The “Blueprint” for the St. Louis Public Schools has the usual institutional worry about logistics of buildings closing and opening. It is not misguided but superficial. The quality of public education has always been about the quality of teachers, and it is a problem St. Louis shares with every urban school system in the United States. We are entering a crisis of lack of new, skilled and committed teachers in the profession.

In a recent study of interest and recruitment of good teachers, Matthew Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon reveal, through surveys and interviews, how students have indicated less interest in teaching in the last decade:

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshman has fallen 50% since the 1990s, and 38% since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years. The number of new entrants into the profession has fallen by roughly one third over the last decade, and the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50- year low. “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession,”

Teaching has recently suffered losses from its ranks during Covid, but the prestige of the profession has been declining for the past decade and longer. Some of the reasons identified by Kraft and Lyon are “education funding, teacher pay, outside opportunities, unionism, barriers to entry, working conditions, accountability, autonomy, and school shootings.”

The problem of loss of prestige most often cited by students is lack of pay. Missouri has addressed its low ranking for teachers’ salaries by minimum pay increases to $38,000 per year, but to no benefit for St.Louis teachers, whose average minimum is $44,000.  Urban schools require higher salaries to attract teachers to schools where conditions may be problematic.  So St. Louis teachers need more competitive minimum salaries.

Lacking that, there are ways to attract teachers to urban schools.

• A national movement called Grow Your Own (GYO)  attempts to “draw teacher candidates . . . from the local community. The hope is a community member will be more personally invested in the school system, and more likely to stick around. Drawing teachers from the community also makes it easier for students to see themselves and their life experiences reflected in their teachers.”  Incentives may include college scholarships, mentoring programs for teacher candidates, and job shadowing of good teachers.
• Schools in Jackson, Miss., have partnered with the Mississippi Department of Education to provide candidates with a no-cost master’s degree and dual certification in elementary and special education. In return, the new teachers promise to stay and teach in Jackson for three years. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1164800932/teacher-shortages-schools-explainer
• Professional Development Schools. This is an institution from the 1990’s that died for lack of funding. Classes in teaching were taught in fully-operating public schools where the gap between theory and practice was constantly challenged. Student teachers could come back to the methods classroom declaring, ” I tried this method and this is what happened.” Clinical professors would engage on the subject of what should happen vs. what works.  It would all occur within the same building, just a few doors away from the actual classroom with real students.  It was clinical education following the model of teaching hospitals. [https://online.suny.edu/epn/developing-a-professional-development-school-pds/].

The Professional Development School worked most effectively in small, under-enrolled schools, which makes St. Louis an ideal candidate.  Universities that prepare teachers must initiate the program by hiring or devoting faculty to clinical teaching in the schools. Teacher education professors would have to commit to a learning-by-doing methodology. In the public schools teachers would have to allow observers and conversations about how to improve teaching.

A significant by-product of Professional Development Schools is kids in schools get to see teachers in the making. They can see a community (university and K-12 teachers) devoted to excellence in teaching and see a bright career path.  The Professional Development School is challenging to set up, but the benefit is a cultural change in teacher preparation.

Improving public schools requires more than keeping the seats filled and the buildings maintained. It takes a village and generous funding to make a teacher, but good teachers are essential to school reform. When young people stop seeing the benefits of a career in teaching, there is serious disruption of the supply chain, to borrow a crude metaphor. It will take a community of teachers, teacher educators and determined public officials to make teaching an attractive career option for the next generation of teachers.