America's teacher shortage is leading some states to lower their requirements to become one

Teacher shortages are common in the US, and some states have lowered their requirements to becoming one.
However, higher salaries for teachers could bring in highly-qualified people who otherwise might not have become educators.

A teacher shortage has led legislators in several states to lower requirements to become a public school educator.

The Wall Street Journal's Joseph De Avila and Tawnell D. Hobbes reported that several states, including Minnesota, Arizona, Illinois, Utah, and Kansas, have in various ways revamped the requirements for being a public school educator.

For example, Arizona's Republican Governor Doug Ducey signed legislation "giving local school administratiors the power to determine teacher certification." Candidates with higher-education degrees and "significant" experience in a subject, including having taught a related course over the past two years, can get credentials.

Connecticut is thinking about changing up its own certification process, as well. Oklahoma and California, meanwhile, started issuing more emergency teacher certificates to fill vacancies.

The lack of teachers is not a new development. All 50 states plus Washington, DC have reported a shortage of teachers since 2005, according to the WSJ. Schools have a particularly difficult time filling math, science, special education, and English as a second language posts.

Its all about wages

The requirements for becoming a teacher are not the sole obstacle to hiring good public school educators, however. Teaching jobs also come with relatively low salaries, which, combined with those requirements, dissuades qualified people from pursuing those jobs.

As a comparative reference point, we can look at medicine and law. Those fields also have difficult requirements. (No one wants to take the bar exam.) But people who become doctors and lawyers can make significantly more money than teachers, even if they don't live in a big city, which makes it a more attractive career choice to some.

This brings us to an interesting paper by Markus Nagler, Marc Piopiunik, and Martin R. West published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found

The results showed the recession-era teacher hires were significantly more effective in raising both scores, and more so in math.

This might sound counter-intuitive because usually everything gets worse during a recession. But the researchers' findings suggest that as the overall job market sags — and economic opportunities overall are worse — more capable applicants head for the classrooms in search of better opportunities and competitive salaries.

The question here, then, becomes whether the public cost of increasing public school teacher salaries is "worth" the private benefit to the individual students.

Notably, the paper's authors ran their own back-of-the-envelope calculation to figure this out and concluded that their "admittedly coarse comparison suggests that it may be efficient to increase pay for new teachers and thereby improve average teacher effectiveness."

Check out the full report from the Wall Street Journal here.

America's teacher shortage is leading some states to lower their requirements to become one

Its all about wages

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