of applications for an elementary position,” Behrmann said. “Now we’re lucky if we get three or four.”

Administrators often find themselves hiring from neighboring districts, creating new problems in other places. That’s what Superintendent Chuck North did when a few openings cropped up in the middle of this school year in Reading Community Schools just north of the Ohio border.

“There are no new teacher candidates out there,” North said. “School districts basically have to try to steal from each other.”

Craig Thiel, director of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a public affairs research group, said he doesn’t perceive a statewide crisis the way Rice and other state officials do. But he acknowledged that shortages represent a pressing problem for many communities.

“Any time a student is sitting in front of a teacher that doesn’t have the credential to teach the class, that’s concerning,” Thiel said. “And if that’s happening more often, it is a growing concern that requires public attention.”

Nationwide, there were 386,000 teacher vacancies in February 2022, according to the latest data available from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. A decade earlier there were 108,000 openings.

The bureau doesn’t report vacancies by state, and Michigan doesn’t track them in real time. Breen said the department follows state law, which requires it to collect personnel data from school districts twice a year.

Researchers at the Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative, known as EPIC, say that’s too infrequent to capture rapidly changing conditions within districts. They also say the data isn’t detailed enough to be useful. They recommend a new law requiring more frequent reporting of data that captures new hires, terminations, reassignments, job openings, and start and end dates of each vacancy.

Other researchers find the data lacking, too.

“We did a report to try to suss this out in 2019,” Thiel said, and the main finding was that in Michigan, “we’re doing a very bad job of trying to get our arms around the nature of this problem. If there’s a problem, what are the nuances of it?”

What is causing Michigan’s teacher shortage problems?

For many Michigan districts, a teacher shortage crisis has been brewing for years, beginning with the Great Recession of 2008-09, which left many schools reeling financially and caused widespread job uncertainty for staff. It continued as lawmakers enacted laws unpopular with educators that made it easier for school districts to fire teachers, weakened teacher tenure laws, and made test scores an important part of teacher evaluations.

Meanwhile, fewer people were choosing the profession to begin with. Suddenly Michigan, which used to be a state that overproduced teachers, was seeing big holes in its pipeline. In 2014-15, there were 14,749 people enrolled in teacher preparation programs. In 2018-19, the latest year the data is available, the number was 10,168.

Although average teacher salaries in Michigan are around $64,000 a year, the pay for new teachers is low. Beginning teachers average $37,320 annually, according to the Michigan Education Association. It can take years for a new teacher to reach the top of the pay scale, and those who have in-demand skills in areas such as math and science can command much higher salaries in the private sector.

Factor in an aging workforce — 62% of teachers in Michigan are over age 40 — and the challenges become more clear.

The pandemic has only exacerbated this problem. Teachers are working longer hours, often filling in for colleagues who’ve become ill with COVID. Online teaching has been difficult, as have the challenges of dealing with learning loss, mental health concerns, and inconsistent modes of learning over the years. Some teachers have had enough and are considering leaving the profession.

“Teachers are exhausted,” Leah Porter, a Holt teacher who was named Michigan’s Teacher of the Year in 2021, said during a recent meeting of the Michigan Board of Education. “The stakes have never been higher on teachers, and they feel that pressure. They are just burned out beyond belief.”

The pandemic has often put teachers on the front lines of conflicts over whether schools should be in person or remote. A raging debate about curriculum, including how topics such as Black history and racism are taught, hasn’t helped.

The MEA, the state’s largest teacher’s union with affiliates across Michigan, earlier this year released the results of a survey that show 1 in 5 Michigan teachers who responded expect to change careers in the next two to three years, while 14% said they plan to retire. That doesn’t mean they’ll all leave, and national data show that similar survey responses haven’t resulted in a huge exodus, but it is concerning for local and state education officials.

Where is the shortage worst?

It’s difficult for researchers to say which districts are struggling the most to hire teachers. The answer isn’t captured clearly in the data the state collects, said Katharine Strunk, director of the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative at Michigan State University.

Districts in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula, for example, have the highest ratio of teachers to students. Yet teachers in those districts are the least likely to have permanent certificates in the grade or subject they are teaching.

Turnover is highest in urban districts with the highest poverty and the most Black students, according to EPIC. That means some of the state’s most disadvantaged students have the least experienced teachers. A Chalkbeat analysis last year shed light on the disproportionate effect of teacher turnover on students of color and students from low-income families.

“This kind of teacher churn can have substantial deleterious effects on students, and on schools’ and districts’ abilities to operate effectively and efficiently,” EPIC researchers said in a 2021 report.

How have the shortage areas changed?

Michigan, like many other states, has long had trouble finding enough teachers certified to teach special education, math, world languages, the sciences, English as a second language, and career and technical education courses.

Recently, hiring difficulties reached elementary schools, where principals at one time had their pick of hundreds of applicants for each open position. In 2018, elementary teachers appeared on the U.S. Department of Education’s critical shortage area list for Michigan.

That’s startling in a state that once produced so many teachers that the State Board of Education in 2005 stopped authorizing new college and university teacher preparation programs.

There are currently 26 disciplines on Michigan’s critical shortage list, twice as many as a decade ago. Recently added disciplines include physical education, art, music, elementary education, language arts, psychology, and social studies.

How does the struggle to hire qualified teachers affect students?

Students are in larger classes and are sometimes being taught by uncertified long-term substitutes or educators teaching outside the grade levels and subject areas they trained for. Other students are being taught by educators who are stressed from the burden of covering for absent colleagues because of a troubling shortage of substitute teachers, Breen said.

Despite staffing challenges, most Michigan schools are finding ways to still offer electives and advanced courses, Breen said. Doing that sometimes requires assigning teachers who don’t feel prepared to teach in those content areas or who haven’t taught those courses in 12 or more years, Breen said.

Will there be money in next year’s state school aid budget to help?

The governor, House and Senate agree there’s a problem, but they have vastly different ideas for how to address it and how much to spend on it. They have until July 1 — when school districts’ fiscal years begin — to hammer out the differences in their disparate spending plans.

Whitmer’s plan is the most expensive, most complicated, and most controversial.

Her proposed budget calls for $1.5 billion to cover bonuses for teachers who remain in their districts or transfer to high-poverty schools. The bonuses would gradually increase from $2,000 to $4,000 over four school years.

Teachers unions support the plan, but government watchdogs like Thiel say the bonuses should be more targeted.

“Rather than sprinkle the infield, maybe we should provide greater retention bonuses to those who are in special education classrooms or middle school science classrooms,” Thiel said. “If these are the classrooms where we’re having a problem with retention, where we’re seeing teachers leaving, let’s tailor the retention bonuses to those classrooms and those districts.”

Whitmer also wants to invest $150 million in scholarships, tuition reimbursement, and mentorship programs for new teachers.

Teacher recruitment and retention are a much lower priority for Michigan senators who budgeted just $25 million for it in the spending plan they passed last week. That money would be used to provide scholarships to student teachers.

House lawmakers want to invest much more. They budgeted $529 million for recruitment and retention efforts including scholarships, compensation for student teachers, and support for programs that offer pathways for school support staff and high school students to become educators.

That’s in line with what Rice, the state superintendent, has said it will cost to alleviate the state’s teacher hiring problem. He has been calling for a variety of changes including raising teacher pay, forgiving teachers’ student loans, paying child care costs for parents enrolled in education programs, and providing stipends to defray student teachers’ living costs.

