Many Arizona schools hire underqualified, inexperienced teachers to fill gaps

Ricardo Cano | The Republic | azcentral.com

Show Caption Hide Caption Many Arizona schools hire underqualified, inexperienced teachers to fill gaps A database built by The Arizona Republic shows that 22 percent of 46,000 public school teachers in Arizona during the 2016-17 term were either not qualified to teach or had less than two years of classroom experience.

On a Saturday in late April, Principal Theresa Nickolich gave her best recruiting pitch to every person who walked in the door.

Come teach at Clarendon Elementary School in the Osborn School District, she told the candidates at the job fair.

You'll be part of a system that will support you. You'll feel like family in a professional environment built up over years of strong leadership. You will be an anchor of stability for children in need, many of them poor.

You will have a rewarding career. You will change lives.

But across from Nickolich stood both her biggest recruiting challenge and an emblem of one of the biggest crises facing public education in Arizona.

Almost no qualified applicants walked in.

It was the last job fair of the year in the Osborn district before the quiet summer months. In a school of about two dozen classroom teachers, Nickolich still had five jobs to fill for the fall.

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If Nickolich couldn't fill her spots with qualified teachers, she would have to turn to teaching interns. Maybe somebody with an emergency teaching credential, maybe somebody who didn't yet have a teaching certificate. In a dire situation the state could even let her employ a temporary teacher without a college degree.

The recruiting challenge Nickolich faced that day in April isn't unique to Osborn, or even to her region. It's a crisis that school administrators recognize statewide:

Every spring, thousands of teaching positions open across the state.

Every spring, fewer qualified people apply to fill them.

The Arizona Republic gathered data from 162 Arizona school districts, accounting for 46,000 teachers and about 80 percent of the state's 1.1 million public-school students in the 2016-17 term.

Of those teachers, 22 percent lacked full qualifications.

Many in that 22 percent did have a college education and teacher training, but had less than two years in the classroom, a time frame when they don't qualify for the state's full credential — a standard certificate.

Many others lacked even more basic qualifications. Nearly 2,000 had no formal teacher training. Dozens lacked a college degree.

Parents, educators and advocates argue the proliferation of teachers with less than full credentials harms student performance.

Arizona is one of the most improved states in national math and reading test scores over the past decade, but its students still mostly underperform compared with the rest of the country. State test scores show most students aren't mastering Arizona's learning requirements.

The struggle to hire and retain fully qualified teachers means many students lack any stability in the classroom: Last school year, at least 850 teachers weren't even hired until about four weeks after classes had started.

What's causing the shortage?

While the shortage of qualified teachers has been lamented by politicians and policy analysts, the state does no tracking of overall vacancies or levels of teacher qualification. No one has understood the extent of Arizona's shortage of trained teachers until now.

The Republic's statewide analysis also found:

133 school districts staffed positions with people who had not met the basic qualifications to teach, according to their certification.

In 75 districts, at least 25 percent of teachers lacked standard teaching certificates.

About 56 percent of schools with 10 or more teachers filled positions with people who held either intern, emergency or substitute certificates.

One district in Maricopa County filled more than 60 out of nearly 500 teaching positions this past year with teachers who had not completed a formal training program.

In a district in Pinal County, nearly half of 300 teachers were either underqualified or lacked standard certification.

“It’s embarrassing,” Jason Hammond, president of the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association and HR director for the Phoenix Elementary District, said of The Republic's data. “But this needs to be talked about.”

Experts frequently place poor teacher pay and low education funding among the primary causes of the shortage. Median pay for Arizona elementary teachers is $40,590 per year, compared with $54,120 nationally. In 2014, Arizona ranked 48th in average per-pupil spending at $7,457, compared with $11,066 nationally.

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For years, state finances reeled from deficits that resulted in cuts to education. Gov. Doug Ducey calls teachers and public schools "winners" in his most recent budget, which allocated $167 million in new money for education and 2 percent teacher raises spread across two years.

