Students in some Delaware districts will be returning to class at the end of this month, but as the clock winds down on summer, there’s a behind-the-scenes hiring scramble, with hundreds of positions—from teachers, to secretarial positions, to paraprofessionals—still posted on the state’s job board.
“Certainly when you see hundreds of postings, that is definitely concerning,” said Jon Neubauer, the director of education policy at the Delaware State Education Association.
It’s a story happening in school districts nationally, as administrators look to plug vacancies as the school year creeps closer and has already begun in some. Researchers say it has long been the case that districts are looking late into the summer to fill positions, but with disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic and the politicization of the nation’s classrooms, it has become an especially turbulent time for the school system.
Administrators cite a teacher shortage, with applicant pools that were once replete with qualified candidates often looking especially slim, though the details depend on the size and makeup of the district and the specific position they’re hiring for.
Bringing a teacher in at the eleventh hour—and sometimes, after the school year has begun—can have reverberating effects, ultimately shortchanging that teacher’s ability to teach effectively, researchers argue.
“I think it’s important to understand that all schools want to put the best people in front of children. I wholeheartedly believe that,” said Adam Friga, superintendent at Oran R-III in Missouri. “We just simply don’t have the depth in applicants we used to have.”
Districts end up hiring late due to a number of obstacles, educators and researchers say. Sometimes legislative hold-ups mean districts don’t know what their budget is until late in the summer. Teachers may quit at the end of the summer to keep their health benefits as long as possible. And there can be uncertainty about enrollment. Sometimes districts are disorganized, and are simply slower to get on the market.
The last few years have been particularly difficult, though, with districts having to manage teacher attrition and the up and down of funding, said Linda Darling-Hammond, the president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, who has studied the teacher workforce. She also chairs the body that sets teacher-preparation policy in California.
Hiring early allows teachers to know who they’re going to teach, plan over the summer, interface with their colleagues, and participate in professional development—“all of which improves the quality of schooling at the end of the day,” Darling-Hammond said. The ideal time to hire is February, she said, not June through August.
“Teachers’ effectiveness is enhanced when they’re in a context where they are able to be in a team, a collegial team, with sort of continuous support, with the opportunity to plan and organize things together,” Darling-Hammond said. “These issues like late hiring and also all the turbulence about where people are going to teach, like: What grade level are they going to teach? What school are they going to be in? All those things are very disruptive and undermine teacher effectiveness.”
Late hiring is a byproduct of issues within the larger educational system
Administrators have emphasized the issue of a teaching shortage as a reason for hiring dragging late into the summer. Educators have sought to bolster the workforce through “grow your own” programs, alternate routes to certification, scholarship and student loan forgiveness, and job fairs.
But the research suggests, Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, that we make enough teachers. Too many are lost, however, long before retirement for it to make a difference. And that attrition varies across the type of school, he said, with turnover in poorer, urban districts facing the problem most heavily.
“Bringing people in is one thing, but keeping them is another,” he said. “If 50 percent of those [new teachers] leave within five years, you’re back to square one.”
Late summer hiring is a byproduct of a larger system in flux, administrator say.
“People can go out and get other jobs that are not as high stress, and get similar pay or maybe more. I think some people get into education not realizing it’s a lot of hard work,” said G.A. Buie, the executive director of the United School Administrators of Kansas.
Some districts get creative to fill vacancies
That leads to out-of-the-box thinking, in some cases.
The Liberty School District just outside of Kansas City in Missouri is about two weeks out from the start of the school year, and its leaders are looking to fill at the elementary level. The district tries to offset the late-stage hiring it does by having an “early notification incentive program,” which has a deadline in January and offers a small payment in exchange for staff telling the district of impending resignation ahead of summer.
The district has a few options, said Superintendent Jeremy Tucker, if it can’t “beat the bushes, try to deepen our candidate pool to see what we get.”
The district can consider class sizes, to see if they can collapse one section to cover a vacancy, or post it. It can petition the state’s department of education for a “critical shortage,” would which allow a qualified retiree to come back and fill the vacancy. They can leverage student-teachers, with support from a veteran teacher. It could turn into a long-term substitute.
“We’ve gotten a little creative in that regard, in terms of how we cover all our bases,” he said.
Where an opening for an elementary school teacher could have, at one time, seen 30-40 applicants, now there could be two to five, said Friga, the Missouri superintendent.
“That’s a large decrease in applications,” he said. “We’re seeing less people who are certified. That doesn’t mean they can’t be quality teachers, it’s just a different path.”
As the summer grinds on, the higher-quality educators get picked up first, Ingersoll said. His prior research shows that a large number of districts turn to long-term substitutes to fill vacancies. Vacancies disproportionately impact low-income rural and urban districts, he said. Those districts are more likely to use long-term subs, which presents big equity issues, he said. because typically.
Districts have also turned to out-of-field teaching, where teachers credentialed in one area are asked to take on another subject entirely, which can be done through emergency credentialing. He recalls, early in his own teaching career as a social studies teacher, where he was asked to pick up two sections of algebra. He scrambled to get worksheets and materials from other math teachers and relied heavily on rote teaching out of the textbook.
“I would be the first to say they were cheated,” he said. “They weren’t getting a teacher that knew what they were doing.”
Buie said he’s seeing misassignment happening more and more—along with the hiring of candidates who haven’t yet completed the standards for pre-service work or before they’ve completed their teaching programs—when districts are under strain to hire someone.
“I may only be a day in front of the kids … I may not have all that information readily available,” he said. “But good teaching instructions—that pedagogy—that really goes across different subjects. But it does put more pressure on teachers, and the entire building.”
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