A teacher helps a student with a math problem.
Credit: Sarah Tully /EdSource
I am still making peace with a difficult truth. I am not sure I did enough for my students during my short tenure as a teacher.
After two years as an intern, I held a preliminary credential and felt ready for my sixth grade class. Then I was quickly thrown into a new eighth grade class due to dropping enrollment at Los Angeles Unified School District. Just like my students, I felt awkward and uneasy — brand new again. I studied hard and quickly. I had amazing students who learned with me. But, I still think about Luis, a smart young man who struggled with reading, yet could understand complex concepts.
Luis and I both worked hard but needed more support than we were getting. I woke up at 3 am daily as we approached eighth grade promotion trying to think of how to reach him while there was still time. Unfortunately, by the end of that school year, our city, state, and nation began to feel the effects of a recession.
Pink slips had been issued. I had other options and left teaching.
Now I am an advocate focused on how to improve student learning and teacher working conditions and outcomes. Nearly two decades later, we have a lot of the same problems — economic volatility, dropping enrollment, and revolving teacher shortages. We can add the pandemic and its aftermath. It has been a downward spiral for teachers, with many leaving the profession and districts raising alarm bells about cuts.
There is one key difference though.
We now have access to a powerful data tool, Teaching Assignment Monitoring Outcomes (TAMO), a data set that reflects student access to teachers who are appropriately assigned and fully credentialed in the subject area and for the students they are teaching. This data is available statewide and can be traced to the school level. It ultimately reveals where we need greater focus and investments on teacher recruitment and retention.
A third year of data was just released on DataQuest. Eighty-three percent of the state’s teachers are fully prepared. That is a good average, but still leaves nearly 1 in 7 classes taught by teachers who are not fully credentialed and properly assigned. We also must analyze the data across and within districts to assess the equitable access to qualified teachers for low-income students, students of color, English learners, and other student subgroups in our diverse student population.
Educators, parents, policymakers, advocates, and community leaders can conduct that equity analysis and engage in transparent, local conversations to examine unique areas of need such as disparities between schools with high and low proportions of English learners at the same district, or shortages in specific areas such as math or career technical education.
Public access to this data allowed our colleagues at The Education Trust–West (Ed Trust-West) to develop the TAMO Data Dashboard. They found, within districts, schools with the highest percentages of students of color and low-income students have less access to fully prepared and properly assigned teachers. The tool also shows where higher proportions of high-need students are associated with more access to qualified teachers. By exploring this data we could identify places that have successful policies and practices to effectively and equitably recruit and retain fully prepared teachers.
While a wide variety exists, districts also have their own systems to closely track hiring, retention, and vacancies. Actionable and publicly accessible teacher data systems are critical in our long-term quest to effectively and equitably staff schools. Oakland Unified, where 61% of teachers are fully prepared, has developed a public dashboard to track teacher retention data disaggregated by race/ethnicity. Oakland also employs a teacher satisfaction survey to help potentially identify systemic issues with teacher working conditions much sooner. It is possible to address teacher stress and provide more support to newer teachers at specific schools, for example, before they become overwhelmed and take steps toward leaving their jobs.
District, county, and state leaders who use data to precisely define their teacher workforce challenges may have more capacity to envision solutions, such as those in the California Educator Diversity Roadmap, published by Californians for Justice, Public Advocates and Ed Trust-West.
Teachers have enormous impact on individual life trajectories, school communities, and, in the aggregate, whole societies. We must prioritize and invest in the potential of teachers as we recruit, train, and retain them to help students also reach their full potential.
Luis and I didn’t get what we needed back in 2008, but we had assets. I built on mine when I moved on from El Sereno Middle School and I hope he did too. We have much better access to data today. We must match that data with action.
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Angelica Salazar is senior policy advocate on the education equity team of Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization that challenges the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination.
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