Dr. Marc Gaswirth is a retired public school administrator. He has written extensively about public sector bargaining and school human resources issues.

As the new school year begins, the teacher shortage in New Jersey, we are told, continues unabated.  Meanwhile the state Department of Education has yet to release hard data showing the extent of the problem, including the specific types of vacancies and the names of the districts experiencing the greatest number of them. 

A critical question left unaddressed is whether the next generation of educators entering the profession will be better prepared and more effective than previous ones at facing ever more complex challenges than those that have driven current ones to leave the profession. After all, if we want to really address the current teacher shortage,  we need to not only increase the number of certificated staff available to be hired but also ensure they are of high quality and substantial potential. This would give school districts the opportunity to pick the best from a larger supply pool of candidates. 

Setting aside whether there are enough licensed teachers available to staff the state’s classrooms, more attention must be paid to the quality and adequacy of their preparation and their capacity to deliver critical services to students in the years ahead. 

When the Department licenses prospective educators, it does not judge the quality of their work or likelihood of success. That responsibility  is given primarily to institutions of higher education that prepare them for licensure and, of course, the districts that hire and evaluate them. 

The current shortfall raises some doubts whether future educators will be up the task. We know little about their educational preparation before college, in what numbers they are admitted into teacher preparation programs,  what it takes to complete them, or how rigorous and selective they are.

What we do know is that when the number of vacancies exceeds the candidates available to fill them, employment decisions often favor weaker candidates. Additionally, we can expect that a certain percentage of them will likely attain tenure in a school district when fewer new prospects may be available to replace them.

Once the state issues individuals a license to work in the public schools, school districts and administrators serve as the final arbiters of who constitutes a superior educator worthy of job security and continued contact with our most precious commodity, our children. 

School boards and administrators should be concerned that the next generation of public school educators, whose immediate predecessors spent roughly 30-35 years in the profession before retiring, will successfully fulfill their responsibilities. And, whether this new job-hopping cohort hired in the next five years will choose to work nearly as long in a challenging and stressful environment, one that might prompt their early departure from the profession.

The demands and expectations increasingly placed on future educators are likely to intensify as schools continue to act even more as surrogate parents and social welfare sources than as critical socialization and education providers. 

Yet, efforts already underway in the past several years to increase the supply of teachers signal a disturbing trend, not only to reduce the standards for entry into the profession, including eliminating certain testing and training requirements previously thought to be of high value before teachers were allowed to work in the schools, but also to undercut the performance standards by which these individuals once employed are judged to be effective.

More than 18 months ago, Governor Murphy’s “Task Force to Study the Teacher Shortage” issued numerous recommendations. While some have already been legislatively and administratively implemented, they so far have done little to produce more quality, certificated candidates to staff many of the state’s classrooms. 

Altering the testing and performance standards to obtain a teaching certificate, forgoing the payment of fees to obtain one, easing the path for paraprofessionals already working in the schools to enter the profession, and targeting former military personnel to make teaching a career will make only modest changes in the number of future educators.

What is needed now is a close examination of the deterrents to increased teacher supply. Among them are the restrictive labor contracts that ensure disproportionate increases go to senior employees rather than younger colleagues first entering the profession; placing the same monetary value on nearly all positions despite clear evidence of a verifiable shortage in certain areas; and the failure to recognize that certain licenses to work in the schools take more time and are far more difficult to obtain. 

The ill-fated consequence is that some districts— largely urban, small, or poor—with a greater volume of vacancies are unable to fill their classrooms with appropriately certificated and quality staff compared to their neighboring districts.. This restricts schools from  offering students  equitable  learning opportunities. It also invites a serious discussion about school district regionalization because the shortage may be just another indicator of having too many districts in the state, in this case chasing too few of the same types of hard-to-find teachers who under a different organizational arrangement could be reaching more students in need of their help. 

Unlike many other professions where the trajectory looks promising for continued growth and improvement, it is unclear whether the next generation of educators will similarly rise to the occasion and meet the myriad challenges expected of them. All we can do is hope that they will, but there are no guarantees.

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