Pennsylvania's 'Teacher Shortage' – An Alternative View

If you’ve seen statewide headlines or asked the state teacher’s union lately, you’ll get the same canned explanation for the purported teacher shortage in Pennsylvania: the state is dangerously short of educators because of a lack of pay, deficient teacher/student ratios, and the insurmountable cost of higher education. From the standpoint of advocates – for instance, the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), the largest and most powerful lobby in Harrisburg – this explanation makes sense.

Poring over data from the National Center of Educational Statistics (NCES), the Census Bureau, the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), and the National Education Association (NEA), I tried to find an answer – but first, I wanted to be sure of the question. Is there actually a teacher shortage, and if so, what’s driving it?  What I found was an alternative explanation to what we’ve all been hearing.

Let’s start by looking at where Pennsylvania ranks nationally on some metrics.

It’s not teacher-student ratios. On average, Pennsylvania’s teacher-to-student ratio ranks 10th in the nation, besting 40 states in this key metric.

It’s likely not the cost of higher education, though this claim is somewhat more plausible than the others. It’s true that Pennsylvania’s state colleges and universities, are expensive, at $23,000 per year on average. But this relatively high cost is not unique to education degrees or to Pennsylvania. A recent U.S. News and World Report study listed the national average for private colleges at $40,000 per year, the average for out-of-state public schools at $23,000, and the average for in-state public education at about $10,500. So, though PASSHE schools are more costly than other state-run institutions, these costs are not exactly debilitating, especially when financial aid and loans are available. Higher education is expensive in the United States, and teaching majors aren’t exempt from this reality.

So, what is it?

With its laborious six-year process, Pennsylvania is the hardest state to get certified in as a teacher. Correspondingly, Pennsylvania has seen the sharpest decline proportionally in teacher certificates issued (down 5,667 certifications) in the last decade. Plainly, the certification roadblock is the biggest obstacle to shoring up Pennsylvania’s educator pipeline. But merely making it easier to certify teachers may not solve the problem.

PDE data make a compelling case that the subjects teaching candidates are endeavoring to teach is part of the problem. Take two disciplines, social studies and physics, for example. In 2021-2022, Pennsylvania welcomed 32 new physics teachers in the grade 7-12 category. In the same subset, 363 social studies teachers were awarded certificates. Pennsylvania might be short of physics teachers, but it’s hard to believe, if this trend continues, that it will be short of high school social studies teachers.

Consider another example. Last year, 109 Pre-K–12 gym teachers were awarded credentials. Meanwhile, only 38 Pre-K–12 technology education teachers entered the workforce. There is a disparity here, to be sure, but it’s not necessarily a lack of teaching personnel. 

Conventional wisdom holds that the teacher shortage in Pennsylvania has been primarily caused by lack of pay, poor teacher-to-student ratios, and the high cost of higher education. The data, on the other hand, point to the certification process as the chief cause of the shortage. And the “shortage,” moreover, as the numbers imply, might not actually be a shortage after all, but rather a problem of teaching candidates not going into subject areas where they are needed.

The solution to the certification process is simple: streamline and simplify it. When we do this, we’ll stop losing teachers to other states that have an easier process. The solution to the crisis of misplacement is more complex. We’ll need some creativity to persuade prospective candidates that we badly need more physics, math, and English teachers, not more gym and history teachers.

One thing is for certain: throwing more money at the problem won’t fix it. But the proposal made by the governor and House Democrats is to do just that by creating tax credits and pipeline scholarships for teacher prospects. These are well intended, but they miss the root cause of the teacher bottleneck in Pennsylvania: the certification process. We must align our certification process with local needs and reduce the time it takes to get certified if we are to have any hope of fixing this universally recognized problem.

Joe D’Orsie represents the 47th Legislative District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.