Retention & Support: Reversing the Teacher Labor Crisis in Rural States
The edges of Gillette, Wyoming fall away suddenly as you drive out of town; there is no transition to suburbia, no outer ring of an industrial sector, no outskirts. Once you leave the city limits, it’s two hours of driving through the starkly gorgeous Powder River Basin and Thunder Basin National Grasslands until you hit Douglas and Casper, where, if you’re wise, you’ll fill your gas tank. It’s another two-and-a-half hours of driving, staying alert for roaming pronghorn and mule deer, until you come to Laramie, the home of the University of Wyoming and the UW College of Education.
When I arrived at the University of Wyoming in 2021, I thought I knew what it meant to work at a rural land-grant institution, having spent the previous five years at the University of Vermont, in addition to seven years at the University of Georgia and six years at the University of Hawaii. While each of these states has a unique rural character, I was quickly disabused of the notion that I understood rural. Nothing in my career up to that point prepared me for the geographic vastness of my new home state and the challenges that come with those long, unpopulated stretches of unflinchingly straight highway.
It was precisely that drive from Gillette to Laramie that surfaced in my mind when members of the Wyoming state legislature asked me how we, as the state’s only educator preparation program, planned to address the “teacher labor market crisis.”
Let me take a moment to talk about what this challenge looks like from where I sit. First, let’s not lose sight of the fact that this really is a crisis in student learning and achievement, and a talent pipeline crisis for our classrooms. The disruption in the teacher labor market comes at the real cost of our children’s success. By direct extension, this labor market disruption is also a major workforce development problem for Wyoming. When our children struggle to learn because of shortages leading to less-well-qualified teachers, that will directly affect our competitiveness to attract the industries and businesses to the state that will define our proximate economic future. This is an existential threat to Wyoming’s human capital.
Yes, we need to ensure we have a well-qualified, dedicated, passionate educational professional at the front of every classroom. But plugging the hole without simultaneously eliminating the pressures driving so many teachers to leave the profession provides a false remedy to the real problem–a failing labor market for one of our state’s most essential professional occupations.
My own analysis of recent Wyoming Department of Education data reveals about 800 teachers leave Wyoming classrooms each year. Working with a base of some 7,400 full-time teachers, the churn yields an annual turnover rate of about 11 percent. Some teachers move to other schools in the state, some retire, and others leave the profession entirely. Recent data show we replace about 500 teachers annually and have a gap of about 300 teachers each school year– approximately 4 percent of the total teacher workforce in Wyoming.
These gross numbers belie the reality of these ebbs, flows, and gaps, which are not distributed evenly across the state. Districts serving higher proportions of children in poverty have a more severe challenge hiring and retaining teachers. Resolving school staffing challenges in several areas in the state is hampered by a lack of affordable housing or an adequate inventory of housing altogether. The gross numbers mask the reality that certain fields are harder to staff than others. For a variety of reasons, fields such as Career and Technical Education, Science, Math, and Special Education are particularly hard to hire in. The patterns I am describing here are not unique to Wyoming. These patterns are found in most every state.
This unevenness frustrates the temptation to simply absorb the staffing deficit through larger class sizes. Rural areas in states like Wyoming often have a small number of teachers for any given subject or grade level. If a school doesn’t have someone to teach science, for example, expanding the size of history classes does not help. This is a complex problem of matching professional expertise with local needs in a system that does not tolerate meaningful differences in compensation that could offset contextual characteristics that may make a position more or less desirable in the eyes of a well trained professional educator. There are at least two components at play here. The first is Wyoming’s overall level of compensation relative to other states in our region. We had a real advantage there a decade or more ago and enjoyed a buyer’s market for well-prepared teachers in the region. We’ve lost that advantage over time and now find it harder to draw educators to Wyoming from other states. The second component is the lack of meaningful pay differentiation by subject, grade level, and school district. In short, we seem to be missing the market with our compensation packages in some of these hard-to-staff areas.
The pipeline for new teachers is also challenged. On the front end, enrollments in educator preparation programs across the country continue to decline. Young people are voting with their feet and walking to other fields of study that lead to more desirable professions. A 2022 Merrimack survey revealed 55% of teachers say they would discourage their younger self from entering the profession. It is little mystery then that the number of new entrants falls short of the number of educators leaving the field, and they are leaving. Almost one-half of new teachers leave the field within five years, and these are well-prepared (although relatively inexperienced) professionals who have invested considerable time and resources in their training. Everyone has a vital stake in the success of our new educators, yet we let this happen as a normal course of public policy.
Attrition in the field is not limited to our newest educators; in Wyoming, a full 65% of teachers recently surveyed said they would quit the profession if they could afford to. The pandemic, coupled with an aging teacher population, chronic understaffing, poor professional development, and now the stress of culture wars playing out in our schools, has triggered a wave of departures and impending retirements that otherwise would have crested and broken in a more manageable fashion.
