As Teacher Shortage Looms, States Get ‘Creative’ By Lowering Qualifications

Lowering the qualifications for aspiring teachers is understandable in the era of profound teacher shortages. However, the long-term effect will be a generation of classroom instruction that is banal, utterly incapable of inspiring, uplifting, and rousing our students to look up at the peaks of human possibility.

This had to be the most predictable public policy crisis in a generation.

After two years of distance learning directives, masking diktats, and roller coaster education policy that made learning and teaching miserable for broad swathes of the educational universe, the exodus of teachers from the profession was as predictable as a Joe Biden gaffe.

Every day a new headline from a different corner of the country reveals the metastasizing shortage in school district staffing — not just teachers, mind you, but bus drivers, coaches, and even administrators. It is affecting a new region every day. No geographic area seems immune to the mass migration of labor fleeing American school districts in droves.

Just how bad is it?

Reportedly, 93 of the largest 100 urban school districts are experiencing some form of staffing shortage. The word “catastrophe” has been evoked to describe the sheer size of staffing shortfalls soon to afflict American schools this fall. There is plenty to fight about when investigating why this has happened. Paltry pay? Public disrespect? COVID classroom chaos? Horrendous student behavior after sitting at home for a year?

Perhaps the most troubling element of this story is the strategy now being used by states to confront the shortages: profoundly lowering the bar of access to the teaching profession. Americans generally celebrate the removal of barriers to professions, especially when they are of an entrepreneurial nature. Though, the latest trend is unlikely to elicit much celebration from American parents.

In Arizona, Republican Governor Doug Ducey signed a bill that permits teachers to start instructing students before they have completed a bachelor’s degree in favor of a teacher training program. Indiana might have to solve the shortage by placing teachers in classes who only hold an emergency credential, possibly in core subject classes they are not qualified to teach. The use of emergency permits has skyrocketed in Indiana by 58% in recent years. In Kansas, the substitute teaching pool has been expanded to include those who have only earned a high school diploma.

If you go to Google and search “Teacher Shortage” + “Any State,” you will witness the same problem everywhere. And just to be clear: I am not criticizing policymakers in Arizona or Indiana or Kansas or anywhere. The beginning of the 2022-2023 school year is just weeks away. States are having to get creative in order to come anywhere close to meeting their staffing needs.

It does beg a broader and more salient concern, though. Who is going to be left to teach our children when the COVID dust has finally settled?

My worry, what vexes me and makes me anxious about the future composition of the American corps of teachers, is that our schools are going to be populated with teachers who are either academic lightweights or who see their jobs primarily in terms of advocacy and social-emotional support. The Twitter account Libs of TikTok leaves viewers with the unfair impression that most teachers are zany Bolsheviks hell-bent on launching a cultural, political, and sexual revolution from the safe perch of their classroom. Such hysteria isn’t merited.

That said, it is fair to ask if the teachers of tomorrow will be imbued with a sufficient level of academic excellence to teach the future citizens of the country. It has been endlessly noted that American classrooms have recently become meccas of ease: less assigned homework, more group work, open-note exams, infinite flexibility with due dates, constant pressure to pass failing students, and the list could go on and on. It is not illogical or out-of-bounds to wonder if there is a connection between lower classroom expectations and a substandard academic teacher corps?

As Kate Walsh, who led the National Council on Teacher Quality for 20 years, recently observed, “The focus on how a teacher identifies, racially, ethnically, sexually, without any recognition that they need to know something to be an effective teacher has been really demoralizing for me.”

A friend of mine recently shared a heart-warming story about her father and a teacher who changed his life. Decades after leaving her class, he remembered that she was “a mid-thirties, sweater-and-skirt-wearing, one-way passage into all things writing. She read The New Yorker. The New Yorker for cryin’ out loud. In Marion, Virginia. In 1982.” I will never forget my freshman year of college when my political philosophy professor off-handedly told us, “I learned Ancient Greek so I could master Aristotle.” My best friend is an AP US history teacher whose endless capacity for memorizing dates borders on the superhuman to the wonderment and awe of many of his students. My

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