UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Education’s Educational Leadership program prepares outstanding leaders and scholars committed to the continuous improvement of educational systems. Through its curriculum, training and partnerships, the program is tackling head-on the nationwide teacher shortage that is hitting Pennsylvania particularly hard.
“We’ve had, for over a decade, a teacher leadership program,” said Gerald K. LeTendre, H.L. Batschelet Chair of Education and professor-in-charge of the Educational Leadership program. “We don’t train new teachers, that’s (the Department of Curriculum and Instruction’s) job. But we offer a master’s in teacher leadership and the Pennsylvania Department of Education endorsement in teacher leadership. And the curriculum is really focused on helping teachers develop their own inquiry/research skills and helping them get the tools to affect change.”
The mission of the Educational Leadership program is to “positively impact educational systems through high-quality scholarship, rigorous instructional practice and equitable partnerships.” The program also has a vision of playing an integral role in promoting excellence, equity, anti-racism and social justice in education. Graduates of the program are prepared to pursue or continue careers in PreK-12 education, academia, research and/or educational policy in the area of educational leadership.
In addition, the Educational Leadership program prepares teachers to become principals in its highly ranked online principal preparation through Penn State World Campus. According to Ed Fuller, associate professor of education (educational leadership), research has shown that principals play an important role in retaining teachers in the profession by creating positive working conditions for teachers.
“The Educational Leadership program builds the capacity of aspiring leaders to support their teachers and develop positive working conditions to help teachers remain in the profession,” Fuller said.
The Educational Leadership program is poised to elevate the teaching profession in large part through its unique partnership with the Pennsylvania School Study Council (PSSC), LeTendre said. Founded in 1947, the PSSC is a partnership between Penn State and member school districts, intermediate units, and career and technology centers. PSSC is dedicated to improving public education in Pennsylvania by providing up-to-date research information, professional development activities, and technical assistance that will enable its members to provide top quality educational services to students.
“Our faculty are partnering with effective principals to offer course work that is truly competency-based, focused on real-world problems and supported by coaching by principals identified in the field as highly effective,” said Peggy Schooling, professor of practice in educational leadership and executive director of PSSC. “Effective school leaders then have greater skills and resources to develop innovative strategies to address teacher recruitment, selection, induction and retention not only as teachers enter the profession, but long-term as well, by building career ladders that develop teacher leaders and future school leaders.”
The Educational Leadership program and PSSC recently applied for a principal preparatory grant through PDE that will engage rural school district leaders in a consortium to address the specific needs of rural school leaders and their communities. At the same time, Schooling said, the project will focus on developing a collaborative partnership between Penn State and professional associations that will “strengthen how we prepare leaders for the future.”
“Historically, leadership preparation programs have not always had strong collaborative partnerships with the field,” said Schooling. “It’s our hope that we can do a better job of bridging theory and practice in onboarding new school leaders and retaining and developing more experienced leaders.”
The number of certified educators in Pennsylvania is currently at crisis levels, according to recent news reports. Just 6,000 new teachers were certified last year, down from about 20,000 a decade ago. In addition to a shortage of teachers, schools are dealing with dwindling numbers of school support staff such as bus drivers, nurses and paraprofessionals — a crisis that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The teacher shortage crisis in Pennsylvania is in line with a larger national trend, as reported recently by The Washington Post, which has led to states such as Florida and Texas taking measures such as switching to four-day school weeks and asking veterans with no teaching backgrounds to lead classrooms.
Fuller has been analyzing state data on teachers and other educators to identify the extent of the shortages of educators, the distribution of the shortages across schools, and the potential causes of the shortages. His research has shown the primary cause of the teacher shortage in Pennsylvania is a substantial decline in the number of individuals entering Pennsylvania teacher preparation programs and obtaining teacher certification.
“In fact, Pennsylvania now certifies fewer new teachers than the number of teachers on emergency permits in Pennsylvania,” said Fuller.
In addition to the decline in the number of newly certified teachers, he said, teacher attrition also affects the shortage of teachers. In Pennsylvania, teacher attrition has a notable impact in charter schools and in urban schools serving children of color.
“It is important to note that an increase in the shortage of teachers has the most pronounced effect on underfunded schools as well as schools serving high proportions of students living in poverty and students of color,” said Fuller. “In Pennsylvania, these are often the same schools.”
The teacher shortage crisis is inexorably intertwined with politics, according to LeTendre. Teacher salaries in the U.S. are notoriously low compared with other countries, he said, and many districts and states have passed policies restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history and current events.
“It’s a political dynamic and we have to work on changing the political climate and getting officials elected who understand the importance of having a highly paid teacher force,” he said.
In addition, LeTendre said, teacher preparation programs should “provide new teachers with an understanding of the political system and the kind of communication skills needed to effectively argue their points and to fight back against political forces in the community that they see as being negative.”
In the Educational Leadership program, students engage in an inquiry project on an issue in their school district. One of LeTendre’s students had been working on an issue of lack of diversity of books available in her elementary school and did research on how having a diversity of characters in early childhood reading is beneficial to children. She then presented her results to peers and the local school board.
“We really think that by having more active teacher leaders within a school — teachers who are trained to identify the problems they see, collect the data and make presentations to school boards, administrators and peers about how to affect meaningful change — that this will have a more positive impact on teachers and hopefully teaching as a profession,” he said.
School districts can take proactive steps to address the teacher shortage, LeTendre said, by focusing on community-based programs that expose high school students to the profession — which is especially important, as teacher labor markets tend to be local.
“Particularly for rural and more isolated school districts, it really makes sense to create pipelines leading back to high school,” he said. The Educational Leadership program has tried to secure tuition discounts for districts involved in Central Intermediate Unit #10, one of Pennsylvania’s 29 education service agencies.
“Given the tuition costs, it’s really incumbent upon universities to think about resources such as scholarships and tuition discounts to incentivize people to go into teaching,” LeTendre said, adding that those types of programs could be particularly beneficial to first-generation students. “Local community and university partnerships could be really important.”