Learning From the Best Abroad

When Addressing Teacher Shortages, One State Learns from Singapore

The U.S. is facing what can only be described as a dire and worsening shortage of needed teachers, putting pressure on systems to lower teacher qualification standards. Yet clues for how to approach the problem over the long term may emerge from a look at Singapore and Finland as well as the work in Maryland.

High flyers, such as Singapore, do not lower their qualification standards for the profession when hiring newcomers. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The world’s high-performing education systems recruit and retain teachers from the ranks of top-performing secondary and postsecondary students, while also effectively mitigating potential teacher shortages.

Teacher salaries are benchmarked against those of similarly educated professions to ensure competitive pay. In Singapore and Finland, teaching is an attractive and respected profession.

Teacher education and induction programs equip early-career educators with the skills, abilities and cultural competencies to thrive. Once on the job, teachers work as professionals, with time allotted to continually improve their skills collaboratively with their colleagues.

In Singapore and other high-performing systems, teachers who want to advance are offered experiences to prepare them for more advanced positions, and advancement in their profession does not require leaving the classroom. As a result, Singapore and other high performers avoid the teacher shortages that are increasingly common across the U.S.

Keystone State Experiences

Seeing this disparity in teacher retention between the U.S. and other developed nations, many states and districts are looking to those successful practices and policies to bring long-term systemic solutions to this long-term systemic challenge. Data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education show that rural schools and schools with high proportions of students of color and those living in poverty face the greatest shortages.

Based on the examples of effective hiring in Singapore, leaders in the Keystone State and members of a newly formed coalition, We Need PA Teachers, have developed policies and five strategies to make teaching more attractive:

Incentivize high-quality teacher prep, characterized by rigorous coursework and intentionally designed clinical experiences developed in partnership with education agencies.

Invest in teacher retention through well-defined career ladders.

Expand pathways into teaching for youth and paraprofessionals.

Improve the financial proposition for becoming a teacher.

Improve data collection to allow for targeted investments in the teacher pipeline.

Vitally, Pennsylvania is not just copying and pasting its answers from Singapore and other countries. Instead, it is synthesizing the best practices of those systems and coupling it with a clear-eyed and in-depth understanding of its own landscape. Through that process, the state education agency and its partners are developing tailored solutions for its districts, schools and teachers, changing the trajectory of the profession in the state and the hardworking professionals who constitute it.

—  Vicki Phillips