Other factors driving the shortage include stressful working conditions and diminished respect for the profession. The problem has grown as older teachers retire; among the flood of newcomers, many try the profession, then leave shortly after.

Though reasons vary, the data show this shortage touches schools across all corners of the state – from rural outposts to affluent suburbs to Phoenix's urban core.

Over the past few years, Nickolich and other Osborn principals entered summer with unfilled positions and zero to few qualified applicants.

After the job fairs, they've posted on Facebook and job apps, looking for people interested in a career change. They've recruited through word of mouth. Last year, Nickolich hired an Uber driver a friend recommended — he became an emergency math teacher.

Late in the day of the job fair, a man arrived and approached her.

“Am I at the right place?” he asked.

“You are,” Nickolich said. “What are you looking for? Tell me you want sixth-grade math.”

A cycle of crash courses

Teacher shortage hits Gila Bend School District hard The Gila Bend Unified School District is having a difficult time recruiting and retaining teachers, both in the elementary school and the high school. The district has resorted to hiring teachers from the Philippines. Tom Tingle/azcentral.com

Gila Bend, population 2,000, lies about 70 miles southwest of central Phoenix.

It's a tough sell for young applicants in search of relationships and a vibrant city life.

Housing is limited, infrastructure is outdated. The closest grocery store is 40 miles away in Buckeye.

The Gila Bend Unified School District has 430 students and 25 teachers, all but two of whom were hired after 2014, according to data reported by the district. Almost 100 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

For the school term just ended, 17 teachers had met the state's basic teaching qualifications. Eight did not.

Arizona allows for a variety of teaching credentials below the full qualifications of a "standard" certificate.

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Many teachers use some form of "provisional" certification, which means they've completed a teaching program and have a college degree but don't yet have at least two years in an Arizona classroom. Teachers from other states or countries also are provisional until they've taught for two years in Arizona.

Intern credentials allow a person to enter a teaching contract while actively working to complete a training program during night or weekend coursework.

Emergency credentials allow employees with a college degree to teach for one year if the school district attests that it can't find anyone who's qualified.

Substitute credentials allow anyone with a college degree, regardless of training, to teach for only 120 consecutive days at the same school.

Emergency substitute credentials allow anyone with a high school diploma to teach.

In Gila Bend, there wasn't much choice. So administrators tried to deal with the emergency.

The district started the past year with a schedule that freed up four of the middle-school emergency teachers for an hour each morning.

While their students took electives, the four teachers got a crash course from Gila Bend’s two principals and academic coach Dawn Vasquez on essentials usually learned over several semesters of a preparation program.

How to plan a lesson. How to manage a classroom. How to take the state’s learning standards and break them down for the adolescent mind.

Lastly, how to actually teach a lesson to real students.

This cycle of crash courses, coaching and modeling repeated itself every couple of weeks as crops of teachers left out of frustration and, at times, without notice. Ultimately, about 10 emergency middle-school teachers left Gila Bend during the year, according to Vasquez.

“When we got back in January, our kids asked our new teachers, ‘Are you coming back?’ because they’ve seen so many teachers leave,” Gila Bend Elementary School Principal Richard Moore said.

Teachers without formal training, as Gila Bend has learned, are more likely to leave during the year and less likely to be committed to their responsibilities.

Traditional routes, such as job fairs, usually yielded one, maybe two hires. Gila Bend used to recruit yearly in Michigan, Moore said, but has since scaled back going out of state.

The talent pool got smaller. Applicants increasingly grew apathetic to Gila Bend’s $29,000 starting salary compared with the $55,000 Texas school districts would advertise.

For the 2017-18 term, Gila Bend had 13 positions to fill — more than half the staff.

Superintendent Anthony Perkins found a partial solution by going global. In July, 10 qualified teachers from the Philippines will arrive, hired on three-year contracts that can be extended for two more.

“We’ve heard very good things about them,” Moore said of the international teachers. “And that retaining part is going to be huge.”

