Education Policy – Teacher Shortage and Other Challenges

CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST: This Special Episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live at Capitol Weekly’s Conference on Education Policy which was held in Sacramento on Tuesday, November 7, 2023.

This is Panel 1 – TEACHER SHORTAGE AND OTHER CHALLENGES

PANELISTS: Heather J. Hough, Policy Analysis for California Education, Stanford University; Katie Hardeman, California Teachers Association; David Schapira, California School Employees Association; Melissa White, WestEd

Moderated by Brian Joseph for Capitol Weekly

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Tim Foster: Hello, my name is Tim Foster and I’m with Open California. We are the 501 [c] 3 nonprofit publisher of Capitol Weekly, and we are the host of Capitol Weekly’s Conference on Education Policy. Thank you so much for showing up. I want to thank right off the bat our sponsors to this event. We are a 501 [c] 3, and the only way that we are able to do these types of events is with the support of our underwriters who make the lunch come; They make the coffee show up. So thanks to them. And so, our underwriters for today’s event are the Tribal Alliance of Sovereign Indian Nations, the Western States Petroleum Association, KP Public Affairs, Perry Communications, Capitol Advocacy, Lucas Public Affairs, the Weideman Group, and the California Professional Firefighters. And again, without them we wouldn’t be here.

So, I also want to turn us over to Brian Joseph, who is our moderator for today’s panel on the Teacher Shortage and Other Challenges. Brian is a longtime journalist in California and has been doing a lot of work for us at Capitol Weekly and has also been working for the State Net Capitol Journal. And he is going to handle our panel today. We will take questions at the end of the hour, so if you have questions, please hold onto them for the last 10 minutes or so. If you’re watching on Zoom, send those in the Q&A function, and we will try to get to those if we can. Thanks again for coming. Brian, I’m gonna go ahead and turn this over to you. Thank you.

Brian Joseph: Thanks, Tim. Welcome everybody to the Teacher Shortage and Other Challenges facing education here in California. I’m gonna introduce our esteem panel here, and then we’ll just get right into it. To my immediate left is Heather Hough, the Executive Director of Policy Analysis for California Education at Stanford University. Next to her is Melissa White, the Project Director in Innovation Studies at WestEd. Next to her is David Schapira, the Director of Government Relations for the California School Employees Association. And next to Mr. Schapira is Katie Hardeman, who is a legislative advocate for the California Teachers Association. Thank you all for joining us today.

Of course the panel today is, is about teacher shortage and other challenges. I thought a good way for us to start today would be to just let each of the panelists in their own words, describe the state of California education today. And obviously with an eye towards the challenges it faces. Ms. Hough, if you’d like to start us off.

 Heather Hough: Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Can you all hear me okay? So I think in a nutshell what I wanna emphasize is that the work of teaching and learning has gotten much more difficult in California schools in the wake of the pandemic, as we all know, schools closed in March of 2020. Students learned virtually during that time, but also were affected by a global pandemic, which had a differential economic and social and health effect on communities across our state. So when students came back to school, they were very behind academically. They remained behind. Our current test scores show that in ELA students are 4.4 percentage points behind pre-pandemic cohorts. And in math, 5.1 percentage points.

They lack socialization from their time out of school, which is leading to behavioral issues in class. There is a youth mental health crisis, not just in California, but nationwide, and student absenteeism has skyrocketed during this time. So in 2022 to ’23, 25% of California students were chronically absent. That means they’re missing 10% or more of school versus 12% prior to the pandemic.

So, you take all of these things together and we’re asking our teachers to accelerate learning to catch students up, but students aren’t necessarily in class. When you think about if you have 25% of your students absent 10% of the time, it’s very uncommon then to have a day where every student is there, which makes the job of educating those kids a lot harder. And then adding to that, we’ve had significant staffing challenges.

 So state and federal funds were meant to be used in a lot of cases for hiring additional people, assistants, paraprofessionals, attendance coordinators. And it’s been difficult to hire for those positions, in part because the pay for those positions is low. And in part because we didn’t just have an existing workforce to fill those slots, which means that teachers are trying to do a lot more every day with no additional support or resources, which is leading to more difficult working conditions, burnout, and in a lot of cases, higher teacher turnover. And I’ll stop there.

BJ: That’s a great answer, Ms. White, please.

Melissa White: All right. Well, I would just echo what Heather shared to say it’s the student achievement is clearly stagnant and has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. And only about a 1/3 or fewer of our students of color and academically disadvantaged students are meeting grade level standards. I’d say that record student absences like Heather just shared, and our teacher shortages are among some of the key drivers of these shortages. And we’re seeing staff shortages in classrooms that aren’t just in STEM classrooms and bilingual and special education, but also for aides and counselors and even teaching substitutes.

“I don’t think there’s a shortage on the teacher side, and I don’t think there’s a shortage on the classified side…. The only thing there’s a shortage of is people who are willing to take a vow of poverty to do that work.” – David Schapira

So I see stabilizing the teacher workforce as a really critical step that we need to take to solve the challenges we’re facing with student achievement. The state has made really unprecedented investments in teacher workforce over the last several years. And there’s a big opportunity right now to sustain these investments and make them work for our teachers and our students. But a lot of the work that needs to be done involves systems change, and that’s hard work. And what we’re seeing right now is that a lot, there’s a lot of implementation issues that are cropping up with these large investments the state has made. So looking ahead in the next few years before these funds expire, I see a real opportunity to think about the systems change work that needs to happen.

