By Fred DuVal
Over 1200 Arizona classrooms began last year’s fall semester without a credentialed teacher at the front of the room.
This is not only shameful and grossly unfair to students and their families; it’s also morally wrong. It places the burden of budget cuts directly on students’ shoulders, forcing them to pay the price for policy decisions made by grown-ups who should know better.
The teacher crisis in the United States has been growing for years and continues unabated. Last fall, over 50,000 classrooms across the country started the school year without a certified teacher. What’s more, over 40% of America’s public schools reported teacher vacancies last year. The average number of years a teacher stays in the profession is declining, with over a quarter million teachers leaving the profession every year.
To adapt, school districts are recruiting temporary teachers from other countries, most notably from Asian countries like Thailand. Districts are also recruiting temporary substitute teachers with or without teaching experience. And these vacant classrooms occur disproportionately in school districts with fewer resources.
Is it any wonder why, among the 31 industrialized countries, the U.S. now ranks 14th in literacy and 24th in math? Or that the 2024 Nation’s Report Card found fewer than a third of students nationwide are working at proficient levels?
The problem has many causes. Teacher salaries are low and usually do not keep pace with inflation. Not only that, but salary scales make it impossible for them to repay the student loans necessary to pursue and obtain their teaching degree. Their hearts may want to teach, but their fiscal realities simply won’t allow it.
Classroom conditions are increasingly challenging, including larger class sizes, growing challenges with discipline, and reduced classroom resources. Teachers are increasingly called on to act as social workers and address issues outside of everyday classroom instruction. Additionally, rather than be celebrated for what they do, teachers must often absorb the criticism, demands, and intrusion of helicopter parents. What’s worse, COVID-19 and online learning have greatly accelerated teacher burnout.
For the salaries we pay, the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
School districts rarely have the resource base to increase salaries to the level necessary to create demand and assure teacher retention. And states – faced with growing demand to pay for growing health care (Medicaid) and corrections costs, are hard-pressed to meet the need.
Yet, all hope is not lost. In Arizona, we devised a strategy to meet many of these challenges. We created the Arizona Teachers Academy.
This idea, one I advanced while running for Arizona Governor in 2014, was adopted by the governor who beat me in that election. It provides full-ride tuition assistance to any student pursuing a teaching degree and who has taught at Arizona schools for more than three years. It is one-to-one financing. This means that for every year a teacher draws on this state-provided assistance, they owe the state a year of teaching. We know from experience that a teacher who stays three years is twice as likely to make it a long-term career than those who don’t.
Tuition assistance also serves as a salary increase. That’s because such assistance eliminates the student loans that often cannibalize a teacher’s salary, loans that can make it unaffordable to continue a teaching career.
In the last five years, over 3000 Arizona teachers have taken advantage of this program, while over 3000 applicants remain on the waitlist (for lack of funding).
The program has become so popular that, for 2025, the Arizona Legislature is moving a bill to open the program to private universities.
States can make a policy choice to address the teacher shortage and meet the needs of our children and the next generation of educated citizens. And they should.