INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – The new school year is just around the corner and there’s a shortage of new teachers in Indiana.

The mainstream media is blaming the state’s Republican leaders, claiming they scared a lot of college students away from teaching in recent years through increased accountability, restraints on union collective bargaining, promotion of alternative schools and a lack of pay raises.

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But for years, many experts – including the leaders of the national teachers unions – have been criticizing the quality of many new teachers entering K-12 education, noting that a high percentage come from the bottom third of their graduating classes.

Mediocre college graduates often become mediocre teachers.

So are the critics of education reform bemoaning the loss of potentially mediocre teachers? If so, why? Shouldn’t the focus be on attracting a higher quality of young teacher, rather than mourning the loss of the subpar?

“The reason for raising the standards for teachers is because we’re expecting more from our kids, and we have to make sure we have a teaching force capable of helping them meet those standards,” Sandi Jacobs, a vice president with the National Council for Teacher Quality, told EAGnews.

“If that course of action is causing us to not have the numbers of teachers we need, lowering the standards again doesn’t seem like the right response. Becoming purposefully aggressive in attracting the talented people we need seems like the more appropriate course of action.”

Sacrifice quality for quantity?

The Indianapolis Star summed up the perceived crisis this way:

The crop of first-year teachers across Indiana decreased by almost a fifth in the past five years, leaving school districts hard-pressed to find educators as a new school year begins.

First-time teachers have decreased more than 18 percent in the past five years, leaving districts in a scramble.

School officials said it’s been increasingly difficult to fill open positions with newly minted teachers – particularly for special education, math and science.

In some cases, schools will have to start the year with substitute teachers to temporarily fill vacancies until they find a suitable candidate. In many other instances, experts say, schools have to be less choosy when hiring teachers – and that can affect the quality of instruction.

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Progressive pundits immediately placed the blame on Republicans for supposedly scaring too many college students away from K-12 education.

One columnist listed “the killing of collective bargaining, the rise of private school vouchers, pay raises tied in part to student performance on standardized tests and more – put into high gear in 2010,” as factors contributing to the decline in new teachers.

“Multiple factors, including poor starting salaries and a hostile teacher climate, have driven people away from the profession,” Teresa Taber Doughty, associate dean for learning and Purdue’s College of Education, told the Indianapolis Star.

Hostile teaching climate? Pervasive negativity?

Are progressives overreacting to the fact that state officials in Indiana – as well as many other states – have started to demand more from K-12 schools and the people who staff them?

Are increased standards necessarily a bad thing? Do we really want to go backward? There apparently is some danger of that happening.

As Indianapolis commentator Abdul Hakim-Shabazz wrote in a column this week, “…the tests to become a teacher have gotten harder. So difficult in fact that the Department of Education is asking the State Board of Education to lower the passing scores in some areas to get more teachers.

“For example, to be certified in early childhood reading and English you need a score of 30 to pass, which 24 percent of the last test takers did.  The DOE wants to lower that score to 24, which would yield a pass rate of about 80 percent.  It would yield more teachers, but it seems to me that this would sacrifice quality for quantity.”

That shouldn’t be the goal, should it?

We’ve been warned for years

For years, education officials and teachers union leaders have been warning us about the steady decline of the quality of college students who become K-12 teachers.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan – a dedicated Democrat – claimed that “a significant proportion of new teachers come from the bottom third of their college class,” and that a lot of students get “far more than their share of ineffective teachers,” according to Democrats for Education Reform.

In 1997, former National Education Association President Bob Chase said, “We cannot go on denying responsibility for school quality. It is our job to improve teachers or to get them out of the classroom. … We must revitalize our public schools from within, or they will be dismantled from without.”

In 1991, the following statement came from the American Federation of Teachers Leadership for Reform Project:

“The quality of the teaching force will continue to drop because most of the high NAEP-scoring students are not going to be teachers.”

Sandra Feldman, who was president of the AFT from 1997 to 2004, was quoted as saying, “You have in the schools right now. . . the teachers who are going to be retiring, very smart people,” she said. “We’re not getting in now the same kinds of people.”

Even current NEA President Lily Eskelsen García said the following:

“The fact is, that while the vast majority of teachers are capable and dedicated professionals, who put children’s interests first, there are indeed some bad teachers in America’s schools. And it is our job as a union to improve those teachers or, that failing, to get them out of the classroom.”

Some progressives and their media friends have attempted to debunk the idea that the quality of teachers has been on the decline.