Panel 1, Teacher Shortage and Other Challenges. Brian Joseph, Heather Hough, Melissa White, David Schapira and Katie Hardeman. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

WestEd has recently convened a new effort that is focused on state level coordination needed among the state agencies that oversee teacher workforce to try and problem solve some of the major implementation issues that are coming up. It’s really felt like groundbreaking effort in the sense that we’re bringing agency leads and their deputies together to problem solve together. And that includes IHE leadership as well. Currently we’re focusing on the very real and challenging issue of teacher of the affordability of teacher preparation.

BJ: Mr. Schapira.

David Schapira: Thank you, Brian. I’m just gonna start off by saying I am going to be Brian’s least favorite panelist today because I am going to refuse to accept the premise of pretty much all of the questions, I assume, and the really the topic of today’s forum.

I think both of the key words and the topic are “teacher” and “shortage.” And I’m not gonna talk about either of those things because our, first of all, I don’t represent any teachers. I represent all the other school employees who open schools and ensure they’re clean and safe and make sure kids get a ride, and that they have meals when they get there. And so it’s not just about the teachers. And Heather gave a great lead into this because there’s a lot of other stuff that goes on in a school that that’s critically important to student learning. And so that’s where I’m gonna focus today.

And the other word is “shortage.” I don’t believe there is a shortage. I don’t think there’s a shortage on the teacher side, and I don’t think there’s a shortage on the classified side. There’s no shortage of certificated teachers in California. There are more certificated teachers than there are teaching positions. There are more people qualified for classified work in the school system. For example, people with CDLs who could be bus drivers, people who could work, food service custodians. There are more of those folks in California than there are jobs.

The only thing there’s a shortage of is people who are willing to take a vow of poverty to do that work.

And so, like I said, I’m going to refuse to accept the premise of both the words teacher and shortage. But I want to really highlight because I think Heather hit the nail on the head in terms of, I think our key problem that we’re trying to address in this conversation. And that is that we have many students who are not in class, and we have many students who are in class who are not prepared to learn.

And the way to address those problems is to address the whole child. And so we have to ensure both that students are at school. And so that requires ensuring that we have wrap-around services to provide.. to make sure that students’ health needs are being met so that they’re well, we need to ensure that we have bus drivers and buses to get them there. California only transports 9% of students to school. That’s the lowest in the nation by a lot.

And we have to ensure that students have meals in their bellies because a hungry student is not ready to learn. And so there’s a lot of things that we need to address around the classroom that affect what happens in the classroom. And that’s what I’ll focus on today.

BJ: This will be interesting. Ms. Hardeman, please.

 Katie Hardeman: Great. Thank you. And I agree with all of the other panelists and great points David. I will just say education is, along with many other sectors, is obviously still recovering from the pandemic. And we knew it was going to be a long recovery then, and that has proved to be true now. And not just academically, but all of the other whole child things, wellbeing of our kids.

And I’ll say too, public education is constantly under attack. And whether that’s at the state level through Initiatives and things that I know folks will talk about later today, or locally through local school board actions or even individual school sites, our schools have become more and more politicized, and that puts more pressure on students, teachers, staff and everyone at our school sites.

So it’s not surprising, California’s had a shortage of educators for a long time. This is not new especially in certain subjects in certain areas of the state. But obviously through the pandemic… [chuckle] I’m talking to me you. That has been exacerbated.

And so, we’ve seen a record number of retirements and just the candidates not keeping up with the needs. So and CTA did a survey last year with UCLA and Hart Research and found we surveyed about 4,500 of our members just on how teachers are feeling. And the results were scary. About half of teachers said they considered leaving the profession. One in five teachers said they planned on leaving the profession in the next three years. So the shortage could get worse, [chuckle] before it gets better, unless we take some actions.

But I wanted to just note, make one note that our survey obviously focused on teachers, but it does go beyond, well beyond the teachers of also all, all staff that we need to support our students with.

BJ: If I may, I’m gonna summarize what the four of you all said, and I wanna get your reaction to it each of you. It sounds like despite what Mr. Schapira said, and it actually sounds to me that, that all of you’re saying about the same thing, which is that on the one hand, working as a teacher in California is very difficult for a number of reasons. Student absenteeism, the politicization of our schools, and also coming out of the pandemic, that’s one issue. It’s a tough job, basically, if you wanna summarize it in that simple of a way. At the other hand, it’s also a tough job that doesn’t pay very well. [chuckle]

Am I correct that that is the crux of what all of you are saying, that this is a tough job that doesn’t pay well, and that’s why we’re having problems? Is that fair? You’re squinting Mr. Schapira.

“In the past 10 years, we’ve increased pretty dramatically our per-pupil funding, but we’re still below the national average when you adjust for the cost of living.” – Heather Hough

DS: Well, I’ll say pay is just one aspect. I mentioned earlier the fact that we have difficulty finding bus drivers, which is one of the reasons that we transport the lowest percentage of students in the country. And just, I want you to close your eyes and picture that I’m offering you a job. I want you to work for 20 hours a week for no benefits, no pension eligibility. You need to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, gonna work for a couple hours in the morning, a few hours in the afternoon. You’re required to have a CDL. You’re required to go through an annual CHP inspection, and you’ll be the only adult with 35 screaming kids for all of your work hours. And you’ll be driving. And by the way, we’re gonna compensate you a grand total of minimum wage.