Won’t federal COVID relief money help?

Michigan schools received a $6 billion windfall as part of the federal government’s COVID relief package. Districts are using it for tutoring programs, summer school, computers, ventilation systems, and much more.

Superintendents are reluctant to use it to hire staff because they would have to maintain the salaries for new hires after the three years of federal COVID money runs out.

What is the Michigan Department of Education doing to mitigate the problem?

Last summer, the MDE launched the Welcome Back Proud Michigan Educators Campaign to help former teachers with lapsed credentials return to the profession. The program also provides the necessary professional development to open pathways to Michigan education majors who completed their programs but never became teachers.

Last year, Rice approved new alternative-route teacher certification programs created by New Paradigm for Education, a charter school network, and the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Alternative-route programs are an important part of the solution but not a replacement for college and university programs, Breen said. Alternative-route candidates need to already have bachelor’s degrees before they enroll, she said. Much of the recent growth in enrollment in teacher preparation programs was fueled by alternative programs.

Rice is also using his bully pulpit to encourage local school districts to boost teacher salaries, and to press the Legislature to fund recruitment strategies and — especially — retention efforts such as Whitmer’s proposed bonuses.

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. Reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Uncertified education majors could soon teach in Michigan

2022-02-01T23:14:07+00:00

Uncertified college students soon could find themselves leading Michigan classrooms and in charge of students’ academic progress for a full year.

The state House Education Committee is considering a bill allowing districts to hire not-yet-certified education majors as paid teachers with their own classrooms for up to one year. The bill aims to alleviate a severe teaching shortage that has crippled schools in Michigan and across the country, but some say it could do more harm than good.

“This is not a reasonable solution,” said Gail Richmond, director of teacher preparation programs at Michigan State University. “As a parent, I want to know that the teacher of my children has been through a program that has a particular set of expectations, offers a certain set of learning opportunities, and has a set of standards that they’ve met,” she said.

Education majors need that kind of structure too, Richmond said, calling the legislation a “lose-lose situation.”

Bill Sponsor Pamela Hornberger, who leads the committee, said her legislation provides one more tool in a toolbox that now also includes legislative authority for bus drivers, library aides, and other support staff to substitute teach with only a high school diploma. She acknowledged that hiring education majors may not work for every district, and it would be optional.

“We’re at the point where we’re voting to put anyone with a pulse and breathing in a classroom to sub,” the Chester Township Republican said during a committee hearing Tuesday. “We need to do something.”

The bill does not specify how far along students must be in teacher preparation programs to participate, but during testimony Tuesday Hornberger suggested that they would have had at least some teaching experience during their college coursework.

The Michigan Department of Education opposes the bill. Department spokesman Martin Ackley would not elaborate.

Rep. Lori Stone, a Democrat and former Macomb County teacher, said she feels “some hesitancy” about college students leading a classroom without real-time support and feedback from a certified teacher. Still, she said, the legislation could alleviate financial hardships for education majors, whose student teaching assignments are usually unpaid.

Hornberger said teacher preparation programs could restructure their programs to ensure education majors are prepared sooner to lead their own classrooms, and districts could establish mentorship programs to guide them.

None of that is specified in the bill, and that’s a problem, Richmond said in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon.

“I can imagine some version of this might work if it were carefully crafted, carefully designed, carefully assessed, and carefully overseen, but not if it doesn’t identify the kinds of necessary and powerful supports that developing educators need,” she said. That should include regular real-time feedback, co-teaching experiences, and day-to-day support of an experienced mentor, Richmond said, describing the support students typically receive during unpaid student teaching assignments.

Hornberger said during the hearing that she’s open to amending the legislation. If districts and universities work together, they can craft a model that provides good experience to student teachers while solving local teacher shortages for districts in crisis, she said. Universities might have to restructure their model for how student teaching is delivered, she said.

From South Carolina to Colorado, school systems are increasingly relying on uncertified instructors.

Petoskey Superintendent Chris Parker said he wouldn’t choose to have education majors act as teachers in his district, but said it could be an option for districts with a more severe teacher shortage.

“It’s nice to see the Legislature trying to help solve the current crisis,” he said, but “would you want a surgeon taking out your appendix who’s on a temporary certification but has binge watched the ‘ER’ television series and took a couple biology classes?’

Rep. Darrin Camilleri, Democrat from Brownstown Township, said the legislation could be impactful.

“This is a much bigger step than filling a teacher shortage. It’s re-evaluating what the concept of teacher education is,” Camilleri said.

The legislation could add administrative costs for the Michigan Department of Education, according to a House fiscal analysis. Those costs would likely be absorbed using existing staff, analysts said.

Education advocate Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future, said it isn’t ideal to have uncertified instructors in charge of classrooms, but it’s a reasonable option during a severe teacher shortage. Michigan Future is a nonpartisan think tank focused on education’s role in bolstering the economy.

“There’s more demand for teachers than there is supply. There’s a real problem, and given this environment, we’re going to have to find alternatives,” Glazer said. He said a student in an education school program “sure seems a hell of a lot better” than a bus driver without any college credits.

State Superintendent Michael Rice has proposed a menu of other options to alleviate the teacher shortage. So far, the Legislature hasn’t considered them. They could cost between $300 million and $500 million over five years, he told lawmakers in a November letter.

Rice’s proposals include offering scholarships to education majors, extending loan forgiveness to current teachers, and better mentoring of new educators. He also wants support to ease restrictions on accepting teacher licenses from other states, to create grow-your-own programs that train support staff to become teachers, and to revive teacher preparation programs in the Upper Peninsula and lower Northern Peninsula.

Bridge Michigan staff writer Isabel Lohman contributed.

Michigan bill would reduce qualifications needed for some to substitute teach

2021-12-13T22:16:04+00:00

Secretaries, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers soon could teach classes in Michigan K-12 schools even if they don’t have a single college credit.

The state Senate is considering a bill temporarily allowing school support staff to substitute teach as long as they graduated high school or have equivalency certificates. That’s a switch from the current policy that requires an associate degree, 60 college credits, or, in the case of career and technical courses, subject-matter expertise. Substitute teachers who are not staff members would still have to meet those requirements.

The legislation passed the House in July on partisan voting lines and could come to a vote Tuesday in the Senate Committee on Education and Career Readiness. The state Department of Education opposes the legislation, spokesman Bill DiSessa said. A spokesman for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer did not respond to a question about whether she would sign the legislation if it passes.

Sponsored by Republican state Reps. Brad Paquette of Niles and John Damoose of Harbor Springs, the effort is meant to alleviate pandemic-related strain on school districts through the end of this school year.

Districts have long struggled to find enough substitute teachers, but the problem worsened during the pandemic when many teachers retired and those who remain are sometimes forced to quarantine because of coronavirus exposure. The nationwide problem has forced temporary school closures and prompted pay hikes to attract substitutes. Before the pandemic, substitute teachers in Michigan were typically paid $80 to $85 a day but some districts are now offering much more.

“What I think is most important for someone in the classroom is to know the kid’s name, to know the school, to care about the school, and have a reputation in the community,” Paquette testified last week before the Senate committee. “Staff who are already in the school system have already proven that they care about kids. They want to be around kids, and they have that passion for kids.”

Sen. Dayna Polehanki, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said the proposal might help the substitute shortage but would put pressure on other understaffed areas such as cafeterias, transportation departments, and paraprofessional staff that help students with disabilities.

