About Kentucky’s teacher “CRISIS”

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know by now that Gov. Andy Beshear has been cited all over the place (see here, here, and here for a few examples) for claiming Kentucky’s public school system is short about 11,000 teachers.

At least some of the media folks are calling the situation a “crisis.” 

But is this really true?

Consider this:

The latest Kentucky School Report Card data indicates the state has the equivalent of 43,501 full time teachers working in its classrooms. A shortage of 11,000 teachers would indicate one in four teaching positions was currently empty, a highly improbable situation, at best.

But, with the governor and educators pressuring the General Assembly to increase spending, lawmakers clearly need to get a handle on how the real situation looks. Towards that end, House Education Committee Chair Rep. James Tipton, R – Taylorsville, wasted no time getting at the truth during the current legislative session.

In fact, in Tipton’s meeting of the House Education Committee on Feb. 7, he required everyone testifying to do so under oath.

Let’s examine some of the evidence obtained from sworn testimony during the meeting. In the spirit of providing “The rest of the story” as the late Paul Harvey used to call it, I added some additional information I think warrants inclusion.

First up is information about the whole reason we run a school system, the students. Table 1 shows the Kentucky public school End-of-Year Kindergarten to Grade 12 student membership (you probably think of this as enrollment) for the past five school terms. This was extracted from the Kentucky School Report Cards system.

Table 1

The key thing to note here is that Kentucky’s public school student membership has recently been declining. Between 2017-18 and 2021-22, membership fell by 16,706 students, a drop of 2.6%. Now, let’s look at some of the data Kentucky Commissioner of Education Jason Glass presented under oath during the education committee’s meeting. Table 2 is the first of several pertinent slides in Glass’s presentation.

Table 2

First, notice that the school years are listed in reverse order, with the latest data on top.

Next, notice the number of full-time equivalent teachers (FTE) in Kentucky’s public school system increased between 2017-18 and 2021-22 from 42,060 to 43,500, a rise of 1,440 teachers and a 3.4% increase.

The commissioner’s slide also shows that the turnover of teachers each year rose in the same time interval. However, those losses were replaced and even more so; thus, the full-time equivalent number of teachers also increased despite the turnover increase.

In fact, more teacher slots were filled in 2021-22 than in any previous year listed in Table 2. And, that happened while a notable decrease was occurring in the total number of students in the system. The picture provided by Tables 1 and 2 is a condition of more teachers for fewer students in the Kentucky public school system.

Does this look like a crisis?

Let’s look at another factor impacting teacher manning – Retirements. Figure 1 was also provided during the committee meeting, but this was presented during a separate discussion of the teacher retirement system and is not part of Commissioner Glass’ presentation.

Figure 1

The retirement system briefer pointed out exactly what this graphic shows. Retirements in 2022 were not notably different from those over the past decade.

So, at least through 2022, the actual history of public school teacher retirements in Kentucky doesn’t seem like a crisis, either.

The retirement system briefer also mentioned that while thousands of teachers are able to retire now, there are a number of factors that make retirement at this time unwise. It didn’t sound like he expected anywhere near the potential retirements will actually occur. He certainly wasn’t anticipating a crisis.

At the other end of the retirement statistic is the information about people completing teacher preparation programs to enter teaching. Table 3 builds on a slide the commissioner used to discuss this topic. Table 3 also includes my additions (in red) to his slide. I added figures for the total number of traditional preparation and alternate pathway preparation teachers for each year.

Table 3

Except for a spike in total completers in 2017-18, the most recent data for the total number of completers of teacher preparation programs in 2020-21 is the highest shown in the table. As of the last reported data in Table 3, this doesn’t look like a crisis situation.

When we hear about teacher shortages, concerns about problems filling special teaching slots like special education, science and math always arise. So, I was really surprised when the commissioner presented the current shortages in these hard-to-fill positions with the graph in Figure 2. I added up the total number of shortage slots for you and listed that in red as it wasn’t on the slide as presented.

Figure 2

According to the commissioner’s briefing, a grand total of just 43 positions in critical teaching skills areas were unfilled statewide during the current school term – just 43.

Recall that Table 2 shows there were 43,501 teachers in 2021-22. That number probably hasn’t changed much for the current year. Using 43,501 teachers as an estimate for 2022-23, the number of unmanned special teacher slots made up just 0.097% of the number of teachers in Kentucky. I fully agree that every child deserves a well-qualified teacher, so even one teacher teaching out of field is problematic, but overall does this look like a crisis?

