Susan Pendergrass speaks with Avery Frank, senior policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, and James V. Shuls, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute and head of the Education Liberty Branch of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University, about their new report, “Understanding Missouri’s Teacher Shortage: Evaluating Missouri’s Teacher Pipeline to Inform Future Policy Strategies.” They discuss whether Missouri actually faces a statewide teacher shortage crisis, why teacher hiring has grown even as enrollment declines, which subject areas and school districts face real shortages, the case for differential pay, and more.
Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Thanks so much for joining us on the Show Me Institute podcast. I’m being joined by Avery Frank of the Show Me Institute and Dr. James Shuls of the Institute for, and I already forgot, Civics and Liberty at Florida State University.
James V. Shuls (00:13): The Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University.
Susan Pendergrass (00:18): Mine wasn’t bad. I mean, yeah.
James V. Shuls (00:21): We can start a new institute.
Susan Pendergrass (00:22): And also a senior fellow at the Show Me Institute, and you’ve certainly done a lot around Missouri education for a long time. And one of the things that I know you’ve worked on, and you as well, Avery, over the years, is the idea of the headlines around the teacher shortage crisis. That it is a crisis, regardless of what’s happening with K-12 enrollment. Regardless of what has happened with teacher salaries in the state of Missouri, I feel like every year we find out that there is a crisis. Is that right, Avery?
Avery Frank (00:58): Yeah, and that’s honestly what’s been said a lot, and most of it revolves around, we’re not paying teachers enough. They usually point at our low salary, that it’s one of the worst in the nation, and say, well, if we had a higher average teacher’s salary then these things would be fixed. And even after we supposedly fixed them in twenty twenty-five when we raised the minimum teacher salary to forty thousand, we’re still seeing the same complaints. I believe I saw a few op-eds about the topic this year,
Avery Frank (01:25): and, as we’ll discuss in the paper, I won’t spoil the whole podcast, but there’s a reason
Susan Pendergrass (01:31): Go right ahead.
Avery Frank (01:32): that we’re still feeling that pressure even after making these general, broad changes.
Susan Pendergrass (01:37): Yeah, I mean, the state recently, within the last few years, had a blue ribbon commission to study it, and I think this is the time of year when teachers are making their decisions if they’re going back or not, and they have these empty spots to fill. But I guess the first question is, is there a crisis-level teacher shortage in Missouri? Go ahead, James.
James V. Shuls (01:55): So what happens oftentimes is there are problems, for sure. There are some districts that struggle to find teachers. There are some subject areas where it’s hard to find teachers. And what happens is, whether it’s the media or the teachers union or some group that really would benefit or really would like to see us pay teachers more or increase education funding, they latch on to those stories and they latch on to those narratives. And they make it sound as if there’s this huge, broad crisis across the state. It would be kind of like, if I had ants in my kitchen and I said, my gosh, there’s ants, and you came and looked and you said, there are ants in your kitchen, James, there’s a crisis in this neighborhood, there’s ants
Susan Pendergrass (02:38): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (02:38): everywhere. It’s like, well, there’s a localized problem in my kitchen, or in my school, or in some school, right? That doesn’t necessarily make it a statewide problem. And it doesn’t make it necessary for us to have statewide solutions. That’s part of the point that Avery and I drive home in this paper: when you actually look at the data throughout the state, there are isolated problems. There are certainly things where some government intervention could potentially help. But what happens is the people, like I said, who would benefit, or who want to see broad education policies, or who want to see increased teacher pay overall, latch onto those isolated stories and blow them out of proportion.
Susan Pendergrass (03:18): Yeah, and I might be doing the same thing here, but from a macro level, at the state level, I talk about this all the time, that K-12 enrollment is declining and it’s going to continue to decline. There’s no forecast that turns that around. We’ve had smaller and smaller kindergarten classes for fifteen years. So we will be looking at smaller and smaller K-12 enrollment for a long time. Yet the number of public school teachers has actually increased at the state level by several thousand teachers. Now that doesn’t mean that every district is necessarily hiring, but what about, in addition to teachers, Avery, hasn’t there been massive hiring in support staff at the school level?
