Teacher shortages are often most acute in certain fields, particularly bilingual/English as a second language, special education, mathematics, Spanish, and physical sciences. Sometimes students are taught through a revolving door of substitutes. Other times, students from the affected class are temporarily or permanently added to different classes, increasing class size. When substitutes are not available, which is often the case, other teachers may be assigned to “cover” the class during their prep periods, a practice that solves the immediate problem but has long-term consequences for staff morale and assistance when teachers are exhausted. and frustrated. It’s hard to ask students to take their education seriously when their school seems unable to provide them with a regular teacher.

The most common areas of vacancies were special education and middle school classroom teacher. While some openings may seem small, it’s not small from the perspective of students without teachers. Higher-poverty schools are more likely to have teachers hired after the start of the school year. The highest-poverty elementary, kindergarten through eighth-grade, and high schools had at least twice as many teachers hired after Sept. 15 as their counterparts with less than 80 percent low-income students. Vacancies are concentrated year after year in the same set of high-poverty schools, a situation that worsens when teachers with less experience are placed in these schools.

With approximately seven percent of the teaching force completely new in any given year, new teachers can be found in every school. But the school assignment process has the effect of concentrating new teachers disproportionately in positions that require the most determination and skill to succeed. New teachers are more likely to be found in poorer schools. For example, 11 percent of teachers in schools with at least 90 percent low-income students had less than one full year of experience in the district, compared to 5 percent of schools in which less than 80 percent of the students were poor. In schools where 90 percent or more of the students are classified as low-income, the median number of years in the district was 10, and about half of the teachers in these schools had five or fewer years of teaching experience. prior to the district.

“Senior” colleagues may only have a few years more experience than newcomers. The concentration of new teachers in private schools presents a huge challenge to mentoring efforts: there simply aren’t enough veteran teachers to go around. Additionally, many of the new middle school teachers have no experience in the middle grades and had little interest in teaching those grades when they applied to the district. These disparities in teacher experience occur in part because of school transfer rules that give the first job selection to the most senior teachers. A new study found that the general pattern is for teachers to transfer from higher-poverty schools to lower-poverty ones. The longer a teacher is employed by the system, the more opportunities arise to transfer to a lower-poverty school.

Since new teachers are more likely to be found in high-poverty schools, and new teachers are less likely to be fully certified, it follows that schools with higher percentages of low-income students also have higher percentages of emergency certified teachers. . 82 percent of teachers in the highest-poverty schools (defined here as 90 percent or more low-income) were certified to teach, compared to 92 percent in schools with the lowest rates of student poverty ( less than 80 percent low income) . While this inequity is evident in each of the years we examined, the disparity between the highest- and lowest-poverty schools has intensified over the three years since 2017. The inequity has increased in part because, while certification rates have decreased Across all levels of school poverty, the poorest schools experienced a larger drop. The highest-poverty schools also tend to have high percentages of minority students. Our data shows that the percentage of certified teachers in a school decreases as the percentage of minority students increases. In 2017-2018, 96% of teachers in schools with fewer than half of minority students were certified, compared to 86% of schools with 90% or more minority students. As of 2018, schools with the lowest minority enrollment maintained roughly equivalent levels of teacher certification, while schools with highly minority populations saw their teacher certification levels drop.

Once hired, new teachers often experience a rough start to the school year. For new teachers, late hiring and school placement means they have little time to learn about their school or the neighborhood it serves, meet their colleagues, set up their classrooms, evaluate the instructional materials available to them, or plan appropriate lessons. Those who arrive after school starts are sometimes faced with students who have been taught by a series of substitutes, a situation that often creates a culture of disorder in the classroom that is difficult to change.

While some school principals do an exemplary job inducting new teachers, a high percentage of respondents to a new survey reported that they finished their first week in school without basic supports and information from administrators. During this period, two-thirds were not provided the district’s curriculum scope and sequence for their courses; nearly three-quarters did not receive student forms; one-third were not given a personnel manual, and only half were told who their union construction representative was. Focus group research indicates that secondary school teachers receive less assistance than teachers at other grade levels. However, there were some significant differences in their answers on these and other items by school level. For example, elementary school teachers were more likely than others to say they felt safe in their buildings, and substantially higher proportions of new high school teachers reported that their buildings were clean (39 percent) and that students were clean. added or removed from their classes on a daily basis (45 percent).