Widespread concern over filling positions

It is difficult to compare Arizona's teacher experience with the rest of the country. But research suggests the shortage impacts Arizona more acutely than other states.

A 2011-12 U.S. Department of Education survey, the most recent available, found 9 percent of the country's public-school teachers had less than three years' experience.

According to a 2015 report by the Arizona Department of Education, more than one-fifth of the state's teachers leave the profession in their first two years – before reaching the three to five years research says it takes for teachers to become effective. That report forecast 24 percent of the state's teaching population would be eligible for retirement by 2018.

A report released in May by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University found 74 percent of school administrators expressed difficulty in finding qualified teachers.

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Forty-two percent of those teaching in 2013 had left the profession by the 2016 school term, according to the report, leaving “schools to scramble to find and keep teachers while denying students the benefits of having a well-trained, consistent presence in the classroom.”

In past years, schools would wait until early April to negotiate contracts with their teachers. Now, it’s March. February. January.

Some schools start hiring for the next year as early as fall for positions that have yet to officially open. Schools that don’t find enough qualified applicants for the current year never stop searching.

The concern over teachers has spread across Arizona communities.

High-school students in the Lake Havasu Unified School District staged a peaceful walkout in April 2016 in support of higher salaries for their teachers.

Nearly two dozen irate parents tried to withdraw their kids from the Murphy Elementary School District in west Phoenix last July. They protested outside the district’s office and faulted the administration for over-relying on long-term subs and not addressing ballooning class sizes.

Angry parents in the Liberty Elementary School District in Buckeye filled a board meeting in February and in fiery public comments accused the district’s administration of driving educators away because of poor management.

At the Arizona Capitol, tensions continue to boil. Education advocates staged numerous protests asking the state to invest more in teacher pay.

Experts believe the state's teacher situation will worsen before it improves. The problem is likely to snowball for four key reasons: a smaller applicant pool; the constant effort districts must make to replace underqualified teachers on stopgap certificates; older teachers reaching retirement; and teachers leaving through regular churn.

Hammond of the ASPAA/Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association and Justin Wing, human resources director in the Washington Elementary School District, also believe the use of long-term subs is underreported because documentation methods are inconsistent among districts and vacancies fluctuate over the school term.

State leaders: Shortage needs to be addressed

Gov. Ducey and Schools Superintendent Diane Douglas have both said more needs to be done to address the shortage.

The governor backed the launch of a new principal training academy and legislation that allows people to attend the state's public universities at no cost if they teach in Arizona public schools.

Ducey also signed into law a bill that overhauls the state's teacher certification system.

The legislation, Senate Bill 1042, will allow people to get a standard certificate without any formal training if they show five years of "relevant work experience" in what they plan to teach.

The Gaggle: Arizona's Teacher Shortage Our weekly politics podcast gives you inside-the-newsroom conversation you can’t get anywhere else. This week, a special edition examines the politics of education in Arizona, and our exclusive report on the state's teacher shortage.

Applicants could also obtain standard certificates without the traditional testing and training requirements after teaching at the postsecondary level for three years or if they hold a bachelor's, master's or doctoral degree in the subject they're hired to teach.

The new law will effectively allow both a college biology professor as well as a recent graduate with a bachelor's degree in biology but no formal teacher training to obtain a standard certificate for that subject.

The law takes effect Aug. 9. After that date, the state will begin promoting people who previously would have held provisional certificates into the fully qualified standard classification.

The Arizona Department of Education, which will enforce the changes, is still working on finer points of the legislation and will track the number of people who get credentialed through the new "expert" pathway.

It is unclear whether large numbers of people will use the new certification path. Arizona currently offers a similar "specialized" certificate for science and math fields for people who have 10 years of work experience and pass a subject knowledge exam. About 50 people had a valid specialized certificate as of February.

Ducey and lawmakers supporting the legislation said it is intended to help find more qualified teachers by removing layers of bureaucracy and giving more autonomy to schools.