“You’re just kind of playing musical chairs with critical school system employees. I’m wondering if that’s even workable,” said Polehanki of Livonia.

Currently, Whitehall District Schools typically needs six to eight substitutes per day but usually has only two to four available, Superintendent Jerry McDowell said. When there aren’t enough, principals, guidance counselors and other certified educators usually rotate in and out of a classroom throughout the day, magnifying the disruption and inhibiting consistency for children in the 2,000-student district north of Muskegon.

Several bus drivers and library assistants are willing to step in if the Legislature allows, McDowell said in a telephone interview.

“They’ve spent most of their lives working for Whitehall District Schools’ children and staff members,” he said. “They already have a relationship with them. They know our emergency routines, they know how to respond if things go a little astray, and they know the principal and school secretary by first name.”

Sen. Erica Geiss, a Taylor Democrat, agrees it makes sense to hire substitutes that already have a rapport with students and a knowledge of the school but has concerns about the quality of education they might provide.

“Is this envisioned as being basically babysitting or child-sitting for a class of 30 or 36 students when the focus is really supposed to be doing the education that we as parents send our kids to school to receive?” she asked.

“My concern is that we’ve already had a year of learning loss for a variety of reasons related to the pandemic,” said Geiss, who is a former educator. “Yes, we need to shore up the holes in our substitute teaching force, but how are we ensuring that the students are getting the information they need in order to continue moving forward in their various classes and coursework?”

Paquette, a former public school educator, said the quality would depend more on the classroom teacher’s preparation than on whether the substitute had college coursework.

It’s mostly a matter of “how much the teacher is willing to put in for their sub plans to make learning happen that day,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, but it comes down to how much that teacher is going to be invested, and how much they know that substitute teacher and what they’re capable of.”

There’s nothing to stop principals from choosing substitutes who have more education than the bill requires, Paquette said. “If they have an option of choosing someone better, that’s something they’re going to do,” he said.

Education advocacy groups are divided over the legislation.

It’s not ideal, but it’s a solution that can be implemented quickly, testified Chris Glass of the Education Associates of West Michigan, which represents 43 school districts.

School employees in non-teaching positions see the strain on educators who are giving up preparatory periods or taking on additional students to cover for co-workers’ absences, Glass said. They want to help alleviate it, and this bill will help, he said.

Other proponents of the bill include other Michigan Association of Superintendents and Administrators and the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, a charter school advocacy group.

“We desperately need a solution — an immediate one — to the challenges that we are facing,” Glass told the Senate committee last week.

Opponents — including the state’s largest teachers’ unions— agree on that, but they say they don’t want unqualified people teaching students.

The Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals opposes the legislation and has a plan of its own to help when teachers are quarantined at home. The association wants the state to allow adults who are not certified teachers to manage classroom behavior while the quarantined classroom teacher provides remote instruction from home.

“Such an arrangement would provide much-needed relief. It would also clearly differentiate between someone who’s leading instruction and someone who is just facilitating the classroom environment,” said Bob Kefgen, the association’s lobbyist.

Geiss weighed the urgent need for substitutes against the need for higher quality instruction by substitutes with college experience. She bristled when Paquette, a former public school teacher, called the 60-credit requirement arbitrary and unnecessary.

“We need to figure out a way to ensure we are addressing this critical need but also not sacrificing our kids’ education at the same time,” Geiss said.

Michigan superintendent pushes reforms to get more teachers in classrooms

2021-11-09T22:21:02+00:00

James Rautiola, an Upper Peninsula superintendent, has lost a lot of sleep stressing about how he would get certified teachers to lead classrooms in the Copper Country Intermediate School District.

“We’re not the only industry suffering with trying to find employees, but we have a great opportunity in front of us to make it right for kids,” he told the Michigan Board of Education at a meeting Tuesday. “The time is right for us to explore some options.”

State superintendent Michael Rice has some ideas to mitigate the state’s teacher shortage. He presented them to the board Tuesday, saying it could take a state investment of $300 million to $500 million over the next five years to effectively address the problem. That’s a fraction of the $17.1 billion annually the state currently spends on schools.

“The fact of the matter is that this is a major issue across the state,” Rice said.

Numerous districts have temporarily closed schools or shifted them to remote learning because of teacher shortages exacerbated by faculty illnesses and quarantines.

And the problem isn’t just in Michigan.

Unprecedented teacher shortages throughout the country have resulted in students learning in larger classes, from teachers who aren’t always certified, or without the extra help districts had hoped to provide to help children catch up from last year’s learning losses.

Increasing teacher pay, especially for entry-level educators, is a major part of the solution, Rice said. Some beginning teachers in Michigan earn less than $40,000 a year, he said, and colleges have seen a large decline in students who want to enter the teaching profession.

“I’m going to keep beating this drum. We need to boost teacher compensation, and we need to particularly do it with early career teachers,” he said.

He offered the state board Tuesday a menu of other mitigation options, many of which would require legislative action and funding. They include:

Offering tuition reimbursement for college students in education programs.
Forgiving current teachers’ student loans.
Awarding scholarships to promising high school seniors entering teacher training programs.
Reviving teacher preparation programs in colleges in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula
Easing restrictions on accepting teacher licenses from other states.
Simplifying the employment pathway for people who graduated from teacher preparation programs but did not complete all requirements for certification.
Expanding eligibility for child care reimbursement for students enrolled in teacher preparatory programs.
Providing tuition reimbursement for teachers who complete reading courses required for a professional teaching certificate.
Offering stipends to defray living costs during student teaching.
Funding district efforts to recruit and retain teachers.

“We need to look at teacher supply. We need to look at quantity, quality, and diversity. They are all important,” Rice said.

He cautioned districts against relying too heavily on the recent infusion of federal COVID relief dollars because that money will run out in three years.

“We do have an opportunity with new funding but we have to be very, very careful with that funding,” he said. “You ought to be very, very careful not to put recurring expenditures on nonrecurring revenue.”

Existing “grow-your-own” programs that help members of school support staff become certified teachers are helping on all three fronts, Rice said. So are efforts to encourage high school students to enter the profession, he said.

Both the K-12 student population and the support staff ranks are more diverse than the state’s teaching pool.

“To actively inspire, interest, engage, and recruit from these two groups is to work not simply on quantity and quality, but also on diversity,” Rice said.

A number of factors contributed to increases in teacher vacancies during the pandemic. Some educators burned out from the increased pressure of moving between remote and in-person teaching. Others left because they were afraid of contracting COVID in their schools or because they didn’t want to comply with staff vaccination policies some states have adopted.

No matter the cause, the problem has left districts with more vacancies than ever.

Rice didn’t quantify the vacancies and Michigan Department of Education spokesperson Martin Ackley said the department doesn’t collect that data.

District administrators say they are filling the gaps by increasing class size, bringing in substitutes, shifting staff to classes they may not have the subject-matter expertise to teach, and hiring job candidates they might not have hired before.

The problem is urgent, said Michigan Teacher of the Year Leah Porter.

“The stakes have never been higher on teachers, and they feel that pressure. They are just burned out beyond belief,” said Porter, who teaches third grade at Wilcox Elementary School in Ingham County’s Holt School District. “If we’re not changing some of these things quickly, we’re going to continue to see teachers leaving the profession.”

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the estimated cost of the proposed initiatives.

Amid high teacher turnover in Michigan, audit finds failings in teacher support systems

2021-04-01T21:21:21+00:00

Key policies designed to support Michigan teachers aren’t being adequately enforced, according to a recent audit by the state’s Office of the Auditor General.