U.S. News and World Report cited a study that said “the SAT and ACT scores of a typical new teacher had declined to the 42nd percentile in 2000 – a middling figure, not a bottom one. By 2008, those average scores had risen 6 percentage points, to the 48th percentile.”

But is the 48th percentile really good news?

“To be sure, 48th percentile still means that 52 percent – more than half – of all SAT and ACT test takers scored higher than the average new teacher,” the article said.

Teachers create the standards themselves

Most of the warnings about new teacher quality were consistently ignored until recent years, when elected officials in states like Indiana started waking up and approving higher standards.

But Indiana’s higher standards for teacher certification were not established by Republican politicians, as progressive suggest. They are set by the Indiana State Board of Education, the group charged with overseeing the quality of instruction in K-12 schools.

“As a general trend (teacher certification) requirements are more difficult (than in the past),” Marc Lotter, the Director of External Relations for the Board of Education, told EAGnews.

“As a nation we’ve been raising academic standards for students, so we’re seeing a similar increase in the expectations of teachers. We need teachers to be able to master that material so they will be able to teach those students.”

The board members do not act independently when establishing teacher certification standards. Decisions are made in close consultation with advisory groups of professional educators, including many teachers, Lotter said.

“(The professional advisors) take the test, review the material, determine what should be required to obtain a state teaching license, and make recommendations to the state board about passing scores,” Lotter said. “It’s only after they make these recommendations that they go back and look at the potential impact on test takers.

“This is all done based on the recommendations of those already in the profession – what they believe an elementary math teacher should master in order to be licensed to teach that subject.”

Should states like Indiana now back away from the more rigorous standards, so they can get more warm bodies into the teaching profession, regardless of their qualifications?

The answer is clearly no, according to Jacobs.

A 2014 report from the American Federation of Teachers, titled “Raising the Bar—Aligning and Elevating Teacher Preparation and the Teaching Profession,” offers a great deal of evidence that training and certification standards for new teachers should be enhanced, now lowered, Jacobs said.

Among other suggestions, the report says teacher candidates should have to pass the same sort of tough exams that prospective attorneys have to pass to gain certification.

As AFT President Randi Weingarten said in the report, “It’s time to do away with a common rite of passage into the teaching profession, whereby newly minted teachers are tossed the keys to their classrooms, expected to figure things out, and left to see if they and their students sink or swim.”

“(The report) is an absolute indictment of the state of teacher preparation,” Jacobs said. “There is all around acknowledgement that we’re not doing enough to make sure teachers are ready.

“The fact that we’re seeing so many states looking at things like admission requirements (for potential teachers) is a response to the very low bars that states have set for new teachers.”

Uncapping the earning potential

There’s no evidence of a nationwide shortage of new teachers, according to Jacobs. And there is no consistent evidence to suggest that the shortage only exists in states where reformers have raised teaching standards.

If that were the case, why is there a widespread shortage of new teachers in California, where the unions still run education and little reform has been implemented?

Instead of backpedaling and lowering standards again, the idea should be to actively recruit more gifted students into teaching programs, Jacobs said.

A big key to that could be uncapping the earning potential for outstanding teachers.

Under union collective bargaining in Indiana and other states, teacher salaries are largely based on the number of years of employment and level of college education attained. Skill, quality of work and level of success are not part of the equation.

The good teachers make the same as the not-so-good, a fact that’s a turn off to outstanding college students who want to stand out in their professions and be paid more for better work, according to Jacobs.

“One thing we know about pay and compensation is that millennials do not want to be paid on a salary schedule,” Jacobs said. “They want to be treated as individuals. If they are a superstar they want to be paid like a superstar. That’s part of what is currently unappealing about having a career in teaching.

“The argument that college students look at the (union scale) base pay for teachers and walk away, I don’t think that’s accurate. They want the ability to break away from the pack.”

Union pay scales also prevent many schools from filling teacher shortages in the STEM categories by offering more money to candidates in those fields, Jacobs said.

“It’s pretty hard to understand why we continue to pay everyone the same when supply and demand are very different, and in many cases the job is very different,” she said.

Even if more money were freed up to attract more students into the profession, it’s clear that states must be more careful about who becomes certified to teach our future generations.

As Hakim-Shabazz wrote in his column, “Is pay an issue for some?  Sure it is.  But someone who wants a lot of pay while avoiding tough standards and accountability is not someone I would want teaching my kids, and I doubt you would too.”