Good reporting imparts good information

From US Schools Facing Mass Exodus of Teachers Who Won’t Return This Fall by Autumn Spredemann.  I don't read the Epoch Times all that much but people periodically recommend it so I have been dipping in with greater frequency.  

Based on a meaninglessly small sample size, they do a somewhat better job around numerical issues than NPR, Washington Post or New York Times, my historical sources.  When I saw the above headline at Epoch, my immediate response was "How do they know?"  Is there really an exodus? 

Compared to the other mainstream media, Sprederman does a reasonable job of making her case.  Whereas NPR, Washington Post or New York Times will usually just quote people asserting that there is an exodus (and usually people from just one side of the issue), you actually want to show that there is an increased teacher turnover rate or that there is a survey metric that is a reliable leading indicator.  For example, if increasingly teachers say on surveys that they intend to leave the profession and that survey measure strongly correlates to an actual future increase in turnover, that is useful information.

Further, you want to give context.  It is not enough to say that there is a 15% turnover rate among teachers on an annual basis.  If you are arguing that there is a mass exodus, you have to show that 15% is meaningfully greater than in the recent past or long term averages.

These are numeracy hurdles which NPR, Washington Post, and the New York Times rarely clear.  They assert.  They use surveys of intent as actual outcomes.  When they do use data, it is out of context.  etc.

In this instance, The Epoch Times does reasonably well.

The average national turnover rate was only 16 percent before COVID-19. However, in 2021, that number jumped to 25 percent.

[snip]

Yet the struggle to keep existing educators and hire new ones is only half the battle. A new report from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education indicates that university students pursuing teaching degrees are declining.

In 2019, U.S. colleges awarded fewer than 90,000 undergraduate degrees in education. That’s down from nearly 200,000 a year in the 1970s. Over the past 10 years alone, the number of people completing traditional teacher preparation programs has dropped by 35 percent. 

 

[snip] 

 

“This is a five-alarm crisis,” said NEA president Becky Pringle.

One of the hurdles administrators face amid the staff scarcity is a lengthy certification and training process even after qualified university graduates apply to teach.

“I want to continue teaching—however, I’m being forced out,” Lisa Carley Hotaling told The Epoch Times.

Having taught in Michigan and New York, Hotaling found herself between a rock and a hard place after she took a teaching job in California as an emergency hire in the Alameda Unified school district.

Despite already having a master’s degree and more than a decade of education and classroom experience, she still has to take the California Basic Skills Test (CBEST) and go back to school specifically for her master’s in education to continue teaching.

“That only gives me a one year credential,” Hotaling explained. “[Then] I’ll be required to return to school to do what I’m already doing in the classroom. It makes no sense. And I have to pay for further education on top of it?”

All-in-all, some good old-fashioned reporting with a solid mix of pertinent data, context, source quotation, and illustrative anecdote.  

Even so there is still a clanger, though possibly due to the reporter's sources and her not catching the issue.

Findings from a joint study on the role of school counselors from the Connecticut State Department of Education, the Connecticut School Counselor Association, and the Center for School Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst revealed schools with fewer students and more counselors had lower rates of student suspensions and disciplinary actions.

Good to quote studies but there is such an obvious confounder that it needed to be addressed but is not.  Schools which can afford to be smaller and which can afford many counselors are presumably also wealthier schools with a student body from more affluent and competent families.  The implication being that wealth and class and marital status are potential confounders when considering suspensions and disciplinary actions.  Especially when it is already known that poorer schools have a higher prevalence of single-parent families and also higher disciplinary issues.

Still, she did good journalistic work compared to her brethren at NPR, Washington Post, and the New York Times.  

Sprederman does have one item which is not explored but I suspect is relevant.

He also thinks a general lack of respect for educators underscores why more are leaving their jobs early, and others are reluctant to apply.

“The respect situation is just a huge issue,” he said.

Marks was candid when asked about the difficulties of hiring new talent in schools. “I don’t know right now, given the way the world is, if I’d be interested in being a classroom teacher.”

Marks is making the argument that low respect for the profession leads to lower applications and higher turnover.  That is plausible.  But it is worth thinking about whether the profession does have a low reputation and, if so, why.  

Curious, I checked Gallup.  Indeed, in 2021, people had a high regard for grade-school teachers with 64% assessing grea-school teachers as having high or very high honesty and ethics.  Context: reporters (17%), car salesmen (7%), lobbyists (5%), police officers (53%), military officers (61%), nurses (83%). 

However, nurses have basically been at 80-85% every year for the past twenty years.  Teachers, on the other hand are down from 73% in 2002.  And I suspect this understates the decline.  I wonder what the numbers will be in 2025 once people have fully digested what happened.

We are coming off a two-year period when parents have been enormously impacted by misguided and dangerous policy from public health organizations, politicians, and teachers unions.  Schools never needed to close.  Vaccine mandates are and never were appropriate for children.  School closures have been very damaging to children's physical and mental health in addition to the lost learning.

And teacher's unions led the charge for all these policies.  I am not surprised that there might be a decline in public respect for the profession.  It seems like their behaviors as professionals (via their unions) has warranted a decline in respect.

Especially given that there were all along, loud and persistent voices drawing attention to the poor evidentiary base for the union-supported policies.  It is one thing to suddenly have to spend two years effectively home-schooling your own children (and probably foregoing meaningful employment to do so).  It is quite another when you do that because others forced you into that role for no good reason.