So does anyone in this room know anyone that would take that job?

I’m always shocked when I talk to my members who are school bus drivers that they are willing to work under those conditions. So pay is just one piece of it. And it’s not just school bus drivers, it’s paraeducators in the classroom. It’s cafeteria workers, it’s custodians who are dealing with very difficult working conditions. And I think what society as a whole forgets, and sometimes the legislature forgets, and our school leaders forget, is that my members’ working conditions are your students’ learning conditions.

Panel 1, Teacher Shortage and Other Challenges. Brian Joseph, Heather Hough, Melissa White, David Schapira and Katie Hardeman. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

And so it’s about pay, but it’s about a lot of other things that contribute to people’s willingness to accept and do a job. And it’s also about providing them with the tools they need to be successful.

HH: I think I’ll add to that. California has underfunded our schools for many, many decades. And in the past 10 years, we’ve increased pretty dramatically our per-pupil funding, but we’re still below the national average when you adjust for the cost of living. It’s very, very expensive to live in California. So to paint the picture of what it’s like for a teacher, you go to college, you invest in a teaching credential, you take a job for $60,000 in a town where it costs $3,200 a month to pay your rent, right?

So you’re an educated professional. You’re going to be asked to dedicate your entire being to these students. And you want to, because that’s your passion. You wanna serve kids, but in order to do that, you’re having to sacrifice your ability to make a living wage and to live a good life, even as a professional who’s made this big investment.

MW: Yeah. Well, I will would definitely agree with your summary Brian and the comments my co-panelists have made and only add that in addition to it being an incredibly difficult job with low pay for many teachers and that the pay being unaffordable in many places in our state for teachers to well find a basic housing situation, there’s also, so there’s a lot of challenges that the tough job and the low pay create, right? There’s supply side and demand side. So we’ve got, we’re losing teachers, so we have a leaky faucet problem. But then we’re also struggling to attract teachers into the profession in part because of the challenge of teachers, prospective teachers understanding those issues that we just discussed. And in addition to the fact that we make becoming a teacher, often very difficult.

“In California, teachers make about 19% less than other professionals with similar background and training” – Katie Hardeman

And to take an example right now, the state has just made a large investment in programs called teacher residencies, which are considered to be very high quality, clinically-rich pathways into the profession. Those programs require teachers to basically spend a year working for free, which is a fabulous opportunity for training. But most people can’t take a year to work for free in and the classroom of a mentor teacher.

There’s a lot of funding the state has made available to prospective teachers to support them in these programs. But those dollars aren’t getting into the hands of those prospective teachers in seamless and easy ways. We’ve made accessing those funds extremely difficult. And not only that, we see some programs absolutely able to pull together packages for their candidates that are approximating the wages that a teacher who opted for a fast track into the profession might make as a full-time teacher. But there’s so much what we might call undesirable variation in that many, many other programs are not offer offering those kind of packages. And teachers are being forced to… prospective teachers are being forced to choose between things like eating and paying for textbooks. And that’s not the way to get the teachers we want into our profession.

KH: And if I could just add, I agree with the other panelists in terms of it’s not just pay, it’s also working conditions, which are also student learning conditions. So, in California, teachers make about 19% less than other professionals with similar background and training, so that needs to be addressed. But also, our class sizes are also working conditions for teachers and learning conditions for students. So we have some some work to do on the class sizes and support staff in our class, in our classrooms and in our schools. So having school nurses and mental health professionals and paraprofessionals and all of those people that support students so that it can take some of that burden off of our teachers who are asked to do more and more and more, because we don’t have the funding to hire those people.

BJ: It’s fascinating as much as the four of you come from different backgrounds and different perspectives, you’re all basically saying the same thing. So I guess as a journalist I like to hold people accountable. Who is to blame for this? Who is… Is it society’s lack of value that it places on teachers and on the education system? Is this… Should we be upset at superintendents, school boards, the legislature, a litigious society? What is causing these dual issues, poor working conditions, and lousy pay and benefits for people that work in our schools? Who of us in the audience can we go to and say, it’s your fault for making this problem? Who’s to blame for this?

HH: Well, I think when you have really complex societal and systemic issues, the solutions and the blame is really complex and really distributed. And so I think we can hit any number of these different areas. And I’ll name a couple. I think one is all of us in this room, it’s the taxpayers and it’s the voters.

We in California invest less in our education system relative to our revenue as a state than most other states in the country. And that’s a value statement about what we as Californians believe money should be spent on. We have Prop 13, which really changed the way that we fund schools and made it so that our school funding is anchored on property tax, which is very volatile.

So we have this system that voters won’t change. Anything that even plays on the edges of Prop 13 is a challenge for Californians. And when we think about these challenges between, let’s say teacher pay and additional staff, we’ve had a lot of teacher strikes in this state in the last couple of years. And the problem is that when teachers say, we want more money and we want better working conditions, which means more staff, you can’t get that without enlarging the size of the pie. We have to have more money to do both of those things, otherwise, one gets more and the other gets less.

