Teacher Preparation Policy
Teacher Supply and Demand Data: West Virginia publishes district-level data on the percentage of teachers with three or fewer years of experience or who are provisionally licensed. The percent of classes taught by fully licensed teachers is also publicly available. This data is disaggregated by Title I and Non-Title I schools. However, this data is not provided by certification area.
West Virginia has published an annual Personnel Data Report, which provided information regarding supply and employment, broken down by both specialization and by district. This report also outlined the reasons that positions were not filled, such as lack of qualified applicants and/or current fiscal restraints. However, these reports have not been updated since 2014-2015.
Teacher mobility data: West Virginia has published data on reasons why teachers did not return for employment the following year. The state tracked 11 reasons for leaving including: retired, deceased, resigned to accept an education position in West Virginia or out-of-state, or resigned to accept employment in a non-education position. This information is tracked at both the state and district levels. However, the most recent data published pertains to teachers employed during the 2013-2014 school year who did not return for the 2014-2015 school year.
Publicly report information on teacher production.
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. West Virginia should
strive to collect a rich set of data that can inform policy decisions,
including graduates by program, ethnicity, and gender, as well as new
hire information broken down by these levels. These data can then be
used to determine, when connected with teacher program data, teacher
shortage and surplus areas.
Track teacher mobility data and make it publicly available.
West Virginia
should not only track teacher mobility data at both the state and
district levels, but it should also 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 West Virginia's teaching force.
West Virginia recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis. The state also indicated that it has shifted the data collection efforts to a more accurate collection of staffing of classrooms with certified teachers. The data provides more clear information regarding where the staffing shortages lie.
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.