Avery Frank (04:00): Yes, there’s been a huge boom both in administrator full time equivalent and staff as well as teachers. James and I, we just tried to unwind it a little bit for just teachers, and we look at, okay, there’s about, if we assume there’s twenty kids per classroom, there’s about twenty eight thousand fewer students, we’d expect there to be about fourteen hundred fewer teachers, but when we look at it, over that same time period we’ve lost all those students, we actually have four thousand more teachers. So we’re seeing some very strong upward trends for administrators especially, but teachers as well, while our students continue to lose enrollment, and that’s gonna have a lot of pressure financially. But I also do think it kind of shows up in the shortage data, ’cause a lot of our districts don’t really have any problems with shortage, and how could they, with all these teachers? But that doesn’t change the fact that we still have some districts that, even when we have a huge influx of teachers and staff, still have some schools and subject areas that are struggling, because they’re not being paid a market wage that they should be, because the teacher profession still is not as market oriented as a lot of other professions.
Susan Pendergrass (05:18): Yeah, so you mentioned this as a solution, James, in the paper: teachers are paid on a step and ladder, and to pay one teacher a higher base salary you have to pay every teacher basically a higher base salary, you have to shift the step and ladder. What about differential pay? I thought Missouri passed that a few years ago.
James V. Shuls (05:37): Well, I wanna hammer home the point that Avery just made for a moment first. While we’re losing students, we’re adding teachers. And that gets left out of the narrative around teacher shortages. If you continue to hire more and more and more, even when you don’t need more and more and more, that puts pressure on the system. And if a high performing district or high-paying district starts hiring more teachers, and let’s say the colleges of education aren’t producing more teachers, where are those teachers going to come from? Well, they’re going to come from the hard-to-staff places that are hard to work in, where teachers don’t want to be there. So if you think about this in the St. Louis context, if Rockwood goes on a hiring spree, hiring more teachers, teachers might leave Normandy, they might leave Riverview Gardens and head over to work in Rockwood. You could see the same sort of thing throughout the state. So when districts are hiring more and more teachers, that puts pressure on the market and helps to contribute to this idea that there’s a shortage. But to ask your question about differential pay, think about that scenario I just mentioned. If you increase overall pay across the board and every district now pays teachers more because you’ve raised the base or whatever it is, well, you’ve not helped those disadvantaged districts at all. What you’ve done is simply made everyone get paid more, which may be good, and maybe in the long run, if we paid everyone more, maybe more people might want to come into the profession. But that’s a solution way down the road and it’s very expensive. It doesn’t lead to any solutions today for the districts that are struggling to attract teachers today.
Susan Pendergrass (07:26): So tell me a little bit more about this pipeline, Avery. The teachers in Missouri public schools in the St. Louis, Kansas City area, they probably come out of UMSL and UMKC programs. Are the universities and colleges across Missouri supplying as many teachers as they used to?
Avery Frank (07:46): Most of our universities are seeing fewer completers. Some are pretty extreme. If you look at Lindenwood or MOBAP or UMSL,
Susan Pendergrass (07:55): What’s MOBAP?
Avery Frank (07:56): Missouri Baptist, sorry, that’s a local
Susan Pendergrass (07:58): Okay, well, that
Avery Frank (08:00): locals saying. If
Susan Pendergrass (08:01): Yeah.
Avery Frank (08:02): you look at Rockhurst University, I believe in Kansas City, you see a lot of pretty significant downturns, and I do think part of that is because there’s less students in the city and all of that. But we’re seeing a lot of downward pressure on that, but at the same time we’re actually seeing a lot of upward growth in non-university teacher preparation programs. So when you look at the American Board, Certification of Teacher Excellence is a long title, but they’re actually the biggest producer of new teachers in twenty twenty-five. They had about five hundred teacher completers, and that program is basically for career switchers that want to take online classes, and then they come and take a few tests and they’re ready to teach, as long as they show they have subject expertise and they can handle a classroom. So that’s not a four-year path, that’s a go-at-your-own-pace kind of path. And it seems like that is growing a lot more in Missouri, while our traditional programs, even though enrollment is up, enrollment is up a lot in a lot of these programs, completion is still down, which is interesting.
Susan Pendergrass (09:09): Why do you suppose?
Avery Frank (09:11): There’s definitely a lag, because there was a big trough a few years ago, but now it’s on the upward trend. So I do anticipate there to be some increase in teacher completion, but at the same time I would have to look deeper into why exactly completion rates are dropping even though enrollment is going up.