And that comes back to us all eventually as a question about paying taxes, about how we allocate our taxes. So that’s something… That’s kind of, I think a big one that I want us all to be thinking about.

And then I think Melissa noted all of these systemic issues that start at the state policy level and get filtered all the way down to how we think about classrooms. And as we make investments in things like the teacher residency program or we have all these new programs in the state designed at trying to improve what’s happening in schools and what’s happening in classrooms, we need a much stronger infrastructure for how that investment is supported and implemented and monitored as we think about how funds are spent and the impact of those funds. We don’t do a lot on that regard in this state.

MW:  I would add. And just to echo Heather, I think absolutely agree. And I think one of the challenges, as I think back to the time I’ve spent observing the teacher workforce issues in California, is that there… I don’t know that we’ve ever had a really clear vision for how we’re gonna solve the teacher workforce challenge in the state with a very actionable evidence-based database effort to make progress against that vision. And I think there is an opportunity with the conditions as they are, and so much attention on this issue for our state to get clearer about what our commitments are, not in the short term, but in the long term, to work overtime to solve the teacher shortage through long-term sustainable solutions.

DS: I’ll be frank, I think there are elected leaders at the national and state levels who believe what Mitt Romney said, that students should only get as much education as they can afford. There are people who don’t believe in a public education system. And I think we are constantly in a battle with folks like that. We are fortunate in California that that is not the majority of our legislature. That is not our governor, that is not our Superintendent of Public Instruction.

So we are thankfully not in that boat as a state. But I do think it is something we combat nationally. And it is a philosophy that exists across the country among certain segments of the population that education should not be a public good. And so I think that the push and pull that exists in our political system results in a situation where we have to question our values.

There’s a former US senator, now president who once said that if you want to understand the society’s values, look at their budget. And I think if we look at our federal and state budgets we can see that our society has undervalued our education system. And that is something that must be addressed in the political system at large.

But there’s also issues at the local level. And so we do have some school districts where they are investing in the best way possible to ensure that students’ needs are being met. And there are districts where that is not the case. And so we have a system of local control that allows for that, that allows for local decision making. And that’s the system we have. And I’m not saying that that shouldn’t be the system, but what it results in is a disparity.

It results in some students that get resources that other students do not get. The other thing that leads to that disparity in California that is relatively unique to our state when it comes to the economics of education is that we are among just six states. And the other ones would surprise you, states like Texas are in this group, and other conservative bastions across the country. But we are among six states that still fund schools based on attendance.

The vast majority of this country fund schools based on enrollment – which only makes sense when you think about the fact that we don’t hire teachers or bus drivers or cafeteria workers or custodians based on how many students we think are going to attend. We hire them based on how many students are enrolled.

And so what we have in this state, which does not exist in many other states across the country – most other states across the country – is a disparity between districts with high attendance rates and low attendance rates.

“Prop 98 was meant to be a floor and not a ceiling, and it has become basically the floor and the ceiling.” – Katie Hardeman

We’re thankful that Senator Portantino has run a bill the last two years to move California away from the archaic attendance based funding towards enrollment based funding. But to ensure there are no losers in that process, it’s going to take resources to make that change. Over $3 billion would be necessary to convert to enrollment based funding. CSEA has supported that bill, encourage others to look into it.

The last thing I’ll add that’s non-economic is respect. We need to ensure that we live in a society that respects the profession of educators, classroom teachers, instructional assistants, school bus drivers, front office workers, all of the folks who we entrust our children with deserve the respect that should be afforded to them. And that would result in a system that attracts and retains more people. And I will say that a lot of times we’re not feeling it.

Panel 1, Teacher Shortage and Other Challenges. Brian Joseph, Heather Hough, Melissa White, David Schapira and Katie Hardeman. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

We’re not feeling the respect from society, we’re not feeling respect present company excluded, I guess, from the media. But I will say that respect for the profession is as important as compensation and learning conditions.

BJ: Ms. Hardeman.

 KH: So I noticed that no one’s sitting in the front row that, so you’re not blamed for this? [laughter]

 So I would say there’s not one single thing to blame for the teacher and staffing shortages, but certainly adequate funding is a significant barrier as others have mentioned. You know, California becoming the fourth largest economy in the world. I think it’s not a capacity issue, it’s the willingness to really fund our schools at an adequate level.

 And of course California does have Proposition 98, which sets sort of the minimum funding level for our schools and community colleges. And this does help protect from disproportionate cuts and things like that. But you know, Prop 98 was meant to be a floor and not a ceiling, and it has become basically the floor and the ceiling. And so we need to change that mindset as well. So I would add the funding mechanism as well.

BJ: It’s interesting our conversation here is sort of evolved into one of almost an existential discussion because what we’re talking about here is sort of the fundamentals of our society and how society views the education system.

I guess the question that I have, and this is to open to anyone, and again, this is gonna be a complex answer, I’m sure. Why don’t Californians value the education system more than they do? I mean, I can speak to myself when I was a young single man, I didn’t have a lot of interest in education ’cause I didn’t have a child. Well, I have a daughter now, she’s in the second grade. My wife works in the schools. So I have a… I care about it a lot more now just by virtue of where I’m at in my life. But it sounds like what you’re all saying is that overall that our society just doesn’t place enough of an emphasis on this. Why not?

