Ask someone to name a few high-demand jobs of the present and future and they’ll likely identify careers in cybersecurity, green energy, health care, and artificial intelligence. It follows, then, that it would be important for students to get exposure to popular and emerging STEM fields in high school or earlier.
But schools have been struggling to recruit and retain math and science teachers for decades, let alone educators who can teach about computer science, artificial intelligence, health care, and other emerging fields.
Plus, how can schools compete for talent in high-demand STEM fields when the teaching profession has a reputation for being poorly paid and underappreciated?
“It’s a trifecta: It’s hard to find those people, when you find them, they’re more likely to leave, and in today’s economy they can trade up in terms of their salary when they leave,” said Bailey Cato Czupryk, senior vice president of transformation at TNTP, an education consulting firm that specializes in teacher training. “That’s a hard tangle of challenges for individual schools and districts to figure out how to solve.”
Teachers are also increasingly finding their profession at the center of heated political debates—even in STEM fields—over a range of issues, which also complicates recruitment, experts say.
What makes matters worse is that schools are losing potential STEM teaching candidates early in the teacher pipeline, or before they even enter the pipeline, said Erika Shugart, the CEO of the National Science Teaching Association.
“A lot of [college] students make the choice, in computer science they become a programmer, or if they’re in the biomedical sciences maybe they go into industry or pharmaceuticals, because they can get paid a lot more,” Shugart said. “Retirement [among teachers] is fairly consistent, people are not leaving in droves, but the pipeline of the students has shrunk quite a bit before they become teachers.”
Yet finding and keeping teachers who are fluent in STEM subjects is critical for two important reasons. First, it helps students get more engaged in school by showing them the relevance of STEM topics. Second, it helps prepare them to study STEM in college and prepare for jobs in those fields when they are in the workforce, experts say.
To meet the demand for educators who can teach emerging and popular STEM subjects and fill those student learning gaps, they say, schools and districts must get creative, and government and industry need to step up.
Some of the barriers to finding qualified STEM teachers may feel insurmountable for school and district leaders, who have little control over how the job market, public opinion, and political winds might push a promising college student toward the cybersecurity industry over the teaching profession.
Strategies to fill STEM learning gaps caused by teacher shortages
But there are strategies that education leaders can use to address those challenges. Top among them, experts recommend, are building partnerships with local businesses, universities, and industry to give students opportunities to learn more about in-demand and emerging STEM fields, and working with other schools and districts to share teaching resources.
To fill teaching gaps, schools within a district can share STEM teachers, said Charlotte Cahill, the associate vice president in the education practice at Jobs for the Future. And districts can take that idea a step further, forging partnerships with neighboring districts to create STEM programs where they share teachers and resources.
We’re just not preparing young people for the futures they tell us they want and that they deserve and that our country needs them to have.
One example of this is the Rural Schools Innovation Zone, where five districts in Texas have pooled resources to offer courses in health sciences, STEM, and other industries important to the region. Each district hosts an academy focused on a specific area—such as STEM—that students from any of the five participating districts can attend.
RSIZ executive director Michael Gonzalez, who runs the nonprofit organization created to coordinate the partnership, said it’s much more sustainable for the five districts to share one or two STEM teachers than hire one per district.
The partnership has also created teaching positions that are easier to recruit for, Gonzalez said. It can be hard for rural schools to entice teachers because they’re asked to take on so many responsibilities outside of their core area of interest.
“They’re a STEM teacher, they’re a precalc teacher, they’re an Algebra II teacher, they are doing so many different things, it’s not even worth applying to a job like that,” he said. “This allows you to be specialized.”
Gonzalez said that figuring out how to coordinate funding for the programs and transportation for students among the five districts is a work in progress, but the payoff is giving students access to courses in cybersecurity, geographic information systems, and robotics that they wouldn’t otherwise have.
Schools can also leverage partnerships with industry. Students can go to local businesses for internships or work-based learning experiences. Or employees from tech, energy, or health science industries can go to schools to deliver workshops or co-teach STEM subjects with experienced and licensed teachers, said Cahill.
But to pull this off, schools need local companies to be active participants in solving the STEM teacher shortage problem, said Cahill.
“What are the opportunities for employees in those well-paying tech jobs to actually have support from their employer to teach a class?” she said. “And to work-based learning and internships, we need employers to open their doors more to students so that students have an opportunity to start really building and testing and applying these skills.”
Industry partnerships go both ways, said Monica Asher, the principal of Olentangy Orange High School in a rapidly growing district north of Columbus, Ohio. That’s because they also give employees in those fields a chance to see what it’s like working with students, she said, for those who might be interested in making a career change into teaching.
But schools can’t expect to easily recruit from the private sector, Asher cautioned. Knowing that her sole computer science teacher in her previous school was getting close to retirement, Asher started working to find a replacement three years in advance.
“You can plan ahead, and you can develop some sort of internship model, where you are partnered with local businesses and someone who works in the private sector can get an alternative pathway to get their teaching license,” she said. “There are alternative licensure pathways, but for a person to finish that and then be able to teach, it does takes some time.”