Districts spotlighted in the audit couldn’t prove that new teachers had been assigned mentors or that teachers’ annual evaluations were based on a classroom visit — both of which are legal requirements.

Michigan is grappling with high rates of teacher turnover, especially in low-income communities. Some experts predict a mass exodus from teaching after a grueling pandemic year. In a recent report, Chalkbeat used a trove of state data to document the toll that teacher departures take on student learning. But the audit, published last week, calls into question whether existing policies designed to retain teachers are being adequately enforced.

“If the laws and the rules are all set up, but no one is checking to see if the rules are being followed, how can [the state] achieve its goal of retaining teachers?” said Craig Thiel, research director for the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan think tank that has reported on problems in the state’s teacher workforce.

Auditors surveyed thousands of teachers and examined records from randomly selected school districts from the 2015-16 through 2017-18 school years. They found:

Fewer than half of school districts in the sample were able to document that they provided teachers with all required training. Many couldn’t document that mentors were assigned to new teachers, a legal requirement.
Thirteen of 20 districts in the sample were unable to document that all of their teacher evaluations were based in part on a classroom observation, a legal requirement.
Nearly 40% of a random sample of 114 teachers couldn’t document the training they claimed to receive for teaching certificate renewals.

The Michigan Department of Education agreed with the audit findings. In a response, department officials said they hadn’t had enough staff to provide the required oversight.

“We have a teacher retention problem here in Michigan and the kinds of things that are touched on in this audit are key strategies to improving teacher retention,” said Leah Breen, director of the Office of Educator Excellence, an arm of the state’s education department that is responsible for overseeing and supporting teachers in Michigan.

Breen said the department will offer new guidance to districts on requirements around teacher certification, evaluation, and mentorship.

And, in a further response to the audit, the department will conduct its own audits of districts’ handling of those issues beginning this fall. Breen said her staff will have to cut back in other areas to complete the audits, but said that it’s not clear yet what those areas will be.

Breen said that the discrepancies uncovered by the audit weren’t just a matter of missing paperwork. In some cases, she said, teachers were not being given the help that the law guarantees them.

“I think it’s probably both, she said. “There are definitely instances where mentors are not being assigned.”

Breen pointed out that the state does not provide funding to school districts to pay teachers for the additional work of mentoring new teachers.

Oversight of the teaching profession in Michigan has fluctuated over the last decade. An audit in 2011-2012 found similar problems to the new one, prompting the state to increase its enforcement of teacher support laws. A few years later, another audit found that districts were doing much better at documenting teacher training and mentorship. At that point, the department of education stopped auditing districts on this subject, and compliance fell off again.

Rep. Regina Weiss, a Democrat from Oak Park who was formerly a high school social studies teacher in Detroit, said she did not recall being assigned a mentor when she entered the classroom for the first time in 2011, as required by law.

She added that the state’s teacher training system, in particular, can be burdensome to teachers. Indeed, a quarter of teachers surveyed by the Auditor General said they were “dissatisfied” with training provided by their districts.

“It’s a missed opportunity,” she said. “It is helpful for teachers to be able to go to trainings, but I really do think it becomes just a box-checking exercise.”

Overcoming fear and disrespect to help students succeed

2021-03-28T12:22:47+00:00

(Editor’s note: Chalkbeat Detroit and Crain’s Detroit Business, as part of a collaboration on teacher tenure and retirement issues, set out to hear what it’s like to teach today and how Michigan leaders can make the profession more attractive. Here is one response.)

The first day of school this year was the most nerve wracking I’ve experienced in my 22 years as a teacher.

Rather than the pandemic, my nerves had everything to do with starting the school year teaching to a computer screen.

My anxiety didn’t lie in mastering the technology; rather, it was that I wouldn’t be able to do my best work in this environment.

For the first time in a long time, I found myself doubting my ability to meet the unique needs of my students. Since then, almost every day I either think I’m not doing enough or overcompensating and overwhelming my students. I constantly ask myself: “What am I not doing?” “What am I missing?”

I’m far from unique in this regard. I can tell you without hesitation teachers working remotely or in hybrid situations experience the same doubts every day. No one enters our profession with dreams of teaching to a camera from their makeshift home office.

For me, this was a jarring juxtaposition to the prior school year.

I was named Michigan’s 2019-20 Teacher of the Year for my work teaching English and history at Rochester’s Stoney Creek High School. I was honored to travel the state meeting with educators and students, sharing the amazing work happening in our public schools. Last March, I had just come from meeting the other State Teachers of the Year and was looking forward to seeing them again on upcoming trips.

Then, the pandemic struck. Suddenly, educators had no access to classrooms or the tools we rely on to help students succeed. With nearly zero direction, educators were forced to adapt to conditions outside our control with the same expectations to prepare students for college and careers.

No one who works in education wants to be separated from students. Yet, some constantly opine that educators have used the pandemic as an excuse to kick back and do nothing for the past 12 months. To say I take great offense to that false narrative is a gross understatement — we haven’t stopped working since day one of the pandemic. That’s not who we are as a profession.

Adding insult to injury, educators hear a constant rallying cry to get kids back in the classroom, health and safety be damned. That mentality — promoted by those who have never stepped foot in a classroom to teach, let alone during a pandemic — sidelined any concern for the well-being of teachers, support staff and other public school employees, in addition to that of our students, families and communities.

We have a moral and ethical obligation to make stopping the spread of COVID-19 our top priority. Every day, our schools and the people who work in them are charged with nurturing and protecting our future. As an educator, I’m trained in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — put simply, human beings can’t learn if their basic needs for mental and physical safety aren’t met first. Therefore, following CDC recommendations to stop the coronavirus isn’t something we can choose to ignore due to inconvenience or budget constraints — it is an educational imperative.

From there, the academic challenges are real for our students. However, we must remember that the world largely stopped for the past year, and this pandemic isn’t over. Over time, our students will recover from the interruption to their learning and educators need the support, respect and tools to get that job done.

However, what we seem to get is far from that helpful: more mandates, more standardized tests, more paperwork, and more partisan bickering over distributing the funding needed to do the job at hand.

Dealing with this noise day in and day out is exhausting. Our mission as educators is to help our students succeed in school and beyond. We never signed up to be political pawns with our health and safety as an afterthought.

Despite these challenges, I’ve never been prouder to be a teacher. I’ve seen my colleagues repeatedly overcome every obstacle, roll with every (gut) punch, and readjust plans again and again to meet the needs of our students.

As always, Michigan’s educators remain committed to our students, and we will continue to put them first, pandemic or not.

Cara Lougheed is a teacher at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester and is the 2019-20 Michigan Teacher of the Year.

Understand and support needs of future teachers

2021-03-28T12:22:36+00:00

Teaching is a calling. Teachers can change the world. To be a teacher is to touch a life forever.

These lofty proclamations sound great with their implied respect for educators, but as a college student preparing to become a teacher, I’ve discovered that they actually serve to trivialize the profession to martyrdom. One minute teachers are hailed as front line heroes – the next they are villainized as selfish and lazy.

Early in the pandemic, teachers were portrayed as intrepid warriors driving to students’ homes to impart knowledge or creating Broadway-quality musical numbers to deliver content. Those educators should be commended for amazing work, but when those superhuman examples move from the exceptional to the expected, something has to give.