HH: Very complicated question, but I’ll take a shot and just start. I think part of it is exactly what you said that if you don’t have children in the system, you’re not paying attention to the system in the same way that you do when you have children in it, or you’re invested in it in some way. And that, of course, will impact voters. And voters may not understand that the success of our education system is related to the success of our economy overall. Right? And so we’re having to ask them to make a lot of leaps with information that they don’t have.

“I think we all need to be watching very carefully what’s happening in the choice movements outside of California around vouchers, around private school investments.” – Heather Hough

I think part of it is just a larger issue that was mentioned earlier around our national investment and what we care about. And it isn’t generally children. That’s true across different funding lines across the country and here in our state.

And I think that another aspect of it is in thinking about how we value the outcomes of education, particularly for other people’s children, right? That in California we serve a really diverse population. That diverse population isn’t necessarily the population that votes. We have a much higher population of our voters, our homeowners than the population in California. More predominantly white than the population in California.

And some of the culture in education has been around choice in versus investment in our public schools. So for a lot of families, and this has definitely borne out during the pandemic, if the schools don’t feel like they’re serving you, your two options are, you invest in your schools or you opt out. And we’ve seen increasing opting out of our public schools. And this is even more true outside of California, where I think we all need to be watching very carefully what’s happening in the choice movements outside of California around vouchers, around private school investments. ‘Cause that could come here. I think we can’t be naive about the shift that’s happening nationwide. And that shift helps people avoid an investment in a public education system and instead invest in what’s best for their family in a different way.

BJ: Anyone else have a comment on that?

 DS: I’ll just chime in and say Harry Truman said that democracy is based on the conception that man has the moral and the intellectual capacity as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice. And I think the key piece of that is that the survival of our democracy depends on the intellectual capacity of our society. That’s how foundational education is. And we forget that too often.

And I think when you’re going through the education system as a child, you fail to realize that society is investing in you. How many of you as a kid thought, oh, how many taxpayer dollars are being spent today on my education?

BJ: I can tell you I never thought about that.

DS: I don’t think most people do. And I remind my children of that because I think it’s important for them to understand how much society values their intellectual capacity. How important that is to the survival of our society and our democracy. How do we turn that around?

 BJ: That was gonna be my next question. How do you, Change? How do you change that dialogue?

DS: Yeah, I don’t know. But I think we’re starting to realize, I think we’re at a tipping point. We’re… I mean, if you just look at what’s happened in our society in the last few years in our culture and our political systems and the way we treat each other, I think we’re at a tipping point where people are starting to realize that when you don’t make those investments, this is what happens. And so I don’t know the answer, but I do know that it is critically important that we figure it out.

HH: I think we have some kernels of the answer in places that have made good turnarounds. And it starts with an acknowledgement that if teachers are unhappy and administrators are unhappy and other school staff are unhappy and students aren’t engaged and families aren’t engaged, that’s a consensus that the current system is not designed for teaching and learning.

 BJ: I think that’s the definition of a consensus.

HH: That’s right. [chuckle] I don’t think that we have anything that looks like consensus about what we do with that, but I think when you’re starting from a place where there’s so much dissatisfaction, that is a real opportunity to have a deep engagement across all of these different stakeholders about what school would look like if it was an engaging place that was great for teaching and learning, where people wanted to be.

And I think even these issues that we’ve been talking about about social investment and about teacher salary and staff salaries, they’re of course critical. But I think that there is a lot of work that we can do be without, or while we work on changing that big structural issue to make schools more inviting for the people that spend every day in them and the people that are sending their children to those schools. And it starts with deep hard conversations.

BJ: Does anyone else have any thoughts on how we can change the dialogue?

KH: Oh, I was just gonna add I think it’s all related to this ongoing attack on public education and this sort of perception that education has plenty of money, right? And they got an 8% COLA last year, so they’re doing fine. So we need to sort of change that narrative as well and really lift up our schools.

BJ: Are you all saying that the people like me, the media are not covering this well? I think that’s a legitimate question. Is coverage of education not to where it should be? How could it be better?

DS: I think that the media covers education in the way that it covers a lot of politics as there’re being two sides, as there being a push and a pull instead of us working together to address the needs of the next generation. And education has become, like a lot of other sectors, a realm of competition where we think that we can treat it like any other capitalist system and have schools compete against each other and that will end in the best possible result. And I’ll tell you why competition doesn’t work and why the way the media’s covering education doesn’t work. And that’s because the capitalist idea of assuming that survival of the fittest will lead to the best outcomes, forgets that in survival of the fittest, some people don’t survive, and we can’t afford to have a generation of kids where some of them don’t survive.

BJ: I would hope that we’ve evolved beyond the point where we’re talking about…

DS: We haven’t.

BJ: Humans not surviving, but…

DS: Well, I mean, I’m not… in some cases I am talking about literal survival.

BJ: No. I know you are, but I’m just saying from a moral perspective, I would hope we’ve evolved beyond that at this point in our lives.

DS: Yeah, I’m thinking more metaphorically, but surviving in an education system and thriving in an education system and so we’ve gotta stop thinking about education as a place for competition and for back and forth and for battles among unions and management. And that’s… ’cause that’s what the media covers, the media covers school board meetings where people are debating about Critical Race Theory, which isn’t even really being taught in most places in the world or in this country or in this state. And so if the media would stop covering the battles and start covering the needs, and start being a little bit more forward thinking about the impacts of the decisions that are being made today on the students of tomorrow, I think we’d be in a better place than we’re in.

