Nadav Zeimer discusses the current teacher shortage in America, its causes and what can be done to solve it.

1. TEACHERS
R A C I A L B I A S I N
N A D A V Z E I M E R
N A D A V Z E I M E R . C O M

2. If you are young and you want to make a positive
contribution to society it is likely that teaching will come
across your radar as a career worth considering: an
opportunity to address a spectrum of our nation’s
challenges at their roots be they economic, cultural,
political, or well being related.
WHO BECOMES A
TEACHER

3. INGREDIENTS
And yet, across the country, public schools are
scrambling to hire teachers before school is back in
session. America is currently facing a teacher shortage.
Every year, more teachers are needed to fill empty spots
in school districts, but more and more teachers are
leaving the profession. Over the past three years, the
number of teachers who have left the profession has
grown, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Many
former teachers shift to positions in social assistance,
like child care, nursing or family assistance. Between 20
and 30 percent of teachers leave within their first five
years in the profession.
TEACHER
SHORTAGE

4. RETENTION RATES
Current teachers aren’t just leaving the profession, but fewer
students are majoring in education in college as well. From
2009 to 2014, enrollments dropped by 35 percent, reported
the Learning Policy Institute. In a recent survey of students
taking the ACT, only 5 percent indicated they were interested
in a teaching career, a 29 percent decrease from 2010 to 2014.

5. OUTDATED
The fact is that our young people can see that our public
schools are outdated and even counterproductive, often
teaching students to hate learning when our economy
rewards only those who eagerly embrace ongoing
learning. Consider the speed of technological innovation
alone which demands that tomorrow’s employees be
ready to learn new systems every few years – from
mainframes, to desktop PCs, to handheld devices and
cloud computing; and each new technology is coming
faster than the one before it did. It’s hard to believe that
an internet search company can make money, let alone
outperform the titans of industry in terms of market
capitalization. The world is quickly evolving while our
public schools haven’t made any progress in 150 years.

6. UNDERVALUED
Those young people who still choose to pursue teacher
certification discover very quickly that making a
difference as a teacher is like running a marathon while
carrying sandbags and wearing a blindfold. In a 2016 poll,
nearly three-quarters of Americans agreed teachers are
undervalued in terms of treatment and support. Teachers
are, on average, being paid 5 percent less than they were
in 2009. Teachers often have very little say in the
curriculum they’re allowed to teach and even less of a
say in larger administrative decisions that affect them
directly. Young teachers are startled to discover that
their professional union protects teachers who are
neglecting their students and ignoring the needs of
teachers who make herculean efforts on students’
behalves.

7. School district officials can see that students are not
being prepared for today’s information economy and
teachers are easy scapegoats. Those innovative teachers
who are in touch with students’ needs and familiar with
technology are most often barred from implementing
their innovations which are foreign to their evaluators
(e.g. mindfulness, use of smartphones). On the other
hand, teachers hungry for guidance look up to highly paid
administrators who rehash age-old, top-down, command
and control methods that concern themselves with
district priorities to implement superficial changes
rather than fundamentally reforming pedagogy for the
21st century.
LACK OF
INNOVATION

8. INGREDIENTS
Recruiting teachers in rural and low-income school
districts is even harder. Those districts aren’t able to
compete with larger school districts regarding pay, and
teachers are on the hook for purchasing most of the
supplies needed for the classroom out of their own
pocket.
When teachers leave school districts, students are put at
a disadvantage. But, they aren’t the only ones who are
affected by the teacher shortage. Teacher turnover costs
the United States nearly $2.2 billion every year.
RECRUITMENT
AND TURNOVER

9. PROPOSED SOLUTIONS
Proposed solutions include charter schools which give even more power to
administrators and cause even higher turnover as young, inexpensive, idealistic
educators are worked to the point that they cannot imagine a future for themselves
as educators. Another solution is school choice which shifts federal funding to private
and parochial schools, making these schools more affordable for the wealthy while
remaining out of reach for the middle and lower economic classes and leaving public
schools with even fewer resources and higher concentrations of students in poverty.
Philanthropists like the Gates Foundation offer their own business-minded top-down
approaches which fail to support great young educators from the ground up. These
approaches are not as much solutions as political tactics to push agendas (both liberal
and conservative) which, again, don’t have students’ best interest at heart as their
focus is on what is important to the adults involved. Unwittingly all of these players
squander the greatest resource in our nation – young people’s confidence in their
future contributions to society.

10. TRANSFORMATION
So how do we transform public education so that
students discover their innate love of learning in public
schools? How do we get students to practice doing
difficult things and grow to be confident, creative, and
self-expressed lifelong learners? The key is those
college-age youngsters who want to make a difference
and believe that education is the most effective way to
do so. Those ambitious young people who have grown up
with big data, social media, and the cutting-edge tools
driving our economy – a few among them will find
answers. While our universities must train these future
educators in pedagogical techniques based on cutting
edge brain research, our public schools must then
empower them to innovate and when they do so help
them to share with their peers regardless of their tenure.

11. UNIONS
But how? I believe that transforming our teacher unions
in the key to making this happen. Furthermore, I believe
that organizing unions based on a decentralized network
structure would create a professional environment that
attracts young talent and empowers those few who are
poised to innovate to spread their learning among their
professional network. This includes bringing an “open
source” methodology to curricula development, allowing
for organic growth and innovation from a community of
professionals.