Susan Pendergrass (09:34): Well, you taught at UMSL, James. Did you see a declining demand for these degree programs? I just thought of your point, Avery, that if we have fewer high school graduates, and it’s the high school graduates in St. Louis that maybe go on to be the students in the teacher prep programs in the metro area colleges, so if there’s fewer high school students there’ll be fewer of them. But did you perceive a drop in the demand for these, James?
James V. Shuls (10:03): Well, one of the challenges that a university like UMSL, University of Missouri St. Louis, has, is that they just don’t get a lot of first time freshmen. Most of
Susan Pendergrass (10:11): Yeah, yeah.
James V. Shuls (10:11): the teacher candidates that they would get would be going to a community college first and then transfer to UMSL. UMKC I would say is probably in a similar boat. So one of the interesting things you see in our paper is a table that lists the number of completers in Missouri teacher preparation programs by area. And
Susan Pendergrass (10:28): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (10:29): you would think, with St. Louis and Kansas City being the biggest areas of the state, that they would have the most teachers being produced there. But that’s not the case at all. It’s southwest Missouri, central Missouri, that are producing the most teachers. St. Louis is in third. Kansas City produces fewer teachers than northern Missouri, and almost the same number as southeast Missouri. So if we want to do something at the university level, then targeting funding to specific areas where there are significant needs would be an appropriate strategy, again, rather than a statewide sort of program. But what I saw at UMSL in my time there was significant growth, as Avery said, in our alternative programs. So while the traditional
Susan Pendergrass (11:19): Hmm.
James V. Shuls (11:20): program, I don’t want to say limped along, but went along and struggled to attract students, especially first-time students at the university, the alternative programs for students who already had a bachelor’s degree and now wanted to go back and get certification to become a teacher, those programs were significantly growing. And that’s where we’re seeing,
Susan Pendergrass (11:41): Okay.
James V. Shuls (11:42): as Avery suggested, some of the uptick in the number of people who are able to be certified, through these alternative type of programs, both university based and non-university based.
Susan Pendergrass (11:56): So Avery, I wanna back up a little bit on the crisis, the shortage. You mentioned that it’s not across the board, it’s in certain subjects. What subjects do we know to be experiencing a shortage?
Avery Frank (12:11): So it’s not just in our paper, but when you look at the literature on the teacher shortage, because a lot of other states have faced this as well, our paper finds similar results. We think of high need subject areas, we think of special education, we think of the STEM subjects, higher mathematics, physics, chemistry, earth science. Interestingly, in Missouri, industrial technology was the highest of teach positions left vacant and or inappropriately certified. But then when you look at the other side you see elementary education, early childhood education, English, social studies, those have the least amount of shortage pressure. And it’s kind of what you’d expect. I’m not trying to say they’re easier subjects to teach, but there are more people that go in to teach those subjects that have more interest in those. A physics teacher is a little more specialized. A special education teacher takes a certain type of demeanor and care for that kind of student. And when we go and we see that in most school districts, and Missouri hopefully addressed it with pay differentiation a little bit, it depends if they’re actually implementing it or not, but when you’re paying all those teachers the same for something where you have enough supply and demand, you have a higher supply, you’re not paying them their market wage ’cause you have less people wanting to work in those jobs, but you’re paying them the same, and some would probably argue it’s harder to teach physics than elementary education, although I know that it’s very hard to deal with little kids, as I’ve experienced leading in my church. But you
Susan Pendergrass (13:50): Yeah.
Avery Frank (13:50): know, it’s just, you have to think about market wages and everything. And when you look at the literature, we noted at the beginning of our paper that in states where special education teachers were paid more, not relative to others, not just more overall, more relative to other subjects, shortages in special education were much lower, because teachers were getting a reward for teaching in those high need areas.
Susan Pendergrass (14:14): And you have looked at the number of applications per open spot, right?
Avery Frank (14:19): Yes. And there’s lower applications in the high needs subject areas.
Susan Pendergrass (14:21): And so, with some of those subjects that you mentioned, like elementary, social studies, elementary ed, open spots get multiple applications, right? That’s not really a shortage or a crisis.
Avery Frank (14:32): Yeah, just looking at, I can just give you one number, I won’t overload you with numbers, but when you look at physics, we found an average of seven applications per vacancy. And then when you look at social science, you get seventeen and a half applications per vacancy on average.