HH: And I think providing guidance about what to do about the challenge. We get a lot of inquiries from parents across the state who say, “I had to see that the funding is low. I know that kids are behind. I have no idea what to do about it.” And I think that helping to generate some of that kind of awareness in reports about the challenges facing education. So that there’s kind of a growing understanding for the public and for parents about what they can do to help.

BJ: It sounds to me like what you all are saying in one way or another is that the reporters that cover education are covering it on a much more shallow, simplistic level and rather than understanding the issues at play and the deep dynamics at play.

Panel 1, Teacher Shortage and Other Challenges. Brian Joseph, Heather Hough, Melissa White, David Schapira and Katie Hardeman. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

HH: I wouldn’t say that’s always true. I think there’s a lot of really great and thoughtful education reporting, but I will say I know about every political skirmish that’s happening in every district across the state. And I don’t know about every really good investment that’s been made in teaching and learning. And so there’s just a difference in how we think about what’s covered.

BJ: That’s fair. That’s definitely fair. We have a few more minutes before we’re going to open up to questions, and we’ve talked very… It’s been a very negative conversation. Everything that’s wrong, everything that’s not working. I wanted to close again before we open it up to questions from the audience. Can each of the panelists point to something in California, a district, a program, an individual teacher, that’s working well and specifically why it’s working well? How they are, whatever it is, the program, the individual is navigating this perilous situation that we’re in and somehow still making it work.

HH: Yes, I’d like to share a pilot program that is being implemented by the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, CCEE. They’re a statewide agency, and they’re working with…

BJ: Can you say that name again?

HH: CCEE, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence. They’re a statewide agency that is designed to help districts that are low-performing who aren’t making enough progress. And they’re working with some of the lowest-performing districts in the state. These are districts that have been identified for something called Direct Technical Assistance. And so in these districts, they are doing really deep work at the classroom and school level around transforming schools to be professional learning communities.

And this work is really exciting to me because it changes the dynamic that is kind of our typical dynamic in a lot of schools where it’s one classroom, one teacher. Every teacher is responsible for his or her students, for implementing the design of their instruction, and this is a really different approach where teachers come together and say, “What do we need all students to learn this year? How are we going to know if they’re learning it on a regular basis? What kind of data are we going to collect? What are we going to do if they didn’t learn it, and what kinds of intervention structures do we build at the school that are both around teachers and interventionalists and paraprofessionals and all of the people we have in school to make sure that students are meeting their needs?”

And why this is so exciting is because it really does accelerate learning when schools are organized this way, but it also changes the way that teachers feel about their job. They feel so much more empowered to affect student learning. They feel so much more connected to their peers, and they feel a lot more capable of doing the hard work than they do when they’re just trying to solve all the problems on their own.

BJ: Imagine that – help leads to better outcomes. Please, Ms. White.

MW: Well, I’d say there’s right now a huge opportunity in and around all the Teacher Workforce Funds that were one time the state made investments around. One of them that I spoke to earlier that I would highlight again is the teacher residency effort. Teachers that are underprepared for the profession, meaning they enter a profession through emergency routes or other fast track routes where they’re immediately the teacher of record with minimal training, tend to leave the profession at much higher rates: two to four times higher than teachers who are fully prepared before they’re in front of a classroom full of students.

And there’s an effort, the state has made a lot of inroads into thinking about the ways that we can improve and expand the preparation of high quality routes into the profession with a $600 million investment over a few years in teacher residencies. They will… That investment will expire at the end of this year.

There are a number of programs that have developed really strong partnerships. That means partnerships between districts and higher ed institutions to say, “Who are the teachers we need and what do we need to do to prepare them well for the profession?” Placing them in the classroom of an expert mentor teacher for a half time full year. And I think there’s an opportunity right now to double down on that effort and say, “What does it take for these programs that are really excellent to influence practice in other areas and to sustain those programs” so that states… The state’s $600 million investment means something in the future.

DS: My fellow panelists, I have a really great grasp of some of the great work that’s being done in the classroom for teachers and to help teachers outside the classroom. I’m sure Katie will add some other great points to that. I’m going to address some things that are happening outside the classroom in California that are relatively unique that we should be very proud of.

For example, we provide universal free breakfast and lunch for every child to ensure that they’re not hungry when they’re in the classroom trying to learn. That’s amazing. California is a national leader on that issue. We are almost at the point where we’re providing universal free Transitional Kindergarten. Early childhood education is the key to the future in terms of student learning. And so our investments that we’re making as a state in that program will pay off for generations to come.

We have an incredible Community Schools program that is actually addressing the whole child. We are doing what other states are talking about. And that program continues to pay dividends for kids across California. So that’s incredible.

And just one thing from the teacher point of view is if we are going to attract and retain great teachers, one of the great pathways for that is investing in paraeducators, because we have a workforce of instructional assistants across this state who are already committed to supporting student learning. And they’re there. They’re getting the on-the-job training. They’re getting paid peanuts to do it. But if we continue to invest in paraeducators like this governor did by investing half a billion dollars two years ago to help us recover from some of the lost learning opportunities during the pandemic, we will continue to build a bench and a workforce. We have a teacher pipeline program right now for paraeducators that’s already at capacity. We have to continue to invest in paraeducators and their training. And for those who want to become teachers, we need to provide them a pathway to do it.

