“America’s Future” Stats Are Buried in the Past
You’ve seen the headlines:
A ‘tsunami’ of Boomer teacher retirements is on the horizon
Half of N.H. teachers 50 or older
Schools Faced With Mass Teacher Retirements
All of them are touting the policy brief from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) warning us that “in less than a decade more than half of today’s teachers – 1.7 million – could be gone.”
NCTAF is one of the few organizations in the country paying close attention to teacher demographics, retention and retirement, which is strange considering how many are dedicated to professional development and teacher quality. This report is in service of an NCTAF policy recommendation – the creation of learning teams comprised of veteran and beginning teachers.
The policy deserves serious consideration. The study supporting the idea leaves a lot to be desired.
Let’s begin with the “we need to replace 1.7 million teachers in the next 10 years” claim. It’s not the first time we’ve heard something like that, as NCTAF admits:
In 1994, the U. S. Department of Education warned that the nation would need to “hire two million teachers within ten years” to offset growing student enrollment and smaller class sizes, along with increasing attrition and retirement. Over the next decade we beat that goal by hiring approximately 2.25 million teachers.”
OK, so we faced a problem worse than this one and hired 250,000 more teachers than the worst case dictated. But NCTAF goes on:
But during that same decade the nation lost 2.7 million teachers, with more than 2.1 million of them leaving before retirement.
It’s been a long time since I took any math, but that didn’t sound right to me. If we hired 2.25 million teachers, and “lost” 2.7 million teachers, wouldn’t that mean we have fewer teachers now than then? Since that’s clearly not true, I must be missing something. The footnote cited a 2007 NCTAF policy brief called “The High Cost of Teacher Turnover,” where I found the exact same quote on page 1. This time the footnote cited p. 25 in a Research for Action report called “Closing the Teacher Quality Gap in Philadelphia.” As you can probably guess, that was an incorrect citation. So I checked the next footnote, which was about Philadelphia, but incorrectly referenced pages 7-9 of a National Center for Education Statistics report titled “Teacher Attrition and Mobility.”
Well at least we’re in the right place now. The three pages referenced have tables related to teacher retention, except they are for selected years, or for the single year 2004-05, and have no cumulative data whatsoever. The figures in the NCTAF report may have been computed and extrapolated from some of these numbers, but which, and how, we have no idea.
Most of the rest of the report details NCTAF’s learning teams concept, until we get to the appendices. Here we learn the basis of the study’s statistics lies in the U.S. Department of Education’s Schools and Staffing Survey for 2003-04. This is the most recent information DOE has issued but, as you might imagine, its use to describe reality almost six years later is problematic.
NCTAF commissioned teacher retention guru Richard M. Ingersoll to plot the age distribution of teachers for each state. He did an excellent job, but his findings are only interesting as history unless you assume nothing has happened in the last five years… which, apparently, NCTAF elected to do.
Appendix C in the report received a lot of attention because it purports to show the percentage of public school teachers age 50 and older in 2008-09. How NCTAF generated these percentages is a mystery, as the footnote only references the DOE 2003-04 numbers and “NCTAF analysis.” A clue lies in the footnote to Appendix B. It reads:
Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were between 40 and 58 when the most recent national teacher survey was done. These Boomers, who now constitute 53% of the U.S. teaching workforce are between 45 and 63 during this school year.
An extrapolation of five-year-old data is risky to begin with, but it looks like NCTAF came up with its percentages for the current teacher force simply by adding five years of age to the make-up of the 2003-04 force.
That’s a reasonable method if you assume that no one was hired, fired, left or retired in the last five years. Or perhaps if you assume every teacher who left was replaced by someone exactly the same age. Or perhaps NCTAF used a more scientific and statistically valid method. Your guess is as good as mine.
Obviously the teacher workforce is aging (aren’t we all?). Obviously it has a serious impact on hiring and training policies. But if you want to describe a current problem and offer a current solution, wait until you have current data.
