A task force will be set up to address the shortage of teachers in the state’s K-12 public schools, as the problem continues to worsen in New Jersey and across the country.
Gov. Phil Murphy issued an executive order late last week to create the task force to “help the state address the challenges facing our educational workforce” and develop short- and long-term recommendations to increase the number of teachers.
Murphy made the announcement while speaking at the New Jersey Education Association convention in Atlantic City, an annual event hosted by the state’s largest teachers union, a major financial donor to the governor’s campaigns.
The number of certified teachers working in New Jersey’s public schools in 2019-2020 was about 98,000. In 2020-2021, that number dropped to 96,000, according to data published by the New Jersey Department of Education.
And there has been a decade-long drop in the number of students graduating with education degrees. In New Jersey, the number dropped by 49% between 2009 and 2018, according to a study released in March 2020 by New Jersey Policy Perspective. The main reason is a “teacher pay gap” — the argument that teachers aren’t paid commensurately with people in other professions who have a similar education, advocates said.
New Jersey began recording critical areas of teacher shortages with the federal government in 2004. The shortages have continued.
Shortages began in 2003 and occurred mostly in the state’s poorest districts. The federal government invites states to report teacher shortages for tracking purposes.
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The task force is critically needed, coming at a time when a lack of staff in some large urban districts may have “reached crisis proportions for students,” said Elizabeth Athos, attorney for educational equity at the Education Law Center, a group that advocates for the state’s poorest districts. These students are already in classes without certified teachers, and the districts have been “hemorrhaging teachers and other key staff,” said Athos.
Meanwhile, the state Department of Education is expected to deliver data for a report due in March that will project vacancies in the teacher workforce for the next three to five years, according to a law passed by the Murphy administration in January. The department did not respond to whether it is on track to deliver that data in time. The law requires the Executive Leadership Council of the New Jersey Education to Earnings Data System to provide six-month progress reports to state lawmakers.
The Education Law Center urged the Department of Education to “start collecting and publicly releasing data about staffing vacancies,” and asked the state to include members on the task force with expertise in the areas of special education and bilingual education, since those students are the most highly affected.
The 25-member task force will be chaired by Dennis Zeveloff, Murphy’s chief policy adviser. It will consist of six members from the state’s two teachers unions, four from the NJEA and two from the American Federation of Teachers, and three from the state’s associations for superintendents and administrators.
Other lobbying and interest groups represented will be the state’s charter schools, school business officials, parent-teacher association, the Council of County Vocational-Technical Schools, the state Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities. A state senator and Assembly representative will also be on the task force.
Teacher shortages have historically affected school districts in the state’s lowest-income districts, growing worse during the pandemic. The problem has now spread to wealthier areas, a consequence of declining interest and enrollments in teacher preparation programs and stringent certification and state residency requirements, according to advocates.
Since the shortages are also a national problem, the federal government issued advisories encouraging states to use emergency COVID relief funds to hire school staff and teachers as a one-time measure.
Bilingual education teachers and teachers of English as a second language, foreign languages, mathematics, science and special education have had shortages in New Jersey since the early 2000s. Career and technical education teachers have been in short supply since 2020.
The state Legislature has passed bills to reduce certification costs and requirements and make it easier for college students to work as substitute teachers. A teacher residency bill that opens up opportunities for high school seniors to start working toward teacher certification passed the state Senate in 2021 but needs Assembly approval before it moves to Murphy’s desk.
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A bill to eliminate the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment, or edTPA, an expensive and cumbersome certification requirement, received a conditional veto from Murphy. The bill would shift the burden of certifying teachers from the state’s shoulders to the colleges that train them. Though the move was welcomed by interest groups and the NJEA, some said it came too late for the current school year. Teacher educators were lukewarm about the move, saying the conditional veto still created unnecessary pressure with added requirements for student teachers.
New Jersey’s 2023 budget did not allocate money specifically to address the teacher shortage, but it appropriated $550,000 for workforce diversity programs in K-12 schools and $750,000 to support programs for recruiting minority teachers in high-poverty school districts to better reflect the demographics of their students. The federal government allocated $600 million in new funds in June toward addressing the teacher shortage nationally