KH: Well, David stole some of my talking points. But I will just add on to say, it’s not all bad. There are definitely some bright spots in the state, especially around Community Schools. And that’s really not talked about and covered a whole lot. But it’s really just an innovative way of serving students and families and communities better. So in places like Anaheim and Richmond, they are coming together. And it’s not just the administration telling people what to do. It’s a shared responsibility. Teachers, families, students, coming together to decide what their community needs. And maybe that’s… The student needs clean laundry every day, or they need a meal, or social services. And deciding what that community needs in a shared way. And implementing that to help.

BJ: I don’t mean to interrupt, can you explain what a Community School is for people that might not be familiar with that, the term?

KH: Sure. Yeah, so it’s part of a grant that was provided by the state. The state invested about $4 billion for grants for districts to come together with their community in a shared responsibility. So with stakeholders to decide different services that students need to help them thrive and learn. So it could be very different in different communities.

 BJ: A decentralized system is what you’re talking about.

Very interesting. Well, I think we’re right on time, Tim, for questions from the audience. So please raise your hand if you have any questions for our esteemed panelists here.

Rich Ehisen: And just a note, Tim is at that end with a microphone, and I’m at this end with a microphone. So there’s two of us, just get one of our attentions.

“[With Transitional Kindergarten] we added another grade into our public school system, and we already had a teacher shortage, right? So now we’ve added a lot more teachers, a lot more need for credentialing without having that big conversation about how we’re going to make that investment.” – Melissa White

TF: And I did have one question to start. I know that there are some funding sunsets coming up, I think, in 2027 and 2029. So while we’re finding some other questions, maybe if you could address what that is, what’s coming up there? And what if anything is being done about that? I know that there are some concerns among the education community about those.

 KH: Yes, you’re right, and so as you know, the original Prop 30 and then Prop 55, which increased income taxes going to education, that will be expiring in 2030. And so I think obviously there is a need to continue the resources that we currently have. And even, as we’ve talked about today, expand upon that and increase the revenues that we have for education. So I think there are ongoing conversations about the timing and when that should happen and to what extent. So I don’t know if I can say anything more on that, but.

 RE: Well, since there’s a little pause here, I’ll ask one. So we just learned how much Senate Bill 525 is going to cost us in regard to paying health care workers a higher minimum wage. I know you talked a lot about the need to pay teachers more, which I think we all agree with, but what’s the realistic chance of that happening anytime soon?

MW: I mean, it seems like right now is a moment, as we were talking about earlier, that… And there’s a lot more conversation about teacher compensation right now happening than I think we’ve had in recent years. So it seems like we’ve got an incredible opportunity right now where things are extremely challenging and there’s an acknowledgement of the challenges as we’ve been discussing them. And a number of people pulling… coming together, to have a conversation about what is it going to take. And in short, it’s going to take a lot of collaborative work together to problem-solve where we’re agreeing on the goals and working together to get to those goals across sectors and across institutions.

BJ: Is there not a widespread agreement about what the goals should be in the education community?

HH: You mean on teacher salary? I was going to say it.

BJ: On everything, it sounds like. It sounds like you’re talking more than just teacher salary. Is that right, Ms. White?

“We have fought for increases in the minimum wage at the ballot numerous times, and we’ll do so in the future, even knowing that the result of those things will likely be that people will leave the workforce in education to go to these other sectors where they can make more money.” – David Schapira

MW: I meant on teacher compensation in particular, but I think that has to be nested within the larger goal of let’s solve the teacher shortage. I do think we have a lot of fragmentation in the goals that we have around particular policies or particular investments and less coherent vision around how all of those pieces fit together and how you address these kind of big transformations that we’ve made all this, we’ve invested all this money in while also trying to deal with our foundational problem, which is this teacher issue.

I think the TK investment, it’s a great example. We added another grade into our public school system, and we already had a teacher shortage, right? So now we’ve added a lot more teachers, a lot more need for credentialing without having that big conversation about how we’re going to make that investment.

And I think I will also add, it’s not just teacher compensation where we’re having the conversation. There’s a national conversation about what people deserve to make in various industries. And we’re seeing unprecedented strikes across… and pressure across industries, across the country. So I think it’s really important to situate education in that larger conversation. I think always, again, to be noting, when you’re standing with the union in education, as we should be for higher wages and better working conditions, you’re pointing the finger back at yourself. There’s nobody who’s running an organization making a lot of money.

It’s not like with the actors where we’re saying they deserve to get more money instead of the people who are making money off the movies, right? It’s all of us. When we say teachers need more, all of us are having to come together to say, “Yes, we’re going to make that investment as a society.”

DS: But I think the root of the question is, it’s talking about wages in these other sectors and the effect that it will have on our sector of education. We at CSEA have stood with our brothers and sisters in health care and in fast food advocating for increased wages this year. We have fought for increases in the minimum wage at the ballot numerous times, and we’ll do so in the future, even knowing that the result of those things will likely be that people will leave the workforce in education to go to these other sectors where they can make more money.