The confluence of these worrisome factors means that even in Wyoming, where our student population is forecast to decrease by the year 2030, I am called upon as the Dean of the state’s only College of Education to address the teacher labor market crisis.
Of course, the notion of a crisis cries for immediate action and almost begs for a quick fix, which is the last thing Wyoming (or any other state) needs. We should not lower the bar for entry into the profession—essentially deprofessionalizing teaching and creating a downward spiral that has begun in other places. Diluting teacher preparation is a disservice to our state and nation and exactly the wrong response for our children. Yes, educators must be ready within a short period of time. But our teachers, schools, and children deserve more than a stop-gap approach focusing on the wrong objective. Our children deserve a revolutionary, high-impact, sustainable solution that speaks to the heart of transformative teaching and learning–a solution that simultaneously elevates the quality of their learning and ability to apply their knowledge to real world problems.
A Revolutionary Approach to Retaining Teachers
I believe we can address the teacher labor market challenge while strengthening our schools and communities by using a creative and self-sustaining approach to retaining well-qualified teaching professionals. The math is simple: If we can cut attrition in half (from 11 percent to 5.5 percent), we realize a surplus of teachers without increasing our current rate of production. This approach mitigates the high costs associated with high teacher turnover. Hiring new teachers costs a lot more than retaining our existing teachers. And new teachers are less effective than veteran teachers. The road to addressing attrition is paved in partnership with the teachers themselves.
We have immense capacity to give early- and mid-career teachers the tools they need to be successful in the classroom, and mid-career teachers the opportunities for growth and development that will benefit them professionally and create the kinds of classrooms that a future-oriented form of education demands. We have this capacity even in Wyoming, a state with a single university and the aforementioned driving distances that make traveling for professional development impractical at best and insulting at worst. Instead, we can work with our professional educators to co-create something innovative and offer a new model that works for more teachers regardless of their location. We can transform educator preparation by increasing access and elevating quality. In the process, Wyoming will play a significant role in a much larger, national discourse around the future of public education.
At the University of Wyoming, we are reconceptualizing our commitment to the schools, families, and communities we serve across the state. Rather than solving the teacher shortage from the supply side, perpetuating the churn of teachers at the short- and long-term expense of student learning and growth, what if we reframed our work to focus on the goal of producing “master” teachers who are prepared to stay and succeed in their classrooms? Rather than focusing most of our energy on creating new teachers, what if we supported the teachers we have through mentoring and customized professional development? Everyone wins.
Think about the professional life of an educator as an arc of growth and success—as we would with any profession–and let’s dig deeper.
Wyoming Teacher Mentor Corps
First, successful professionals rely on knowledgeable and experienced mentors to master their craft. Field experience is one of the most critical components of a high-quality teacher education program. The skills and abilities to supervise and mentor teachers are determinative in the success and impact of beginning teachers. The Wyoming Teacher-Mentor Corps focuses on the two most critical periods in the development of teachers: first are the pre-service practica and classroom teaching experiences in the College of Education’s educator preparation programs; second is the in-service, induction phase of a new teacher’s entry into the profession. Decades of scholarship show the importance and value of expert support during each of these periods—the Wyoming Teacher-Mentor Corps’ purpose is to ensure expert support in a consistent way. Building on the Wyoming Coaching Laboratory, an earlier investment made through the UW Trustees Education Initiative, the Teacher-Mentor Corps focuses on cultivating mentoring skills to support each phase of an emerging master teacher’s career.
The first cohort of the Wyoming Teacher Mentor Corps is entering the second half of their program. This initial cohort of 22 teachers was selected from more than 90 nominations across the state and represents educators in almost every content area and grade-level. Mentors in the first cohort have a variety of responsibilities including mentoring first-year teachers in classrooms next door, mentoring teachers in the same building but in different content areas, and even mentoring teachers in completely different districts.
Cohort One met virtually in November and January and will meet again in February and April. They will attend an in-person Spring Retreat in March and return to the University of Wyoming Campus in June where they will be introduced to Cohort Two. The final meeting of Cohort One will take place in September 2023.
Master Educator Program
The Wyoming Teacher-Mentor Corps’ effects will ripple throughout the arc of an educator’s career. Student teachers and new teachers will obviously benefit during their training. Veteran teachers can reflect on their own learning and develop their mentorship skills. But we can’t stop there. The goal is for teachers to stay in the profession and develop an intrinsic desire to grow and learn continually. We must provide opportunities for educators to do so in meaningful ways. Across the board, professional development (PD) for educators has been chronically ineffective. Sometimes it’s irrelevant, or not appropriately incentivized, or impractical to obtain. Online PD has great potential, but until recently has been a poor substitute for in-person experiences, as the mechanisms for delivery and the quality of available programs have been highly variable.