Daniel Scarpinato, the governor's spokesman, said the new certification law and the governor's other education initiatives are part of an ongoing effort by the state “to make teaching an attractive profession and a valued profession and one that people want to stay in."

"The governor values the contributions of all teachers, and that includes this 22 percent group” of underqualified and inexperienced teachers, Scarpinato said.

But critics say it's already easy enough to qualify to teach in Arizona and the reclassification law will only disguise a continuing shortage by inflating the number holding standard certificates.

“The difficulty in attracting and retaining teachers in this state is not due to getting your certificate," Joe Thomas, president of the Arizona Education Association, said. "Our difficulty is supporting teachers in the classroom.

"That means having the resources coming down from the state level to make sure every kid has a qualified, supported teacher in the classroom, no matter where they live. That’s where the state falls short. And that’s what’s driving this crisis.”

Superintendent Douglas, in an email, said she was not surprised by The Republic's findings and is "dismayed that legislation was passed to lower the standards even further. This will only exacerbate the issue."

The superintendent reinforced her call to extend and increase Proposition 301, the state's sales tax for education.

Schools use some of the sixth-tenths-of-a-cent tax for salaries. Prop. 301 will expire in 2021, though it is viewed by many state education and business as the next step in infusing more dollars into classrooms outside of the state budget.

"I am painfully aware that we face a qualified teacher shortage, as well as a crisis in retaining qualified educators," Douglas said in the email.

'We are looking everywhere trying to find teachers'

Arizona's teacher shortage cannot be traced to a specific point in time, though some schools reported difficulties as early as the start of the Great Recession.

Debbi Burdick is superintendent of the Cave Creek Unified School District in the northeast Valley, one of the top-performing districts in the state. She said the shifting landscape became apparent in summer 2015.

At the time, Burdick had six openings that eventually would be filled by the first day of school.

Nearly two years later, the Cave Creek district has eight teaching positions to fill for 2017-18. They include five hard-to-fill math and special-education positions, and a music teacher spot that has been vacant more than a year.

Cave Creek has an enrollment of about 5,400 students and 270 teachers in seven schools. Less than 10 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Sixteen positions were filled this year with teachers who held certification that did not meet all of the state's qualifications, according to data supplied by the district.

Cave Creek in recent years has offered $4,000 signing bonuses for high-demand positions like science and math. Burdick's recruiting pitch is similar to Nickolich's in Osborn — support, family, stability.

"Like everybody else, we are looking everywhere trying to find teachers," Burdick said. "We're having to work really, really hard to find people, and we don't always find them. And that's what's changed."

'Gila Bend can no longer be the last stop for bad teachers'

In Gila Bend, Moore, the elementary school principal, has the second-longest tenure, behind a PE teacher who was hired in 1999, according to school records.

Moore said he decided to become an educator in 2006. He sold his 400-unit storage facility and used-car lot in Missouri and moved to Arizona because of family and an affinity for the state’s clean highways and triple-digit heat.

“Gila Bend can no longer be the last stop for bad teachers,” he said.

The district boosted its starting salary to $37,000. It hired a second principal this year for the high school and middle school to help Moore, who routinely hopped between high school and elementary school with a walkie-talkie on his hip.

Samantha Liddell, a first-year second-grade teacher, will be back next year. She came from Utah in search of “someplace I knew I could help make a difference,” she said.

“At the beginning of year, I told myself, 'You’re gonna stay here for a couple of years no matter how hard this first year is, because the first year is always very hard,' ” Liddell said.

Lalani Moragoda, a kindergarten teacher new to Gila Bend, is staying, too.

Moragoda taught in Sri Lanka for two decades before she gained U.S. citizenship in 2009, when openings were scarce and teachers across the country were getting pink-slipped due to a spiraling economy. She worked at a gas station in Atlanta for four years before getting her master’s degree at Grand Canyon University. She owes $69,000.

Of all the schools in Arizona that offered her jobs, Gila Bend had the most competitive salary at nearly $47,000.

