A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

The Coming Crisis

While confronting the challenges that we currently face in ensuring good teaching, the United States must prepare for even greater challenges that lie ahead—challenges of quantity, quality, and equity. (Overhead 17)

Quantity

Over the next ten years, the nation will face a tremendous demand for additional teachers.

• Over 2 million teachers needed. The nation's schools will need to hire an estimated 2.2 million public school teachers (including both beginning teachers and those returning to the classroom) in the next decade to serve the growing enrollment of students and to fill a record number of vacancies as the first "baby boomers" begin to retire.^[34]
• Many beginning teachers needed. One-half to two-thirds of these newly hired teachers will be beginning teachers, if hiring patterns remain the same.^[35]
• Teachers for high-poverty schools. Current rates of attrition suggest that high-poverty school districts will need to hire over 700,000 teachers in the next ten years.^[36]
• Turnover in the teaching force. This turnover—over one million beginning teachers in ten years—is significant, given that there are currently about 3 million teachers nationwide.^[37]

Quality

While the quantity of teachers will increase in the coming years, so will the need to improve the quality of teaching in our classrooms in order to meet the nation's education goals. Teachers need to know and do more than ever before. They need content mastery and strong teaching skills, and they need to effectively address an array of daunting challenges such as the following: (Overhead 18)

• Greater racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity;
• Increased expectations for educating students with learning disabilities, physical impairments, and other special needs, in regular education classrooms;
• Greater numbers of students who lack basic proficiency in English;
• Greater numbers of students at risk or in crisis because of violence, inadequate nutrition, housing, health and medical care, and other adverse conditions in their homes and communities;
• Increased use of technology; and
• Greater responsibility on the part of teachers to assume more leadership in schools.

Equity

Our nation's high-poverty communities have the most difficulty attracting and retaining qualified teachers. Therefore, students in high-poverty urban and rural schools—the very students who need the best teachers because of the challenges that poverty brings to the classroom—often have teachers who are the least qualified.

• Unequal student access to effective teachers. A study in Tennessee found that African American students are much less likely to have effective teachers than their white counterparts.^[38] (Overhead 19)

This is a fundamental issue of equity. When any students receive instruction from unqualified teachers, we are denying them access to a quality education.

If poor and minority children had teachers of the same quality as other children, a large part of the achievement gap would disappear.... In the hands of our best teachers, the effects of poverty and institutional racism melt away, allowing these students to soar to the same heights as young Americans from more advantaged homes. But if they remain in the hands of underqualified teachers, poor and minority students will continue to fulfill society's limited expectations of them.[39] Education Trust, Good Teaching Matters

Our Challenge for the 21st Century

As a nation, can we commit to high standards for all students, and thus for all teachers?

Whether we meet this challenge will determine the strength and prosperity of our democracy.

[The Current State of Teaching in America]

[Challenges from the U.S. Secretary of Education]