Universities are another potential source for fruitful partnerships to bolster schools’ STEM offerings and teaching staff, said Allison Persad, the principal of The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria in New York. Middle and high school students at her school go to the nearby Cornell Tech campus to learn robotics and computer science from PhD students there, she said.
The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria is an all-girls school with a focus on STEM. Persad has had several STEM teachers who have left the classroom for the private sector, lured by better pay and remote work. So she is constantly on the lookout for new STEM teachers.
“It’s networking, it’s tapping into talent in places that you wouldn’t expect,” she said. “My ears and eyes are always on the ground, anywhere, [even] sitting next to somebody on a plane.”
School and district leaders can also recruit from inside their own buildings.
Sean Roberts, the vice president of U.S. strategy for Code.org, which works to expand access to computer science education, said that schools don’t necessarily have to compete with the tech, energy, and health science industries for talent. He said schools need to invest in professional development for their existing staff.
Schools can train their teachers to teach computer science and related fields, he said.
“What we have found is that teachers know how to teach, period. Really, what’s important is that we are giving them the vocabulary and context to teach these important skills,” he said. “Algorithms are really sequencing. Kindergarten teachers are doing that already and know how to teach sequencing and teach it well. Debugging is problem solving, we have teachers doing that in every subject area.”
Sylvia Kwon was originally a humanities teacher at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria. Now, she teaches humanities as well as software engineering, after getting additional training in computer science. She said computer science was a natural extension for someone who likes logic puzzles and language. But the real motivation was to meet the needs and interests of her students.
“Every year, students are increasingly exposed to technology at younger ages, whether teachers wish for them to or not,” she said in an email. “The more educators get ahead of that curve and help transform that exposure into curiosity and engagement with their curricula, the easier it will be for all teachers to do their job in helping students obtain the critical thinking and literacy skills they aim to teach.”
Another wrinkle, said Cahill, is that schools aren’t just in competition for talent with industry, they’re also competing with other schools and districts for qualified teachers. That’s a risk that schools take when investing in PD for their educators, she said. Those teachers can then get poached by bigger districts after building new STEM teaching skills.
But schools can help fill those gaps by mining expertise from school employees other than teachers, said Cahill, such as the nurses’ office and the IT department, by having students shadow those professionals in their daily jobs or intern in their departments. In those cases, the nurses and IT staff members are teaching those students valuable skills.
“There are opportunities within school districts and within schools to provide some of these work-based learning opportunities, and schools are not typically taking advantage of this,” she said.
The challenges depend on the size of a district and where it is located
Unfortunately, being able to hire teachers in high-demand STEM areas often comes down to resources, said Asher, the principal in Ohio. She used to work in a smaller district, but now is in a district with four large high schools in a region with growing semiconductor manufacturing and biomedical and health sciences sectors, where schools can share resources and forge partnerships with local businesses.
“Let’s say there is a shortage of a specific type of candidate, I would say physics teachers are often tough to find, computer science teachers are very tough to find. But when you’re in a large district you can have staff that travel from building to building,” she said. “If I were in my previous position, it would be a totally different conversation. School size, access to resources, where a school is located impacts all of these things significantly.”
While schools can take steps to give their students exposure to emerging and in-demand STEM fields, they ultimately have limited control over the bigger issues—such as the teacher pipeline and compensation—making it challenging to recruit educators who can teach these subjects. That’s why, business and government need to step up, experts in STEM and the teaching profession argue.
“I don’t think it’s a problem that schools can solve by themselves,” said Cahill. “I think it is worthwhile to invest in PD for teachers. I think some of that funding is going to need to come from state investments, federal investments. I don’t know that districts can take it on by themselves, much less schools.”
Businesses should also not see lending their talent to local schools as charity, because there’s a powerful return on investment, said Czurpyk at TNTP. By making it a part of their employees’ jobs to mentor students or co-teach classes that local schools are struggling to offer, industry is helping to solve their own talent pipeline problems as well as those in education.
“If you’re a leader in a hospital right now, I’m willing to bet you’re worried that you can’t find enough nurses,” she said.
At the end of the day, teaching students emerging and high-demand STEM subjects like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and green energy is more than an educational issue, it’s an economic and national security priority too, said Czurpyk.
“It doesn’t feel dramatic for me to say that,” she said. “We’re just not preparing young people for the futures they tell us they want and that they deserve and that our country needs them to have.”
At this point, the problem of staffing schools with enough specialized STEM teachers may feel insurmountable without government, industry, and higher education taking the lead. But Cahill doesn’t want educational leaders to walk away with that perception. Schools have much of the know-how to prepare their students for the jobs of the future with the teachers they have.
“If we’re talking about high school students, 10 years from now they are going to be still very early in their careers and no one has any idea what AI will have done to their jobs,” she said. But, “the one thing that we do know pretty clearly is that AI is likely to make what people call durable skills—things like communication, problem solving, and teamwork—more important as people are looking to get into jobs. Those are all skills that can be taught in lots of different kinds of classrooms.”
