What I'm reading in Edtech (pt.4)
Make Teaching Cool Again.
Do we have enough teachers? Are we producing new ones? Is teaching even a viable option for high-achieving college students? How can we attract talent to this field?
I try to answer these questions with the help of some data, of course.
Current public school enrollment in 2024 (projected):
Source: NCES data
Let’s assume a healthy student:teacher ratio is:
Elementary School: 15:1 or lower
Middle/High School: 20:1 to 25:1
Special Education: 5:1 to 10:1
Back of the envelope math suggests that we need at least ~3 million teachers in the public school system in 2024 to maintain a healthy student:teacher ratio:
~2.2 million teachers in public elementary schools
~770,000 teachers in public Middle/High schools
~150,000 special-education teachers in public schools (A record 7.5 Million Students, 15.2% of U.S. Public-School Population, Access Special-Education Services in 2022-2023)
And while we do indeed have those numbers (in 2020-21 there were 3.8 million full- and part-time public school teachers), the two major problems are the distribution of these teachers across the country, and the high attrition and low replacement rate of qualified teachers.
Teacher shortage by state:
Nevada, California, Utah, and Arizona have critically high levels of student:teacher ratios while Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut have a much healthier ratio.
States ranked in order of Teacher-to-Students enrolled in Public Schools Ratio (Scholaroo)
Shortage by subject (Scholaroo):
Attrition
On average, 8% or ~300,000 public school teachers leave the profession every year. This number has remained constant over the past decade. However, this number varies significantly based on geography, demographics, income-levels among other things (as expected). As enrollment in public schools declines, we can expect the demand for teaching positions to also decline but let’s assume we want to keep the replacement rate steady at 8% (for every teacher that leaves the profession, another one is joining).
Replacement
Are we able to successfully fill vacant positions with newly qualified teachers? We’re not even close.
Out of the ~600,000 individuals who enroll in teacher preparation programs, only a little over 150,000 complete them. This falls significantly short of our goal of replacing the 300,000 teachers who leave the profession each year.
Last year Harvard dropped its undergrad teaching program due to declining enrollment. You know something’s not right when a school offers Folklore and Mythology as a major but chooses to drop teacher training.
Why are so many college students interested in teaching programs but not completing them?
Here’s an interesting case study on Black college students enrolled at Michigan State.
Read: Plenty of Black college students want to be teachers, but something keeps derailing them
(The Disconnect) Eighty percent of the nation’s 3.8 million public school teachers are white, but over half of their students are Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and mixed races.
Researchers noticed that Black undergraduates were almost as likely as white students to take a teacher education class
The completion gap between Black and white students was large and striking.
A mere 7% of the Black students who took a teacher education course in Michigan became student teachers, compared to 30% of white students who took these courses.
Several hurdles are disproportionately impeding the progress of prospective Black teachers as they near the end of their coursework:
A state requirement to complete 600 “clinical” hours of apprenticeships and student teaching, which are usually unpaid. Some university programs require more.
That’s both a scheduling and financial challenge for Black students, many of whom are low-income and juggling a substantial part-time job alongside college.
Opportunity cost: Some of these programs require a fifth year for students to complete these clinical experiences. So that’s an extra year that they’re spending on their education, and not earning a wage.
Tuition alone for a fifth year of teacher preparation at Michigan State University, for example, runs $16,700
Another obstacle is Michigan’s teacher licensure tests. The pass rates for Black students are much lower, and it’s unclear why.
Return on Investment: The average starting salary in Michigan was $38,963 during the 2021-22 school year, ranking 39th in the nation. To cover 5 years of tuition (let’s assume a loan ~$80k at current federal lending rates of 8-9%), you would have to pay nearly 20% of your annual pre-tax income just to cover the annual interest on that loan. That’s outrageous.
So, what needs to change?
Pay teachers more: It should come as no surprise that the first thing needing change is the compensation for a profession so critical to the well-being of society. As a finance professional in education, I am often appalled by the lack of financial innovation in the field. I see a teacher as an investor with a portfolio of 30 equal investments—the students in their classroom. The teacher invests capital in the form of knowledge, motivation, and soft skills into each student without any personal upside.
What if teachers could take "equity" in their students' success over the long term? If anyone deserves the benefits of income-sharing agreements, it is teachers, especially top-performing ones. While this idea might seem outrageous now, I hope to see it become a reality in the future.
Make teacher training programs more accessible: understand the opportunity cost of pursuing these programs, especially for low-income aspirants. Work-study or apprenticeship models where a student can pursue the degree while also concurrently getting field exposure (and getting paid to do so) are much more flexible options to bring in more diverse talent into teaching.
Make Teaching Cool Again:
Read: Why Many ‘High-Achieving’ Students Don’t Become Teachers and What We Can Do About It
20% of seniors apply to Teach for America, only a “minuscule” percentage of the class actually studies education.
Social signaling around teaching as a profession is often a major reason for high-achievers to drop out of teaching - what do my parents and peers think about me pursuing teaching as a profession?
Highlight the impact that teachers can have in a society, celebrate every small success story.
Using AI to empower teachers:
AI cannot replace a teacher.
The new generation of AI tools are incredibly powerful at tasks that drained a lot of the time from a teachers schedule. Lesson planning, curriculum, research, feedback and grading, content generation, slide creation, data collection - tasks that used to take hours can now be done in a few minutes using the right tools.
Schools need to allocate time and budget to reskill their educators, enabling them to harness the full potential of AI.
Create rewarding and impactful career pathways for teachers:
Progression within the school district: Building awareness about what career progression could look like within the same school district. (NCEE does a lot of work in this area)
Private tutoring and mentorship: private tutoring can provide more flexibility and depending on geography and skill can be a very lucrative path.
EdTech: Teachers often become some of the most successful edtech founders and operators. Their firsthand experience with students, parents, and administrators provides crucial insights that are often missing in many edtech companies. In case you need some inspiration, here’s Dan Caroll’s story of transitioning from classroom teacher to a successful edtech founder.
Investing/consulting/advisory: Education is a $10 trillion industry. There are many opportunities to grow in this industry and create an impact, being in the classroom is just one step in the journey.
There is an inherent expectation that teachers should remain in their roles until retirement, avoiding career changes or new pursuits. However, data suggests otherwise: student achievement tends to increase the most during the early part of a teacher’s career (5-10 years) and often plateaus after ten years of experience. One way to attract high-quality talent into teaching is to make the transition into these alternative career pathways seamless. If it’s not aspirational, it’s not worth pursuing.
Bonus content
That's me ending my class with a quick meditation session (somehow, I convinced a group of 9th graders to stay silent for three whole minutes). The two years I spent in the classroom set me on a path of seeking out problems I could solve in education with every role I took on. Once you've seen the impact you can create in this field, it's hard to imagine doing anything else. Education is cool, it always has been.
Disclaimer: I consume an unhealthy amount of education-related content every day. This weekly stack is my way of filtering signal from noise. The best way to navigate this stack is to read the articles before you read my commentary/opinion.
About me: My name is Nish. I’m a banker turned public servant turned venture investor. I’m based in NYC where I’m also getting my MBA at Columbia University.