According to a 2019 study of the Rand Corporation, “Teachers matter more to student achievement than any other aspect of schooling.”  The need for ethnically diverse, highly qualified teachers towers above the problems of culture wars.

The culture wars waged by conservative legislatures have introduced a new age of meddling, but not in the quality of student learning.  Until the last decade, conservatives consistently supported local autonomy in school boards. They believed state and federal government should stay out of local governance, because they assumed local voters knew best what would serve their community.

No more.  Governors and state legislators are concerned with making local curricula align with certain gender and racial ideologies rather than improving teaching and learning and the overall quality of public education. Instead of addressing local learning needs, state legislatures are dictating the content of American history curricula, the selection of books in school and public libraries, and the “transparency” that challenges the professional autonomy of teachers.

Such conditions do not encourage young people to enter 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,”

Highly-paid white teachers are easily recruited by prosperous suburban communities.  Recruiting Black male teachers into an urban environment or bilingual teachers into most districts is more problematic. Creating incentives for career teaching is more challenging than recruiting teachers for 2-3 year stints, as Teach for America did. We need young, diverse, committed, and persisting faculty for the next generation.

Federal and state government could provide incentives to attract new teachers in communities by developing an attractive environment for teaching and teacher preparation. School districts can work with local colleges and universities to reduce  tuition and provide loans to engage and retain teachers for up to four years. The longer young teachers are engaged with a school, the more likely they will become career 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
• 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.
• Most teacher preparation programs discourage working while student teaching. Local universities can underwrite the cost of teacher preparation by providing loans and scholarships for student teachers, who have no income for half a year during student teaching.
• research-tested mentoring programs for teachers. Without a mentor, nearly one in three new teachers leave by their fifth year, but with a mentor that ratio drops by more than half, to one in seven [edutopia.org/article/case-mentors-grows-stronger-youki-terada/#:~:text=Mentorships%20are%20particularly%20effective%2C%20researchers,of%20growth%20for%20the%20teacher].

Government needs to address the impending shortage now, as young people are deciding whether to become teachers. Increased aid for career development could attract better and more committed students into the profession.

School districts should also find ways to involve parents constructively in schooling. Federal and state governments could fund programs that employ teacher consultants to demonstrate methods such as

• the Family Writing Project, a program of the National Writing Project. Several National Writing Project sites have experimented with family writing programs as once-a-month gatherings at school. Teacher-leaders at these sites offer practical advice about how to set up such a program, and also suggest writing activities parents and children can do together. The sample activities below are elaborated in “No More Fear and Loathing: The Family Writing Project in Las Vegas.” https://archive.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/resources/write_together.csp
• Resources are available for parent literacy programs at every level. Check out the National Writing Project’s advocacy for parents at https://lead.nwp.org/kb-tag/parent-involvement/
• Teachers can create book clubs for parents to become familiar with the curriculum or to model critical reading.  A great example of how schools affect our view of history is Robert E. Lee and Me, by Ty Seidule, a Professor Emeritus from West Point. The author helps us realize how history is absorbed, as well as studied.

The best model for professional development is teachers teaching teachers, but teacher consultants have to be paid, and not for one-shot demonstrations.  The most effective parent literacy programs need at least a year to launch with teacher modeling. Who pays for this professional development? Innovation grants to schools and districts by state and federal funding.

State and federal curriculum tampering will never have a lasting positive impact on local education.  The best function of remote governments is to incentivize local programs with strategic funding: to attract new teachers, to increase parent participation, to create better school-community connections.

If the state and federal government want to improve education, teacher recruitment and parent involvement are good places to start.