3 Teacher Preparation 45 Teacher Training

which will do little to financially offset such an investment? Understanding these economic disincentives to becoming a teacher helps explain America’s chronic teacher shortages (Carothers, Aydin, & Houdyshell, 2019).

But the problems with how America enlists, prepares, and retains teachers go deeper than simply not being able to recruit teachers. Inequitable distribution of effective teachers is a key factor in America’s broken education system. Indeed, the most under-resourced schools with the greatest need for highly trained, experienced, and effective teachers are far more likely to have novice, inexperienced teachers than their wealthier counterparts (Iasevoli, 2018). This is in part due to cost. Experienced and effective teachers are valuable; therefore, they can be more readily recruited by wealthy districts that have the resources to spend upwards of 70 percent of their budgets on teachers (NCES, 2020).

Under-resourced districts cannot afford the high salaries needed to attract the most experienced and effective educators. Some of these wealthier districts pay close to double what under-resourced districts can offer. In one of the wealthiest suburban districts outside Philadelphia, for example, the average teacher salary is upwards of $100,000 (Trinacria, 2017) while in neighboring Philadelphia, the average teacher salary is $56,000 (PayScale, n.d.). Consequently, there exists a revolving door of new teachers who ineffectively teach the student populations already underserved by a systemically unjust education system. The injustice is not only that America underappreciates teachers in general, but that the most experienced teachers are attracted to teach at the wealthiest districts who can afford to pay them higher salaries, while impoverished districts must hire novice educators who lack the adequate training and experience to serve struggling students who need the best teachers.

The following sections tackle these topics. • Teacher training • Teacher accountability

Teacher Training

To fully understand the degree to which America’s method of teacher training is broken, as well as to imagine how to create more just systems, it is worth diving into the intricacies of how most teachers become fully licensed educators. Most people who become teachers in America go through state college and university education programs (NCES, n.d.a). They either major in education and minor in the subject area they plan to teach or major in the subject area and minor in education (DarlingHammond & Lieberman, 2012). Increasingly, however, people in the United States are taking alternative pathways into the teaching profession. Often run by accredited programs, but not necessarily colleges or universities, these pathways are often of