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CENTER FOR URBAN TEACHING
FEATURE
Recruitment, retention efforts aimed at addressing severe teacher shortage in Milwaukee By Lauren Anderson, for BizTimes EMERALD COLLIER always wanted to be a teacher, just like her mother. But when she took a step toward that career by becoming a teaching assistant in a Milwaukee school while pursuing her education degree, the reality of being in the classroom proved difficult. “I was struggling, floundering and crying every day, not knowing how to manage the classroom,” Collier said. Discouraged, she faced the decision of whether to stick with it or walk away from education altogether. Collier wouldn’t have been alone if she chose the latter. A survey released earlier this year by the National Education Association found 55% of educators are considering leaving the profession earlier than they had planned, a figure the organization deemed “alarming.” That was up from 37% of those surveyed less than a year prior. At the onset of the 2021-‘22 school year, 30,000 public school teachers resigned across the country, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Attrition among teachers combined with a dwindling pipeline 12 / BizTimes Milwaukee MAY 23, 2022
of education majors have created severe shortages nationally and in Milwaukee in particular. From 2011 to 2019, the number of graduates earning degrees in education from southeastern Wisconsin colleges and universities decreased 13%, according to recent research from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. When interviewed for the WPF study, deans of the education programs at those institutions attributed that trend to perceptions of increasing demands and pressure on education professionals, a perceived decrease in public respect for the profession, increasing politicization and de-professionalization of the field, lingering effects of the 2008 recession and a lack of competitive pay compared to other fields. The crisis predates the pandemic but has accelerated over the past two years, forcing the sector to put a focus simultaneously on retention of existing educators and recruitment of more to the profession. “We’ve been sounding the alarm on this,” said Krysta DeBoer, executive director of the Center
for Urban Teaching. “Where we are today has been fast-forwarded, and the problem has been made worse by the pandemic, but there have been warning signs over the past decade that where we are today has been coming down the pipe.” City Forward Collective, the Milwaukee-based nonprofit organization that emerged out of the 2019 merger of Schools That Can Milwaukee and Partners Advancing Values in Education, has put its focus on teacher recruitment and retention in recent years. A full – and fully prepared – workforce is key to the organization achieving its goal of adding at least 5,000 high-quality school seats in the city by 2025, said Patricia Hoben, president and executive director of City Forward Collective. Hoben, who founded and led the Carmen Schools of Science and Technology charter school network from 2007 until 2019, said she observed the narrowing of the candidate pool as a school leader. Teacher openings in the early years at Carmen received 15 to 20 applications; by the end of her time at the then well-established
Emerald Collier is a seventh- and eighthgrade lead teacher at HOPE Christian Schools’ Fidelis campus.
network, she was seeing about three applications per position. “We can’t possibly do enough to try to address it,” Hoben said of the teacher shortage. “That’s the reality we face right now.” Now at City Forward Collective, Hoben said the city needs to grow its pool of teachers of color. Research shows the link between academic gains and students of color learning from teachers who look like them. One of the organization’s strategies is to provide grants for paraprofessionals to continue their education at area colleges so that they can receive their licensure to become teachers in the city. In 2020, City Forward Collective was awarded $500,00 in funding from the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development to support the training of 140 new public school teachers, but it later scaled those plans back to 90 teachers due to disruptions from the pandemic. The organization also initiated a “Why They Teach” campaign, which highlights the stories of Milwaukee teachers and their different paths to the profession, and it partners with Teach for America on recruitment efforts that focus not only on new teachers, but also on drawing back experienced teachers who have stepped away from the profession or are coming from other cities. The Center for Urban Teaching launched in 2001 within Wisconsin Lutheran College with the goal of improving educational outcomes for students in Milwaukee’s central city. In 2013, it became an independent nonprofit organization to grow its capacity to recruit prospective teachers and prepare them to teach specifically in an urban setting. Currently, 375 of its program alumni teach in the city of Milwaukee. When searching for candidates, potential talent comes from “anywhere and everywhere,” said DeBoer, though the search for