Our hope is that a rising tide lifts all boats. Our hope is that the people who need to be pointing their fingers at themselves – we as taxpayers who elect public officials to make these decisions and who decide at the ballot whether or not to increase our own taxes – We will look in the mirror and ultimately make the decision that it’s not acceptable that we can’t afford to pay for the workforce that we need in the places where we’re entrusting… [people] to teach our children.

And so I do hope that we can look in the mirror, that we can do some self-evaluation as a society and as the elected leaders who represent that society. But yes, we believe a rising tide lifts all boats. We support the increased wages in the other sectors, but it is going to potentially make the problem worse. And I hope that we don’t have to let the problem get worse before we make it better, because when we do that, we are leaving a generation of children behind. So we’ve got to address it and we’ve got to do it quickly.

Panel 1, Teacher Shortage and Other Challenges. Brian Joseph, Heather Hough, Melissa White, David Schapira and Katie Hardeman. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

And it’s about political will and all of us. It’s incumbent on each of us, everyone in this room, everyone listening online and the people who aren’t listening to ensure that we elect public officials who are going to make those decisions to invest further in education and ensure that it doesn’t get worse before it gets better.

RE: We have somebody back here who is definitely listening and has a question. [chuckle]

Audience member: I taught at a very poor school in Sacramento for 30 years. I live in East Sacramento. I had a husband who also had income. [chuckle] And there was such a vast difference between the school where I taught and the school where my kids went. And one of the things that I… One of my question is, is transitional kindergarten… Because that… We had a preschool, but it was based on the parents’ finances. So when, in one family, a mom went back to work, the younger children didn’t get preschool. And oh my God, did that ever show…

These were kids that were being raised at home, with another language, with older grandparents who were from another culture, and putting them in a regular preschool just… I mean, in kindergarten straight away was just, yikes, as compared to the older kids when the mother was staying home… and they didn’t have a big income, so the kid… The two older kids got to go to preschool. So that to me is, is really key.

Is that you make sure that all levels are available to people, because it doesn’t matter how much money that mother is able to bring home if her kid is isn’t getting the education at home that he might in another places.

The other question… The other experience I had was in a poor community, and it was shocking to me to find in my family, kids that didn’t get identified until they were quite a bit older with learning differences. And as at the end of my career, I was in charge of helping identify those kids. And we always got dinged by the school district for referring too many kids. And I’d say, “Well, how many didn’t make it? How many were not identified?” Oh, it was 10%. Okay. So we have… I think we have to look at the discrepancies between a PTAwho can support huge programs, and poor schools where the parents don’t have that, and really make an effort to bring those resources up.

DS: The last person had a good question about TK. CSEA, we were the primary and initial sponsors of universal TK. And infact we have two people in the room who are critical in making that happen. The two key staff people who got TK introduced and the person who got across the finish line – Xong Lor and Navnit Puryear – being here in the room who worked on that issue to ensure that all Califonia 4-year-olds starting in ’25, ’26 will have access to free universal kindergarten.

And we believe exactly as you said, that there shouldn’t be a disparity between people who can afford early childhood education and those who can’t. Every kid deserves access to early childhood education. And it’s not just good and important for that kid, it’s important for our society. Hugh Downs did a great documentary about the inverse relationship between brain development and societal investment… that the brain… 80% of your brain development occurs before you enter kindergarten. Yet, what is society investing in you before that time? Very little.

And so, and he also talked about the upstream solution, how important it is that when kids are not reading by third grade, we just decide that we’re just going to rush in third grade to get them reading?

What we have to do is we have to go upstream and find out what’s happening. And what’s happening is we have a disparity in early childhood education and UTK will be the greatest step that any state in this country has ever taken to addressing that upstream solution and ensuring universal access starting in ’25, ’26.

HH: And I’ll just note on the disparities between higher income and lower income schools, you’re 100%, right. And we’ve made huge investments as a state over the past 10 years and continue to make investments to ensure that those schools have a lot more resources. So the Local Control Funding Formula has a mechanism that distributes more money to low income students, to students learning English, to foster and homeless, foster youth and homeless students, which means that students… Schools serving a high proportion of those students do have more funds. A new policy last year in the equity multiplier means that schools that serve a high proportion of those students and have a lot of mobility now get additional funding.

So we’ve made a lot of strides in and making sure that more money is going to those schools. But we still have challenges, it’s harder to staff those schools. And so when we think about teacher shortages, we haven’t talked much about the inequities. But when there is… When there are a limited number of teachers, typically the schools serving low income students and minority students are more likely to have underprepared teachers. So these are kind of system-wide challenges that we definitely have to keep our eye on.

RE: And on that note, we have to keep an eye on our schedule, and we are out of time. So I’m going to call it right there. Thank you so much to our panel. Thanks to Brian Joseph for moderating.

Thanks to our Conference on Education Policy sponsors: THE TRIBAL ALLIANCE OF SOVEREIGN INDIAN NATIONS, WESTERN STATES PETROLEUM ASSOCIATION, KP PUBLIC AFFAIRS, PERRY COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITOL ADVOCACY, LUCAS PUBLIC AFFAIRS, THE WEIDEMAN GROUP and CALIFORNIA PROFESSIONAL FIREFIGHTERS