Regarding a related statistic, how does the situation look for students being taught by Out-of-Field teachers who are not fully certified to teach the subjects they actually are teaching? Figure 3 from the commissioner’s slide pack bears on this discussion, sort of.

Figure 3

Figure 3 reports 2021-22 data, by the way, something the commissioner didn’t mention.

Considering Figure 3 by itself, there appears to be cause for some concern, especially for students in “Title 1” Schools, which generally have higher poverty rates. However, even when considering Title 1 school students, less than one in 10 children are impacted. It’s certainly a problem; but is it a crisis? In any event, this slide from the commissioner’s package is rather curious. Unlike most of the rest of his presentation, it only shows one year of data. That seemed odd.

So, I dug into the school report cards using the link in Figure 3 and was able to find data to create Table 4.

Table 4

The picture in Table 4 is troubling for several reasons.

First, the numbers for 2018-19 are so different from the others that I wondered if there was a data problem. Strangely, the 2018-19 data are only available in an Excel spreadsheet accessed from the School Report Card web page. In notable contrast, the data for the other three years are presented right in the school report card web pages. This presentation difference raises concerns that the data might not be uniformly reported over all the years listed in Table 4.

So, I contacted the Kentucky Department of Education to see if there was an explanation for the differences. It’s now been more than a week, and I have heard nothing back. So, for now, at least, I must take the reported data as accurate for each year.

And, that creates a big concern. Comparing the 2018-19 data to the more recent data, it appears there recently there actually has been a notable improvement in reducing Out-of-Field teaching. If we only look at the 2019-20 to 2021-22 data, it looks like the situation got worse at first going from 2019-20 to 2020-21 and then improved a bit going into 2021-22. But the size of the changes from 2019-20 to 2020-21 are much smaller than the drops from 2018-19 to 2021-22.

Is there a problem with the 2018-19 data? Unfortunately, statistics on Out-of-Field teaching don’t seem to be regularly collected and reported. However, I was able to locate a single, old October 1996 report from the National Center for Education Statistics dealing with this subject titled Out-of-Field Teaching and Educational Equality. Table 3 in this report shows that at least back in 1991, there were indeed double-digit percentages of Out-of-Field teaching going on in Kentucky. Again, this is old data, but consistent with the numbers reported for 2018-19 in Table 4.

I don’t know why the commissioner didn’t include all of this data. It’s readily available in his school report cards.

Including the 2018-19 data, there isn’t a crisis at all. Even just looking at the 2019-20 and later data, I still wonder if an outright crisis claim would be really valid.

Moving along, some closely related data from the commissioner about teacher qualifications shown in Figure 5 again includes multiple years of information. This slide deals with the number of teachers teaching under emergency certification.

Table 5

Here, we see the number of teachers who are using emergency certification has grown notably. However, comparing the 2022-23 emergency certification number to the latest 2021-22 number of teachers, 43,501, shows emergency certifications account for only 2.7% of the total number of teachers. This certainly is a problem, but a crisis? I’ll let you decide.

Before you get overly concerned about teachers with emergency certification, here’s a question to consider: Is teacher certification really much of a guarantee of performance?

In 2022, Kentucky’s public school teachers, the vast majority being certified, only produced proficiency rates on the Grade 4 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Reading Assessment of just 34% for white students and 15% for Black students.

Meanwhile, again despite the fact that the vast majority of teachers were certified, Kentucky’s white eighth graders only scored 24% proficient in NAEP math and the state’s Black eighth graders were just 9% proficient on the same assessment.

If these are the results a predominantly certified staff produces, we might indeed have a crisis. However, fixing this problem isn’t going to happen by just throwing more money at the existing system.

Actually, given Kentucky’s three-decades plus struggle to fix our education system with KERA’s Band Aids, I seriously doubt anything “traditional” (which includes most current “change” proposals, which in reality are mostly just warmed over schemes from the 1990s KERA period) is going to work. What’s needed is something like expanding school choice so parents can get their child into the best school possible for that child while our traditional system increasingly is confronted with a truth that if they don’t go after what really works, they might not be going at all, for very long.

https://bipps.org/blog/about-kentuckys-teacher-crisis

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