Susan Pendergrass (14:47): Notable.
Avery Frank (14:48): So you can see the big difference in the number, and just the interest in positions based on differences.
James V. Shuls (14:56): I have now, I have like two points that I want to make that are kind of different from one another, but both are
Susan Pendergrass (14:59): Sure.
James V. Shuls (15:00): market related. So, if I forget, one is related to universities, and one is related to this last point that Avery was making about applications. So maybe I’ll start there, on applicants for positions. The way the state talks about shortages is different from the way anyone else would talk about shortages, right? So usually when you think of a shortage, you think that there isn’t anyone, right? I can’t find someone to fill this position. Whereas what the state means is there were seven people who applied, but I didn’t really like the seven, or maybe they didn’t have the right degree or something along those lines. But it’s not that they didn’t fill the position, or it’s not that they didn’t have people apply for the position. So the state’s definition, and the way that they use the term around shortage, is very different. But going back to the numbers Avery was talking about in the shortage areas, this is another market-related point, it’s something one of our board members, Mike Podgursky, likes to rail against, that we
James V. Shuls (16:02): have so many certification areas. And maybe the reason we see industrial technology as one of our highest or hardest areas to fill is there are like no preparation programs. You probably couldn’t find a degree program in the state, at one of our universities, that specializes in industrial technology. So getting someone who can go into that program as a traditionally trained industrial technology teacher is going to be almost impossible, because it’s a certification area with no degree, or very few degree preparation programs. But almost every college has an elementary education degree program. Because, think about that, school districts need to have lots of elementary education teachers. Maybe they need one industrial technology teacher, and maybe not every district even has one, right? So the market doesn’t give the universities enough reason to create programs for these things. And then we artificially create shortages by having a ton of different little certifications. So one solution could be to get rid of some of these certification areas, or broaden them, or make it easier for people without traditional degrees to get certified to teach in those areas.
Susan Pendergrass (17:21): It seems, though, that generally speaking, the attractiveness of education as a career, when you’re selecting your major at a four year university, and tuition’s expensive, and the idea of majoring in elementary education, when you know that, relative to probably most people you know, your salary’s gonna be lower, you’re gonna be locked into this organized labor career field where somebody has to negotiate your salary every year regardless of your performance, and you’re gonna get kind of an old school pension at the end of it, which is gonna require you to stay in Missouri, either in one of our two cities or in the state of Missouri, for your full twenty five to thirty year career, it does not seem like a good fit for the people coming out of college today. James, it seems to me you’ve got people in this age range too. If you are working really hard in your first two, three, four years as a teacher, and staying late and pouring your heart and soul into it, and you see people pulling out of the parking lot at three oh five every day and getting the same salary or more, I just think it’s a disheartening field for our brightest, recent college grads. What do you think?
James V. Shuls (18:42): You know, I think back to myself, when I selected, when I wanted to go into teaching, I was an elementary education major. I did it really partly because I wanted to coach. You get a teaching
Susan Pendergrass (18:50): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (18:51): degree and I could coach. But I chose elementary because I like kids and I wanted to work with kids, right? So most of the other majors, though, people don’t pursue. I’m looking at our shortage list, the highest shortage we have: industrial technology, business, biology, technology education. I think it’s rare for someone to say, I really love kids and want to work with kids, so I’m gonna pursue an industrial technology degree. No, rather people are gonna pursue a career in those fields and somewhere along the way figure out, man, I think I’d like to teach, I would like to take my expertise and bring it into the classroom. I think
Susan Pendergrass (19:30): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (19:30): about that great quote, I think it’s Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters, who says, I’ve been in the private sector, they demand results, right? So you think about someone who’s been out there working in the private sector in one of these fields, and it’s a grind, and then they start thinking, you know, I could teach, get a stable salary, have a great schedule that aligns with my kids’ schedules, summers off, where I could do other things, consulting on the side, whatever it is, this could be a great career switch for me. Now, programs like Avery mentioned, ABCTE, American Certified Board Teachers of Excellence, is that right, Avery, have programs that allow
James V. Shuls (20:14): people to switch and get the certifications that they need. We need to expand those types of programs and not think of those as like a substandard certification, because what they’re doing is allowing us to bring in those experts with years of experience in different fields, and bring that into the classroom, and bring something to the students that a teacher who comes straight out of high school, gets a degree in business, isn’t gonna be able to bring in the same way.
