Affluent schools will always attract the teachers they need, leaving students in high-poverty schools to do without. This is especially true of STEM teachers, leaving too few students studying subjects in the sciences and math.
This has become an even greater concern in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Perpetual teacher shortages, especially in the STEM fields, have only gotten worse, potentially cutting off opportunities for future generations of students.
There is one remedy already in place that can open the pipeline of new teachers in these fields. It deals with how New Jersey licenses its teachers to be in the classroom.
For decades, New Jersey has relied on traditional certification programs that require students to major in the subject they will be teaching, but the problem is too few students majoring in STEM subjects.
“Alternate route” programs have proliferated in the state and can help. But they are also hampered by the requirement that prospective teachers major in the subject.
Now, a new third pathway has emerged that has shown promise. It is called “add-on endorsement,” and may solve this problem by not relying on current STEM majors at all.
The differences between these programs require explanation.
Traditional pre-service certification programs are the source of most teachers. Prospective teachers complete a college major in their area of certification and earn an education degree. These programs produce large numbers of teachers in many fields: elementary education, English, social studies, and so on.
However, they are not meeting the demand in STEM subject areas.
In STEM fields, the number of college majors is low and their interest in teaching is even lower. For instance, fewer than 10,000 students earn physics degrees in the United States each year and fewer than 500 go into K-12 teaching. That will never meet the need for 30,000 new physics teachers, if all students are to have access to physics.
Alternate route programs require candidates to have majored in the subject they are going to teach and to have passed the requisite state exam to show mastery of the content. They learn how to teach through an education program that overlaps with their first two years in the classroom. While helpful, this adds just a small number of teachers each year; it still relies on the few students who majored in STEM subjects.
Add-on endorsement programs are fundamentally different. They begin with teachers already certified to teach but who lack the content knowledge to enter a subject area for which there is a shortage.
There are 3.5 million teachers in the U.S. If just 1% of those teachers learned physics, and how to teach it, that would yield 35,000 physics teachers, enough to meet the need.
The question then becomes: can teachers learn the content of a new subject area, like physics, and how to teach it? And it is not just about physics teachers, but also other hard-to-fill fields like math, tech ed and world languages.
That question has been at least partially answered by the New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning (NJCTL). NJCTL believes that, just as any student can learn physics, so can any teacher. And learning physics is easier than learning to teach.
NJCTL, an independent nonprofit charitable organization founded and supported by the New Jersey Education Association, has offered an add-on endorsement program for teachers since 2009 to learn physics and how to teach it. That program was so successful that NJCTL quickly became the No. 1 producer of physics teachers in the United States.
Over the past three years, NJCTL produced an average of 19.3 physics teachers per year while PhysTEC, an organization dedicated to eliminating the shortage of physics teachers, reported that their top producer of physics teachers (Brigham Young University) averaged 7.3. Rowan University, PhysTEC’s top New Jersey producer, produced 5.3 physics teachers per year.
In 2010, NJCTL launched a chemistry add-on endorsement program that led it to becoming a major producer of chemistry teachers. More recently, NJCTL launched programs to produce teachers of mathematics, computer science, middle school science and middle school mathematics.
During that time, New Jersey has had the fastest growth rate in student outcomes in physics and the second highest in chemistry in the nation. By 2018, New Jersey had become No. 1 in physics and No. 2 in chemistry, as measured by AP and SAT II results.
NJCTL is creating opportunity for all students, across the lines of race, ethnicity and gender. Support for NJCTL spans NJEA and AFT districts, traditional district schools and public charter schools, private schools and even students learning at home.
Based on its successful record, NJCTL has been approved by the New Jersey office of the secretary of higher education as a duly authorized Institution of Higher Education (IHE) and is in the process of seeking accreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE).
NJCTL has enjoyed broad bipartisan support from the past three New Jersey governors — representing both major political parties. In 2012, both houses of the state Legislature voted unanimously to make add-on endorsement programs, like those offered by the NJCTL, permanent.
Despite that success, the DOE has not yet drafted the regulations for add-on endorsement programs called for by that 2012 law. Instead, it has tried to apply regulations that were designed for alternate route programs. Those are a poor fit; add-on endorsement programs are fundamentally different.
Add-on endorsement programs are for people who know how to teach but don’t know the content of a new subject area. Alternate route programs are for people who know subject-area content but not how to teach. The starting points and pathways for those two types of programs are fundamentally different, requiring different rules and regulations.
The DOE should promote the expansion of add-on endorsement programs to other institutions of higher education and other subject areas, while adopting the regulations needed to support them.