I’ve been fortunate to have many great teachers. They weren’t applauded on Good Morning America, but to me, they were on that level. They were knowledgeable, wise and created a nurturing environment that helped me succeed. Most people recall similar stories about one or more teachers who positively impacted their lives.

That is the mythos that the general public wants to believe. But this is not the complete story.

It amazes me when some are surprised that enrollment in teacher education programs has plummeted and that we are experiencing a real and dire teacher shortage. As a country we have long blamed public education and educators for the ills of society. No wonder – they are an easy target. Teachers genuinely care about their students and continue to do more with less, shielding their students from harm caused by policymakers’ decisions.

Like the slowly boiling frog in the fable, many veteran teachers feel trapped – and their only recourse is to tell aspiring educators not to pursue a career in education. That is tragic.

For those of us who blocked out the tumult and persevered in our passion for education with the hope of being a teacher, we are met with obstacles rather than opportunities.

I began my pursuit of a degree in education at Michigan State University because it has been consistently ranked as one of the top teaching programs in the country. I knew that teaching is part science and part art; I was excited to develop my understanding and skill in both. Developing these skills takes time, and programs that shortcut this learning are not the answer – nor is prolonging a program that makes completion a Herculean effort.

MSU’s student teaching program has remained virtually unchanged for decades. For many it has become a program that is not equitable, not accessible, and not sustainable – and MSU’s program isn’t alone in that regard.

The financial burden of taking additional coursework and completing a fifth-year unpaid “student teaching” internship creates barriers for students who do not come from middle- or upper-class families.

The time commitment prevents participants from working to earn money to offset the expenses, which often can’t be covered by scholarships and grants as graduate-level education. The university-controlled placement often requires participants to pay extra for housing and transportation. Additional coursework during the internship doesn’t always count toward master’s degrees. All these costs are more than the typical first-year salary of most Michigan teachers – and are on top of already staggering student loan debt for many.

The result is unbearable stress and pressure for participants. MSU acknowledges that interns will cry repeatedly during their placement. Many students drop out of the program, seek mental health support, or leave the profession early.

We would not tolerate these circumstances for PK-12 students, and we should not tolerate them for aspiring educators either.

Despite the many obstacles ahead of me, I’m more determined than ever to become an educator. However, if we continue to burn out aspiring educators even before they begin their career, the teacher shortage will only get worse.

I’d like to see a country that is committed to uplifting and supporting the next generation of educators and leaders. Colleges and universities – along with policymakers – can help by eliminating obstacles and barriers for those next gen educators.

That alone will help us, as future teachers, hold on to the hope that our society will recognize the importance of the work we do and value our calling to educate future generations of Michigan students.

Brittany Perreault of Oak Park is a senior in Michigan State University’s College of Education and president of Michigan Education Association’s Aspiring Educators of Michigan program.

Teachers need tools, resources, and time to help students with trauma

2021-03-28T12:22:22+00:00

Since being inspired by my first-grade teacher, I have always wanted to follow in her footsteps. It’s one reason I became a teacher 28 years ago.

Since then, I’ve worked hard with students to overcome tough situations, first in Kalamazoo and then my hometown of Romulus. This year’s challenges are unlike any other, but all of us in education are pushing through because of our commitment to our students.

But we can’t do it alone. Young people today are dealing with a host of issues, especially those who have special needs or who come from home environments facing poverty and inequity. This pandemic has made many of those issues even worse.

Educators often feel like we’re on an island, addressing not only the academic but the social and emotional needs of students. The whole child matters, which is why we need greater support for educators to address the needs of students beyond the academics, especially when it comes to dealing with trauma.

This past year has been traumatic – for students, parents and educators alike. Loved ones succumbing to COVID-19. Jobs and homes lost. Expanding poverty and hunger. Whether students are in-person or remote learning, that trauma has an impact on their ability to learn.

Within the school setting, teachers need more and better training for how to address these issues. While simply listening and caring go a long way, there are best practices for how to deal with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that educators can learn. From food and housing insecurity, to health issues, to experiencing violence in their community or home, students carry their experiences with them into the classroom – and educators must find ways to meet students’ basic human needs before we can help them find academic success.

A few years ago, I had a student who witnessed his brother attempt suicide multiple times. In order to teach him reading and math, I had to understand his trauma and how it could stand in the way of his studies. I had to meet him and his family where they were – which was not a focus on school but often about survival and safety.

We need to surround these students and their families with the supports they need – from counselors to social workers to nurses and beyond. Teachers can’t address all the social-emotional needs of students alone.

Parents need more tools as well to help be engaged partners in their child’s education.

During remote learning in the fall, I noticed a silver lining – some parents benefitted from seeing firsthand their child’s reading struggles. I was able to see growth in some students whose parents started working with them once they realized, “Whoa, my daughter can’t read like I thought she could.” But it’s a mistake to assume every parent is well equipped to provide that help – just ask any parent who’s struggled to help with math homework during the pandemic.

Finally, we must remember that educators are people too. Especially right now, we’re burnt out and tired after a year of reinventing how we educate kids. With in-person third graders, it’s incredibly hard to have them in a school setting where they can’t do many of the things that we all take for granted – group work, sharing materials, cooperative learning.

My kids understand that they have to wear a mask, but they still want to do what they’ve always done in school. I have to say, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t share your markers. No, you can’t sit together and color.”

It impacts my ability to help deal with student emotional needs as well. Recently, when a young girl shared a sad story about her puppy, my immediate human and educator instinct was to put my arm around the child, but I had to catch myself and remember I can’t. I can’t hug.

It breaks my heart. Every traumatic event my students experience does. With the pandemic, I walk and pray and write to help process that grief. But teachers and other dedicated educators need more tools, more training and more time to process our emotions, so we can better help our students do the same.

Tavia Redmond is a 28-year veteran third grade teacher in Romulus.

How we used data to tell the human stories behind Michigan’s high teacher turnover rates

2021-03-28T12:06:49+00:00

In report after report, experts have sounded alarms about the large number of teachers leaving Michigan schools.

When Chalkbeat obtained a trove of data about the teacher workforce in Michigan, we saw an opportunity to tell the stories of the humans behind the numbers.

To do so, we dug through nearly a million rows of data and spoke with more than two dozen teachers, students, and researchers. Here’s a closer look at our reporting process.

Want to double check our work? We’ve included more technical information and code at the bottom of the page.

What is teacher turnover, anyway?

Turnover is the percentage of teachers who leave during a given year. Teachers who leave might go to another school or district, or they might leave the classroom entirely.

Turnover, as it appears in most state reports, is measured from fall to fall. In this case, a teacher turnover rate of 50% at a given school would mean that half of teachers left the school between the beginning of the school year and the next fall. This includes teachers who changed schools during the summer.

To capture midyear turnover, which research suggests is especially detrimental to students, we calculated the percentage of teachers who left between the fall and the following spring.

Who is represented in the data?

Teachers who were assigned to a classroom in Michigan. This includes long-term substitutes, librarians, career and technical education teachers, and school counselors who were assigned to teach classes.

We did not include teachers who taught in multiple districts schools since accounting for their moves would be extremely difficult. These teachers were about 2% of all teachers, and they tended to be specialists, such as music teachers, or to teach in cyber schools.

Teachers who left due to school closures are included in the data and our analysis. We considered removing them from our analysis, but opted not to because closures are significant experiences for the teachers in question and because leaving them in didn’t substantially change our findings. About 1% of Michigan schools closed in 2019. While several Detroit charter schools closed that year, eliminating school closures from our calculations would have reduced the turnover rate for Detroit charters by just over 1%.

