Amidst a worsening teacher shortage, with 40.5% of the state’s educators leaving their school districts after three years, last fall’s Teacher Recruitment and Retention Blue Ribbon Commission recommended, among other steps, increasing salary and tuition assistance.
Yet in the recently wrapped legislative session, the Missouri Senate failed to act on the House’s bill to raise the state’s minimum teacher salary from $25,000 to $38,000 — still below the national average of $51,557. Meanwhile, Congress is considering the American Teacher Act to set a $60,000 minimum annual salary for teachers across the country.
The nationwide challenge of recruiting and retaining educators may have been best summarized by a 33-year-old teacher who, upon leaving her central Alabama school district, told the Associated Press, “Fixing teachers’ deteriorating work culture and growing workloads would be a more powerful incentive than a pay raise.”
Missouri should pay close attention because it will take more than modest overdue pay increases to fill the pipeline of qualified individuals we need to choose a career in education in our state.
Yet, teachers are not the only ones who benefit from higher wages. A March 2021 article from the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that increased spending on teacher salaries is associated with higher housing prices. Teacher compensation can impact the reputation of a school district, which can then heavily factor into choosing where to live.
However, even if wages are competitive, a teaching career in Missouri must become more appealing than the same work in another state. To attract the businesses and workers of today and tomorrow, Missouri should nurture public education just as it has the state’s key industries of corporate services, distribution, research and development, and manufacturing.
To appeal to the education professionals needed to elevate public education into one of Missouri’s more compelling features, I propose an elective pilot program that utilizes a year-round school year and free in-state tuition for all public school teachers.
Specifically, this program would provide all interested school districts with grants and guidelines for a year-round school year, and embrace the love of learning that likely drew individuals to teaching by supporting their educational growth in any program at any state college or university.
Under a year-round calendar, teachers would have an extended period away from their students every school year with the option to pursue coursework toward a new degree, refresh their teaching materials, or just recharge on their own.
For example, an elementary school’s three second-grade classrooms would be covered by four teachers. Each teacher would spend three quarters with their students and one quarter outside of their classroom. This framework could attract more professional educators to Missouri and ease the negative impact of summer vacation on student development that teachers must address each fall.
A year-round school year is not new to Missouri. In the St. Louis area, the Francis Howell School District operated on a year-round school year (nine weeks on and three weeks off) from 1969 until 2011, when the year-round schedule was phased out. Ultimately, the school board made the change to reduce transportation and staffing costs.
For state lawmakers, the first steps are to raise teacher salaries and remove the tourism-driven requirement that bars school districts from opening the new school year more than 14 calendar days before the first Monday in September. Then convene stakeholders and subject matter experts to craft the elective program around the best interest of educators, students, families and taxpayers.
To attract more of the professional educators who are at the heart of student achievement and are essential to the prosperity of Missouri’s future, we must become nothing less than a premier destination for teachers in America.