Teacher Preparation Policy
Teacher Supply and Demand Data: Kansas's Teacher Vacancy and Supply report includes the top five vacancy areas by board district, reasons for vacancies, overall demographic data on age and experience of educators, and the total number of licenses issued in the state, but not by certification area. However, no connection is made between these data, and consequently this report provides an incomplete analysis of teacher supply and demand in Kansas.
Teacher Mobility Data: The Teacher Vacancy and Supply report contains state-level data on teacher stability and movement between districts, but district-level mobility data is not provided.
Publish data that connect program supply data to district-level demand data.
Teacher preparation programs graduate more candidates each year than actually earn certification, and only some of those certified are ultimately hired to teach in the state. It is certainly desirable to produce a large enough pool to provide districts a choice in hiring, but a substantial oversupply of teacher candidates in some teaching areas serves neither the profession nor the students well. Kansas is on the right track publishing district-level hiring data. However, the state should strive to collect a rich set of data that can inform policy decisions, including graduates by certification, ethnicity, and gender. These data can then be used to determine, when connected with district hiring data, teacher shortage and surplus areas.
Track teacher mobility data and make it publicly available.
Although Kansas is on the right track producing state-level teacher mobility data, the state should also provide this data at the district level, and make these data publicly available, consistent with applicable privacy constraints. Providing detailed analyses of teacher mobility and attrition will help provide a clearer picture of Kansas's teaching force.
Kansas did not respond to NCTQ's request to review this analysis for accuracy.
1B: Teacher Shortages and Surpluses
It is an inefficient use of resources for individual districts to build their own data systems for tracking teachers. States need to take the lead and provide districts with state-level data that can be used not only for the purpose of measuring teacher effectiveness, but also to gauge the supply and demand of teachers in the state.[1] Furthermore, multiple years of data are necessary to identify staffing trends.
Many preparation programs graduate people who are certified to teach but do not get jobs in the classroom. Often times, this is because these teachers pursue certifications in areas that already have a surplus of teachers (e.g., elementary education), while districts struggle to find applicants to hire in other areas (e.g., special education, science).[2] Given this misalignment between the teachers that teacher preparation programs produce and the hiring needs of school districts, the state should step in to establish a cohesive data reporting system. By creating reports that publicly delineate the number of teachers produced by each teacher preparation program (and therefore by certification area), the state will be better able to identify instances where the production of teachers does not match districts' needs.
Furthermore, the state should consider whether teacher preparation programs are supplying districts with the teachers they need when approving or re-approving programs. Teacher preparation programs exist primarily to prepare teachers for public school positions (approximately 88 percent of teachers work in public schools).[3] If teacher preparation programs produce far more teachers than the state needs in some certification areas and far too few in others, the programs are failing to meeting their state's demand. Moreover, student teaching placements (which tend to be near candidates' teacher prep programs) are highly predictive of where candidates will get their first teaching jobs, therefore also allowing states the ability to predict which open positions are likely to be filled.[4] Given that the preparation program's function is to supply the nearby area (and more generally, the state) with public school teachers, it is incumbent upon the state to make sure the program fulfills that responsibility, particularly through the collection and application of data on teacher production numbers and district demand.
Additional elements are needed to use data to assess teacher supply and demand. For example, states should include in their data systems means of tracking when teachers leave schools or districts, as well as when they re-enter new ones, and should make these data publicly available. These data can support the state's effort to build a cohesive picture of the state's teacher labor market and workforce needs.