What did we learn from the database?

The data gave us a more detailed picture of turnover than current data published by the state. The database helped us answer questions like:

How many teachers left their schools midyear?
How many teachers remained at a given school throughout a five-year period?
How many teachers left the profession between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2020, after the pandemic closed schools across the state?
How many students attended schools with high turnover?
What are the demographics of students who attend the schools that teachers are most likely to leave?

How much teacher turnover is too much?

The most recent national teacher turnover rate we could find was 16%, a figure that dates to 2012.

Over the last 15 years in Michigan, the turnover rate has typically been between two and four points higher than that.

In Michigan cities, the rate is substantially higher, often exceeding 30%, according to our analysis of teacher certification data.

Some turnover is normal, even healthy. But experts we spoke with mostly said that 20% to 25% turnover should be considered problematic.

To calculate the number of students enrolled in high turnover schools, we defined “high turnover” as 30%.

Where did the data come from?

The state keeps extensive records on teachers, which are housed by the Michigan Department of Education and Michigan’s school data provider, the Center for Education Performance and Information.

Chalkbeat obtained records of teachers who were assigned to any classroom in the state between 2015 and 2020 by submitting multiple requests through the Freedom of Information Act to the Michigan Department of Education.

The database is based on teachers who were assigned to classrooms in the Registry of Educational Personnel, which is maintained by the Center for Educational Information and Performance, Michigan’s education data provider. The data includes people with teaching certifications and substitutes or licensed school counselors who are leading classrooms.

As part of the request, we asked the department to create a unique identification number for each teacher. (These were different from the unique IDs that the state assigns to every teacher, which are an important part of their personnel files.) This allowed us to track and visualize the movement of teachers over time, which hasn’t been done before by a news outlet in Michigan.

Separately, Chalkbeat obtained a list of schools with teacher turnover rates calculated by the state. This allowed us to check our work with the other data. We also used this list to figure out how many students attend schools with high teacher turnover.

How did you calculate the number of students attending high turnover schools?

A key question we wanted to answer was: Which students attend the schools with the highest teacher turnover?

To find an answer, we used a state database that contains teacher turnover rates over several years for every school in the state. It’s the same data contained in the state’s online parent dashboard.

Turnover rates from that database are available through 2018-19. First, we linked the turnover data with school enrollment data from the same year. Then we added up enrollments for subgroups, such as English learners, Black students, and students from low-income families, in schools with turnover rates of 30% or higher.

The state only provided turnover rates for school buildings. To find rates for cities and charter schools, we did our own calculations using teacher certification data.

Too many Michigan teachers want to leave their classrooms. Here’s how to keep them.

2021-03-28T12:06:13+00:00

Michigan has a teacher turnover problem that is limiting the educational opportunities of Black students and those from low-income families.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Teachers are more likely to stay when they have better training, their principals are well-trained, they receive reasonable pay, and their schools can afford to hire enough paraprofessionals, psychologists, and social workers.

When those things are missing, teachers tend to leave, severing relationships and routines that are essential to student learning. Their departures take a steep toll that is borne largely by students in Michigan’s low-income communities, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of state data.

Improving the situation would be expensive, and Michigan’s Republican-controlled legislature has shown little appetite for a major school funding overhaul. But significant new investments in the teacher workforce suddenly seem possible as school districts prepare to spend billions in federal coronavirus aid.

Advocates say that some of the money could be used beginning this year to pay for training and mentorship that make teachers more effective — and more likely to stay.

“We absolutely have the ability now to reduce turnover and create greater retention,” said Adam Zemke, executive director of Launch Michigan, a business consortium that advocates on education issues.

A systemic problem

Ask many observers how to reduce teacher turnover, and they will tell you that turnover is merely a symptom of a much larger problem.

The state isn’t investing enough in schools, said Barbara Schneider, a sociologist at Michigan State University who has studied turnover.

“It’s a resource issue,” she said.

Efforts to reduce turnover in Michigan have often centered on giving teachers more money for their work. When a nonprofit in Detroit pumped millions of dollars into a handful of higher performing charter schools, some of the money went toward retention bonuses. Just last year, the state set aside $5 million for a similar program: New teachers will receive as much as $1,000 for staying on after their first year, with the possibility of receiving more if they stay longer.

But those are small numbers in the context of Michigan’s $15 billion education budget.

By contrast, the amount of money Michigan spends on schools overall has dropped in recent years — it declined 30%, adjusting for inflation, between 2002 and 2015 as state revenue for schools was reduced by tax cuts.

Schneider says more funding wouldn’t just allow for increased teacher pay, but also for improvements to school working conditions. More money could pay for decreased class sizes, better teacher training, better learning materials, or for more school staff — paraprofessionals, counselors, and social workers — who give teachers the freedom to focus on teaching.

“Apart from really systematic investment in schools, it’s going to be hard to improve working conditions meaningfully,” said Lucy Sorensen, a professor at the State University of New York Albany who has studied teacher turnover. “To the extent that urban schools are less funded, higher stress work environments serving students with greater needs, that’s more likely to cause teachers to depart.”

Training, coaching, and mentorship

Advocates say that billions of dollars in coronavirus aid to Michigan schools presents an opportunity to boost spending on teacher training and mentorship.

School districts have broad discretion to spend the money, including by “hiring additional educators to address learning loss, (and) providing support to students and existing staff,” according to the U.S. Education Department.

Ongoing training, mentorship, and coaching are key to supporting staff, Zemke said. Launch Michigan surveyed 17,000 Michigan teachers in 2019 and found a widespread sense that they aren’t given the same training opportunities as members of other U.S. professions, such as doctors, lawyers, and veterinarians.

“They don’t feel empowered, they don’t feel like they’re being treated as professionals, they’re not supported,” Zemke said.

Several efforts across the state aim to expand teacher training and mentorship. In Detroit, an innovative school is modeled on the residency training system used by medical doctors in which trainees receive support from mentors and from more experienced peers over three years. In Battle Creek, a philanthropic initiative pairs veteran teachers with novices for regular classroom visits and consultations about teaching technique.

Expanding and supporting programs like that one — and teacher training in general — would go a long way toward improving retention, said Elizabeth Moje, dean of the College of Education at the University of Michigan, who was pivotal in the creation of the residency school in Detroit.

While districts have only a few years to spend the federal aid, Moje said the benefits of high-quality training would last far longer.

“What better way to use the money than to actually develop the best teachers?” she said. “If we spend it on a text or a learning tool, that might need to be replaced in a few years. Actively developing our teachers to feel really good about their work, that’s something that goes on and on and on.”

Principals need training and support too, and research shows that effective principals play a crucial role in retaining teachers.

The Detroit Children’s Fund, a nonprofit that is investing tens of millions of dollars in Detroit to improve schools, has already paid for principal training programs across Detroit.

But principals don’t generally get that kind of support, said Nicole Simon, a researcher affiliated with the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, an initiative at Harvard University.

“We know that for teachers one of the most important factors in keeping them in their schools is strong leadership. And we have not invested in that kind of leadership. We don’t teach people how to do it, we don’t support them while they’re doing it.”

Small fixes can yield big rewards

Sorensen emphasizes the need for systemic investment to truly improve teacher working conditions and thus reduce turnover.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing schools can do in the absence of major new funding, she said, pointing out that turnover varies widely even among schools that receive similar funding and serve similar students. Detroit, for instance, was home to 76 schools with high turnover rates of 30% or more in 2018-19. But the city is also home to more than 40 schools with turnover rates below 16%, the most recent available national average.