The delivery of high-quality professional learning is where the potential for transformation is perhaps the greatest. We can give student teachers the mentorship needed to set them up for success in their classrooms, stemming the rate of attrition in the first few years of their career. Now we have better-prepared novice teachers and mid-career teachers who have enough experience to know what they don’t know and to see what changes they might want (or need) to bring to their classrooms or districts. How do we deliver PD to them that is relevant and practical? We treat them as the experts in their classrooms and systems, and we ask them what their needs are. Where are the gaps in their knowledge? What issues need attention? What can they do to increase equity in their classrooms and beyond? Working with educators to co-create meaningful and relevant PD affords them the respect they deserve and is of direct and immediate benefit to their students and schools.
The model of PD that we strive for centers the learners, creating cohorts with specific foci, and fashioning modules that can be scaffolded and arranged according to each educator’s needs and abilities. Adults who demonstrate mastery in an area can move on to another module or build upon a previous one. The endpoint can be a single module or a job-embedded master’s degree. It is competency-based learning at its best, delivering relevant, respectful, and co-created professional development with the educators participating in it.
High Altitude Pathways
The Wyoming Teacher-Mentor Corps and Master Educator Program engage the span of pre-service teacher candidates to master teachers supporting and nurturing professional success in our community of educators. The High-Altitude Pathways Program is the third component of the arc of a Master Educator model focused on improving the pipeline of aspiring professional educators.
High Altitude Pathways, a UW College of Education and Trustees Education Initiative that was awarded a three-year grant from the US Dept. of Education, supports rural high school students’ enrollment and persistence in post-secondary education. We’ve emphasized education-related programs. The grant’s funding cycle began October 1, 2022, and runs through September 20, 2025. The College is working with national nonprofit College for Every Student (CFES Brilliant Pathways) to provide high-quality training, resources, and college-and-career advising certifications to rural Wyoming school staff and students. The goal of the project is to increase the number of students from rural Wyoming schools who enroll, persist, and complete post-secondary education/training programs. These post-secondary programs can be anything from a license or certificate to an associate or bachelor’s degree. To accomplish this goal the College will use a form of the Master Educator Program to:
Train College and Career Readiness Advisors;
Train students, staff, and community members in the Essential Skills for success in post-secondary education and the workforce;
Deliver a 10-point plan for college and career readiness with the support of CCR advisors;
Develop cohorts of near-peer mentors from Wyoming community colleges and the University of Wyoming who will work with High Altitude scholars (HS students);
Get high school students on college campuses both in-person and virtually to connect to the people they will need to know to be successful.
Reprofessionalize Teaching to Elevate Learning and Stem Attrition
The key to professional training and development is to take the “professional” part seriously. For too long, teaching has been dismissed with the tired adage that “those who can’t do, teach.” Teachers have been too frequently mischaracterized as glorified babysitters or over-unionized part-time workers. More recently, our educators and schools have come under intense scrutiny and pressure from parents, state legislators, and school boards who have been whipped into a frenzy over perceived abrogation of parental rights.
So, when I am asked, “What will you do about the teacher labor market crisis?” I am genuinely excited to talk about the Teacher Mentor Corps and the imminent innovations in professional development that are in the works. But truly, the first thing that we all must do–parents, school boards, politicians, media personalities, and even other teachers–is to stop kicking our educators when they’re down. Stop kicking them, period. Treat them first of all like human beings who have the best interest of students at heart, because nearly all of them do. Then treat them like the professionals they are.
We all have something to gain when we approach teachers with respect and enhance professionalism within the field of education. Those outside the field can begin by asking themselves what they are really afraid of, and whether or not teachers and schools are just the latest lightning rod for the heightened collective mood. Those of us within the field can ask teachers what they need, treating them as the experts in their classrooms and systems–and then deliver what they have identified as essential to doing their jobs well and feeling supported. And in this new, respectful, holistic approach, we must never forget that the ultimate beneficiaries are the students, all of whom deserve to thrive in learner-centered and equitable spaces.
In some ways, Wyoming is an ideal laboratory to bear out the results of a changing approach to educator training and mentorship. While we are not exactly a “closed system,” the University of Wyoming produces a significant percentage of our state’s educators, and we are the largest provider of educator professional development in the state. We are also talking about a relatively small number of teachers and education professionals statewide, so we will be able to see results quickly and gauge the efficacy of changes in the absence of variables that exist in more populated regions with more resources.
We have everything we need to connect our educators to the training and mentorship they want, and the support they deserve. And while Wyoming is well situated in this regard, we are not unique. The process of revolutionizing teacher training and PD can begin anywhere by asking our teaching professionals what they need, and then listening to the answer. There are resources to begin these conversations and coaches are available to help ask the right questions.
None of this will move Gillette closer to Laramie, but the vast distances between our cities and towns are becoming irrelevant. Whether in Jackson, Sheridan, or Cheyenne, Wyoming educators will be able to identify what type of training and development will address their specific needs, and they will be able to access it in learner-centered, respectful,and appropriately incentivized ways. I have described the only road we need to travel, and we already have a map.