Susan Pendergrass (20:45): So finally, James, do you think it matters if the education people within public education continue to talk about this as a crisis? ‘Cause I think from a PR point of view this is what you want to do, right? You want to raise the alarm bells as much as possible to draw attention to something. So I suspect that it will continue to be discussed as a crisis, as the teacher shortage crisis. Does it make sense to fight against that?
James V. Shuls (21:13): Well, we should be fighting against this with facts. This is the strategy of the unions, is to make you think this is a crisis. And you think about the public perception of education, they have done a very good job of making us think that teaching is an undervalued field where teachers aren’t paid enough, and they’ve pushed this line so long and so hard that I think a lot of people believe it. And I think it’s a weird strategy. Their strategy is, make everyone think teaching’s terrible so people don’t want to become teachers, and we could say there’s a shortage, and then we can get more money out of the legislature. That’s a really weird long game for unions to play.
Susan Pendergrass (21:57): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (21:58): I think teaching’s great. I would encourage people to go into teaching. I was a teacher myself. I encourage my own kids to go into teaching. I think it’s a wonderful profession with lots of terrific benefits, but we’ve got to approach it with facts. And one of the facts is, and this is what we hope to get out to the public and to legislators, is that the problems that we’re seeing, that we lay out in this paper, are not going to be solved with widespread state intervention across the board. They need targeted solutions, and we provide those ideas in the paper.
Susan Pendergrass (22:28): Every last word.
Avery Frank (22:29): I think when we talk about just the teacher shortage in general, we really need a lot better data reporting, and I know that’s just a policy
Susan Pendergrass (22:38): Yeah.
Avery Frank (22:39): analyst kind of thing to say, but when we’re looking at the teacher shortage data, St. Louis City didn’t report anything. There’s no data on St. Louis City on how their shortages are, and how they’re filled. There is data on other ones, but that’s a big deal. And it makes it harder to find and target these actual shortage areas. In our paper I do believe we identified the shortage areas, the trends, the overall trends. But if we had better data, I think we could do that. And just briefly to mention, on one of the policy solutions, James was talking about there’s not really any room for climbers, and people who are a little bit ambitious, in teaching. And that’s why I think one of the targeted policy solutions we have is crisis pay for districts and schools with severe shortages. So just to take St. Louis City, the St. Louis area, you have Riverview Gardens and Normandy that have around thirty percent of their positions being left vacant. About the whole rest of
Susan Pendergrass (23:40): Come on.
Avery Frank (23:41): the region is zero percent, or less than five percent. So we’re not thinking of the shortage pressure for Rockwood or Clayton. We’re thinking about how can we get teachers in Riverview Gardens, and Normandy, and Jennings. Those are the ones we’re worried about, those are the ones we need to help. And crisis pay, paying these teachers, saying, okay, you’re one of the best teachers in the state, we would need a good teacher evaluation system to do that, and you’re saying, okay, you’re one of the best teachers in the state, you can go make, I don’t know, a hundred twenty thousand dollars in Riverview Gardens, and see if you can get these kids from some of the lowest performers in the state to some of the best performers in the state. And Dallas, the Dallas School District, they tried this, and they saw significant growth for the students in their worst schools. And they were able to actually staff their worst schools in the
Susan Pendergrass (24:32): Dallas, Texas.
Avery Frank (24:33): state. Yes, Dallas, Texas, not Dallas, Missouri. And
Susan Pendergrass (24:36): Yeah, just want to qualify. Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (24:39): Yeah, I think that’s right. I’ve seen this being floated a lot, pay teachers, I’ve heard it called combat pay, which I hate that term, but crisis pay, I think that’s absolutely a great idea. And then that does raise the profile of the profession. But I suspect we’re going to be hearing more about the teacher shortage crisis in coming years, even as enrollment continues to go down. If folks want to find your paper, what’s the title and where can they find it?
Avery Frank (25:07): The title is Evaluating Missouri’s Teacher Pipeline, and you can find it on the Show Me Institute website, and there are a lot of graphs and tables, so feel free to dig into it and look at everything yourselves.
Susan Pendergrass (25:19): Appreciate it. Thank you both for joining us.
James V. Shuls (25:22): Thank you.
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