Moragoda plans to stay “until they chase me away.” In August, her students, nearly all English-language learners, came in not knowing how to read or write. On a Thursday in April, they stood in front of the classroom and one by one described everyday items in full sentences.

'Whatever it takes'

The Osborn district has five schools, nearly 170 teachers and 3,000 students — 90 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Fourteen teachers lacked the basic qualifications the past school year, according to data obtained from the district.

So when Nickolich learned the man who wandered in late – the former private-school PE teacher – had experience in technology, she brightened.

He brought his resume, a Facebook page loaded on his phone that had photos and videos of him teaching kids how to build robots and make marionettes.

Gini Shuss, Osborn’s curriculum director, was impressed.

“You’re an Osborn guy,” she said “You need to be here.”

LEARN MORE: Search for your school in our database

But he had only a substitute certificate, and Nickolich was concerned about how he would perform in a larger class of more than 25 kids. They agreed to follow up.

This was the first year Osborn truly felt the teacher shortage. A graduate teacher preparation program at ASU, iTeach, brought seven hires. In past years the rigorous program — a reliable pipeline for two decades — yielded more than 20 teachers for Osborn.

Nickolich checks AppliTrack, a recruitment app, every day. She also relies on social media and word of mouth.

Through a friend, Nickolich heard of Samuel Williams, the Uber driver she hired last term through emergency certification to teach math. Superintendent Patty Tate said Williams had “the heart” for teaching; he impressed Nickolich with his determination to learn.

Williams will enroll in iTeach at ASU next school year. He said this year was crazy, but rewarding. Master teachers guided him. Nickolich checked in on him often and saw him develop a niche of making math more visual for his students.

Amanda Nolasco, whose kids attend Encanto and Clarendon schools, said she believes Osborn has the "systems in place to combat this issue."

"I don't think a lot of the fault (regarding the shortage) goes back to schools," Nolasco said. "It goes back to state legislators who haven't funded our schools adequately over the last 10 years."

Michael Robert, principal of Encanto School for 10 years, will take over as Osborn superintendent on July 1. Robert said he expects Osborn to have every open teaching position filled by that date.

A week after the Osborn job fair, the school year was winding down. AzMERIT testing was done. Williams’ students were learning about fractions and ratios through sports statistics – an end-of-the-year reward, he said.

Clarendon was looking forward to a ceremony celebrating its nod as an "A+ School of Excellence," a distinction given to 30 schools across the state by the Arizona Educational Foundation non-profit.

Then students would leave for summer break.

“This summer, like, as soon as the kids get out, I’m gonna get in my car and drive across the United States until I find my teachers,” Nickolich said.

“Whatever it takes."

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Tiers of Arizona teacher certification

STANDARD: These teachers have a bachelor's degree, passed a professional and subject knowledge exam, completed a teacher preparation program and taught full time for at least two years.

PROVISIONAL: These teachers have met all qualifications but have not taught in a classroom for at least two years. These certificates are valid for three years.

RECIPROCAL PROVISIONAL: These teachers came from another state and have met the same Arizona qualifications as someone who holds a traditional provisional certificate.

PROVISIONAL FOREIGN: These teachers came internationally and have met the same Arizona qualifications as someone who holds a traditional provisional certificate.

TEACHING INTERN: These teachers have a bachelor’s degree, may enter into a teaching contract, are concurrently enrolled in a teacher-preparation program and actively working toward meeting the state’s standard qualifications.

EMERGENCY TEACHING: These teachers hold at least a bachelor’s degree and may enter into a teaching contract. The school has to attest to the state that a qualified applicant could not be found through traditional recruitment efforts such as job postings.

SUBSTITUTE: This certification requires a bachelor’s degree. This teacher can teach for only 120 days in the same school.

EMERGENCY SUBSTITUTE: This position requires a high school diploma only and the hiring school must verify that an emergency employment situation exists. An emergency substitute can teach in the same school for only 120 days.