What sets those schools apart? Often it’s communication, Sorensen said.

“People in the education field have not done enough of the simple task of asking teachers what they need and what the difficulties are in their everyday jobs,” she added.

Positive communication can be as simple as simply asking teachers to stay, said Punita Thurman, vice president of program and strategy for the Skillman Foundation, which funded several charter high schools in Detroit.

A principal at one of those schools experimented with periodically telling teachers that their presence at the school was valuable and that she hoped they would stay.

“It was a small gesture, but she was blown away at how much of a difference it made,” Thurman recalled.

Simply asking teachers for input is the not-so-secret recipe behind Upbeat, a company that aims to help districts reduce teacher turnover by getting teachers and school leaders on the same page. Upbeat surveys teachers anonymously to identify their frustrations, then shares the results with administrators.

“If teachers are involved in shaping the rules and procedures that govern their work days, they’re more likely to buy in,” said Henry Wellington, CEO of Upbeat, a company that consults with school districts about reducing teacher turnover. “If their performance evaluations are considered fair, they feel more successful. And we know that when teachers feel more successful they’re more likely to stay.”

Editor’s note: March 30, 2021: This story has been updated to correctly identify Barbara Schneider, a sociologist at Michigan State University.

Q&A with MSU’s Katharine Strunk: Teacher retention starts with compensation, school leadership

2021-03-28T12:04:49+00:00

Michigan needs a teacher retention strategy that focuses on boosting compensation in underserved urban and rural areas, places a stronger emphasis on school building leadership and gets the teacher education pipeline closure to the areas most in need of talented educators.

Those are some of the conclusions Katharine Strunk has drawn from years of researching the teacher labor market in Michigan.

Strunk is an education policy professor at Michigan State University and runs the university’s solutions-oriented research center, the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative.

She talked to Crain’s Detroit Business about how schools in the Michigan Department of Education’s Partnership Districts have struggled to turn around because of high rates of teacher turnover — and what can be done to rectify the problem.

This partial transcript has been edited for clarity.

Crain’s Detroit Business: We’re looking deep at the issue of teacher turnover this month in Crain’s Forum, really focused on what’s happening in the industry and the job profession of teaching, where teachers are going and how fast they’re turning over, particularly in urban areas like Detroit and rural areas of the state as well. You’ve done some research and tracked this. Tell us what’s broadly going on from your perspective.

Strunk: There are teacher shortages across the country right now — this is before the pandemic, especially in areas of high need. STEM teachers, secondary teachers in ... rural areas as well as urban areas. These are the districts we call “harder to staff” because teachers often don’t want to be there for some reason or another — or are not able to be there. In a rural district, there may not be a teacher prep program near by. ... There may not be teachers who stay in a rural area because there’s not other jobs available for their family. And so those districts have a very hard time attracting teachers. In Michigan, there are shortages in rural areas, urban areas, as well as districts that are very low performing or have high portions of minority students.

Crain’s: This isn’t a new issue. But is it being exacerbated by the pandemic or by the conditions in schools. What’s going on currently on the ground?

Strunk: That’s a great question and we don’t really have a lot of evidence about the way the pandemic may or may not have exacerbated the problem at this point. Stay tuned. We are starting a study to look at that. But anecdotally, we do know that teachers have felt very burnt out this year. ... This is not how teachers were trained to teach, this is not what they love to do, teaching remotely and teaching in the middle of a pandemic. ... There’s been some reports that there’s going to be a greater amount of turnover at the end of this year.

Crain’s: You did some research on the partnership schools in Michigan that were at one point slated for closure during the Snyder administration and then they worked out this big deal to give them one more shot to try to make a turnaround in these schools. Tell us what you found, what’s going on in these schools and as it relates to the staff and retaining staff right now.

Strunk: It’s an interesting turnaround reform in Michigan. They looked at the lowest performing schools and they’ve also said, ‘Well, schools don’t perform like this themselves. They’re in districts that have systemic problems. So we’re trying to treat both the school level and the district level in Michigan. ... What we find is staff turnover is particularly high in partnership schools. They’re also high in the district schools that are not designated as partnership schools — much higher than the average rates across the state or higher than other high-performing districts and schools across the state. ... So you think about these districts and they’re trying to reform their curriculum, they’re trying to do a lot of professional development in their schools so that the kids can perform (academically) better. And they’re not able to do that if they’ve put a lot of money into a professional development (PD) and the next year they have to train 20 percent new teachers on that some PD. So it’s not particularly effective or efficient when you do that kind of thing.

Another piece of data that we found that we thought was really interesting and really upsetting is when these districts are trying to put in place high quality curricula and these are the things we would like our kids to learn... But when you see teachers cycling through to the extent they have been in the partnership schools, you can’t really put into place that kind of teacher-driven curriculum because you have to have a new teacher in several times a year. So they say, well, we need to put in place a scripted curriculum, which we don’t really want for our kids or our teachers.

Crain’s: There’s a whole host of issues there. What are some areas where you think that from a public policy standpoint, we as a state could be doing to address these most high-risk high-need districts?

Strunk: I don’t think I can overstate the importance of teacher stability in these districts — and keeping the same teachers. The thing we need to think about is what is causing these teachers to leave. Why don’t they stay? And that will help us understand what policies to put in place to keep them. A big one is compensation. We had teachers telling us, ‘Look, I can get paid $10,000, $15,000 more at a district 20 minutes away. So I can’t justify staying here when I need to feed my family. I’m going to go to that district.’ We have principals telling us, ‘I try to put in a compensation bonus, try to give them a retention bonus, but it’s just a one-shot deal.’ It’s only a couple thousand dollars — it just doesn’t make enough of a difference. Even though these districts are really trying, they don’t have enough money to pay their teachers sufficiently to compete with surrounding districts.

A second really important piece was principal leadership. A lot of (the partnership school) teachers told us, ‘You know, I really love the principal and even though I’m getting paid a little less, this principal really is trying to reform this school. This principal’s really got my best interests at heart, so I’m going to stay and give this principal a try. So bringing in really effective and good leaders is important — and that has some of the same problems as bringing in a really good and effective teacher.

A third piece that I think is critically important that we don’t think about enough is the teacher preparation pipeline. We know from the literature that teachers tend to stay close to home — where they grew up — or where they trained to be a teacher. In rural areas, and in some of the urban centers, we don’t have enough of a teacher prep pipeline to bring teachers in to stay in those districts. And so trying to think through the pipeline process elements of this — how can we get more teacher interns into these districts, help them understand what it looks like to teach here, get them committed to the district and the school and then help them to stay — that’s all a pipeline issue that I know districts in the state are working on. But that needs to be sort of beefed up.

Crain’s: On the compensation side, this always comes down to money and how we fund our schools in Michigan. Is there an area you can point to legislators and say, ‘Hey, this is a way you can go about doing this?’ or freeing up more money for their compensation.

Strunk: I know everyone is tired of the refrain that we need more money, but any way you look at it, Michigan underfunds its schools — and underfunds its most traditionally underserved districts the most. There’s not a question in my mind that if we were able to provide increased compensation to teachers in Michigan it would really help. And if we could target the increased compensation especially to those districts like the partnership schools — Benton Harbor, Detroit, Flint — that they would be able to use that and keep teachers and recruit them and retain them.

‘COVID has tipped the scales’: Teacher retirements in Michigan up 44% since August

2021-03-28T12:04:26+00:00

Dwight Pierson stands in his high school classroom in the mid-Michigan town of St. John’s wearing a telephone headset each day while teaching logarithms and polynomials.

In one ear, he’s got one-third of his class talking to him via Zoom, the videoconferencing platform that has become synonymous with the coronavirus pandemic.

In Pierson’s open ear, he’s fielding questions from the rest of students who are masked up in the classroom with him.

It’s a daunting way to teach Algebra II to sophomores and juniors, Pierson said.

“It’s like you’re talking to a wall sometimes,” he said. “It’s a little bit of a circus every day.”

After 29 years on the job, Pierson, 51, is not sure he wants to return to the “circus” next year, knowing that schools will likely have to continue offering a virtual distance-learning option that forces him to effectively teach two different classes at once.

Pierson is one of 18,629 K-12 public school teachers in Michigan who are eligible to retire at any point and collect a full pension, accounting for one in four of the state’s teachers actively working, according to the Michigan Public School Employees’ Retirement System (MPSERS).

According to MPSERS data, an additional 11,975 teachers have 20 to 25 years of service and are close to being eligible to retire early, depending on whether they have bought up to five years of service credit used to calculate lifetime pensions.

The stress and chaos of teaching during a once-in-a-century pandemic has Pierson and others weighing a departure from public education, stirring fears of a mass exodus that could hobble public schools in Michigan without an influx of new teachers in a talent pipeline that was diminishing well before the pandemic.

“The pandemic is a game-changer,” Pierson said. “I think there’s going to be record retirements. That would be my prediction.”

Dwight Pierson uses a headset when teaching virtual classes at St. Johns High School.

K-12 schools in Michigan are already experiencing critical shortages of teachers across all subjects, particularly math, science and special education.

“It didn’t pop up overnight during COVID,” said Tina Kerr, executive director of the Michigan Association of School Administrators. “This is certainly a problem that’s been very alarming to us in the past.”

But the pandemic may have exacerbated an emerging crisis.

From August through February, there was a 44 percent increase in midyear retirements compared to the same period in 2019-2020 as 749 teachers left public school classrooms in the middle of the school year, state data show.

“Not only do we have a lot of retirements in the last year, but we’re going to have a lot more,” said state Rep. Pamela Hornberger, chair of the House Education Committee who spent 22 years teaching in the East China School District.

Active and retired educators are warning of a new wave of retirements coming this summer after teachers get through this current school year, which, for some districts, has been marked by multiple starts and stops for in-person instruction because of COVID-19 outbreaks and mass quarantines.

“COVID has tipped the scales,” said Amy Moening, who retired from Roseville Community Schools last June after 28 years of teaching first grade. “What teachers are being asked to do is superhuman.”

“Most teachers say they’re doing twice as much work they were doing pre-COVID with even less planning time,” she added.

Moening, who turns 55 in November, had announced her plans to retire before the pandemic hit.

She said her departure from full-time teaching came after years of mounting mandates from lawmakers and by-the-book administrators that eroded her classroom autonomy.

“The lack of trust in my professionalism was just killer,” said Moening, who is now a K-5 reading tutor for an online school. “It’s just very frustrating for a teacher when you know what’s best for kids.”

While mid-year retirements have risen considerably, some superintendents expect this summer’s retirements and resignations to level off or decline because of earlier-than-planned departures.

“We’ve probably had more teachers resign/retire, more staff members resign/retire in the middle of the year than we’ve ever had before,” said Gary Niehaus, superintendent of Grosse Pointe Public Schools.

Grosse Pointe schools’ union contract required teachers to declare their intent to retire by March 1, Niehaus said.

“Honestly, we had probably the fewest retirements we’ve had in a really long time just simply because we’ve been doing it all year long,” said Niehaus, who himself is retiring at the end of this school year.

‘It’s only getting worse’

Teacher shortages in Michigan have been a building for years, educators say, as baby boomer teachers retire and the state’s teaching colleges see fewer and fewer students pursuing a degree in education.

Marc Meyers, 55, retired in August after 32 years as an elementary music school teacher in Walled Lake Consolidated Schools.

Meyers had many reasons why he decided to retire in his mid-50s instead of working until he’s 60.

Chief among them were mounting mandates on the teaching profession while his overall compensation diminished. Meyers said his 2013 compensation ended up being his highest annual salary used to determine his pension seven years later.

Meyers said mounting job expectations took a toll on him.

“I would dread opening emails every day because it felt like every day you could expect an email saying, ‘Oh, now you need to do this, we’re not going to pay you more, we’re not going to do anything to make your life better, we’re just going to give you more work and you’ve got to do it if you want to keep your job,’” Meyers said. “And that kind of thing really frustrated me.”

The retirement trend isn’t confined to teachers.

From August through February, there was a 33 percent increase in retirements compared to the same period in 2019-2020 among school personnel who are not teachers — superintendents, principals, counselors, paraprofessionals and other school support staff.

At the Michigan Association of School Administrators’ mid-winter conference in January, 36 superintendents were recognized for their retirement from the profession.

“That was just in January,” Kerr said. “Since then, there have been more. ... It’s not a new problem, but I think that it’s only getting worse.”

Back in the classroom

To fill teaching jobs in Michigan, some lawmakers in both parties with backgrounds in education are proposing a radical idea: Let retired teachers come back to teach full-time while collecting their pension checks.

A bill pending in the House Education Committee would let a retired teacher return to the classroom to fill a position on a critical teacher shortage list or substitute teach without having their pension or retiree health care reduced.

The legislation, House Bill 4375, also would let a school district rehire a retired teacher without having to make additional payments to the pension fund on their behalf to cover unfunded liabilities.

The legislation could effectively encourage double-dipping, but Hornberger said it may be necessary “until there are more people who want to go into the profession.”

“At this point, I’m open to anything,” Hornberger said. “I would rather have a retired teacher come in and sub than someone’s aunt who is looking for a job and they think they’re babysitting.”

Administrators have retired in the past and come back to work for the same school district as contractors while collecting pensions.

“It was a gravy train for them, so you can’t blame them,” Hornberger said. “[But] we’re going to have to do something.”

MASA has joined other education lobby groups seeking greater flexibility for school districts to hire retired teachers who are actively collecting pension checks.

“A teacher should be able to come back if they cannot find a qualified person to fill the position in question,” Kerr said.

In the coming months, veteran teachers will have to begin informing their principals if they plan to retire before August, when the new school year begins. Because of the way teacher salaries are paid, about three-in-five teachers begin their retirements in July each year, state data show.

Teachers Dwight and Anne Pierson at St. Johns High School on Friday, March 19, 2021. Dwight is considering retirement. Anne retired from Fowler High School last year. (Dale G Young, 2021)

In St. John’s, Pierson faces an April 1 deadline to decide whether he wants to be back in front of the whiteboard next fall teaching logarithms and polynomials — likely talking to two different classes at once.

The temptation to retire comfortably in his mid-50s is growing. His wife, Anne, retired last June after teaching English and language arts in rural Fowler for nearly 27 years.

Pierson said it’s “a tough decision” whether to leave his classroom in June or stick it out for another year.

“I still like teaching. I still like being in school,” he said. “But it does wear on you. You’re just not sure if you go one more year if you’ll still like it.”

Chad Livengood is the senior editor at Crain’s Detroit Business.