Purdue’s College of Education revamps its curriculum to boost enrollment and fix Indiana’s teacher shortage

Amy Leeson (MS LA’76) decorated her fifth-grade classroom at Thorntown Elementary School in Thorntown, Indiana, with posters of John Denver and peppered her students’ papers with his quotes (“Far Out!”). Throughout her three-decade career in the classroom, she encouraged her students to do anything they imagined and was to them a “magical force,” says Nancy E. Marchand-Martella (HHS’85), who credits her former teacher as one of the reasons she became a first-generation college graduate. 

“I didn’t even know what a credit hour was,” Marchand-Martella says. “I remember asking my dad, and he said, ‘I don’t know, but you sure need a lot of them.’”

Now the Suzi and Dale Gallagher Dean of Education at Purdue, Marchand-Martella invited Leeson to join the Dean’s Advocacy Council and help other young people enter — and persist in — their chosen profession in the face of potential obstacles like low salaries and aggressive standardized testing. 

“So many teachers are doing a great job, but they’re never told that they’re having an amazing impact on kids,” Marchand-Martella says. “We need to elevate our support of teachers and ask what we can do to bring more good folks into the teaching profession, because the students of tomorrow deserve that.” This question is driving Marchand-Martella as she leads the College of Education in an effort to engage students and stem the steep decline in enrollment that is contributing to a nationwide teacher shortage.

How Did We Get Here?

The national teacher shortage threatens to reach 200,000 by 2025 (nearly double what it was in 2018), and Indiana is one of the hardest-hit states, due in part to severe funding cuts to its public schools. Ninety-two percent of the state’s education districts report a shortage of teachers in 14 subjects, including key areas like math, science, and special education. 

“Sadly, ‘Indiana’ and ‘teacher shortage’ have become synonymous terms,” Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Jennifer McCormick (EDU’93) said in a public statement. “For nearly a decade, we have struggled to find educators to fill even the frequently offered classroom subjects. Unfortunately, this shortage continues to spill into areas not only critical to Indiana’s education plan but areas that prepare our students for a bright future.” 

In an attempt to close those gaps, school districts hire uncertified teachers; in 2017–18, Indiana issued 398 emergency permits in special education, 186 in math, and 153 in language arts. This problem is especially prevalent in high-poverty and rural schools, where teachers are often less qualified — so less prepared — to meet those challenges. Nationwide, more than 40 percent of teachers leave the classroom within the first five years of teaching, and decreased enrollment in education programs means significantly fewer teachers are available to fill those spots. Since 2010, enrollment in education programs throughout the country has dropped by a third, with sharp declines in nearly every state. Indiana is among the most dramatically impacted, with a 27 percent drop in enrollment.

Why Indiana? Among many reasons, teachers point to the fact that their student body is increasingly composed of diverse learners and students with emotional needs, with a high percentage of students at risk for failure and 50 percent who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. 

“I’ve been seeing more students who are less able to cope with being in the classroom because their physical needs or emotional needs have not been met,” says Annie Buckles (EDU’98, MS EDU’04), who has been teaching first grade at Vinton Elementary in Lafayette, Indiana, for a decade. “Teachers can’t just open up a textbook and teach from that because students have too many different needs, and it takes a lot of time outside of the classroom to plan good lessons.”

Not only are teachers overworked, but they’re drastically underpaid, which has received extensive media coverage and sparked movements like Red For Ed, through which teachers and their supporters rally for funding. Although teacher pay is a nationwide problem, Indiana is ranked 36th in the nation, with a starting salary of $35,943 and an average salary of $50,614. The state is ranked last in the country for salary growth since 2002. 

This sends a devastating message to teachers “about what that paycheck represents,” says Jeff Spanke (HHS’05, MA LA’08, PhD EDU’15), a former high school English teacher, now an assistant professor of English at Ball State University. “The tragedy is the social perception of the value of the work because it’s reflective of the fact that people don’t understand what teachers do. People don’t care what teachers do. People think because they went to school that they understand how schools work. And that is clearly not the case.” And the existing processes for documenting teachers’ work and measuring their impact on students does not accurately capture teachers’ efforts, Buckles says. In fact, current assessment methods have a detrimental impact on teachers and their classrooms. 

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 linked funding to academic progress as measured by annual assessments, shifting teachers’ focus to testing. “What we really want to be doing is teaching the whole child and seeing the kinds of learning that we know is best for kids, but that is not reflected in the assessments they take” — especially for diverse learners, Buckles says. “As hard as students are working, it’s not showing up on the assessments,” which in turn reflects poorly on the teachers and impacts their salaries and their schools’ funding.

Many of the lawmakers “who make decisions about what happens in the classroom have no experience with what it’s like in the classroom,” Buckles says. “And the in-the-trenches teacher is not being asked what they think is best. Teaching is important work. We don’t want to abandon our students because of pay or because of how hard it is, but we need to start looking at the emotional health of teachers.”

An Innovative Approach 

At the College of Education, “we have to ensure that we’re listening to our school districts and superintendents and teachers and be as innovative as possible,” says Marchand-Martella, who is leading an initiative to rework all teacher education programs for the cohort of students in fall 2021. 

Among the college’s top priorities is to ensure that its curriculum prepares teachers to meet the needs of diverse learners. In the existing curriculum, students spend 14 to 16 weeks during their senior year observing and assistant teaching in a classroom, in addition to eight to 12 weeks of other early field experiences during their freshman, sophomore, and junior years, which provides them with an intensive but narrow learning experience. “You cannot learn what it’s really like in a classroom from books or small blocks of time,” Buckles says. “It’s a shock to go from student teaching to having your own classroom.”

To mitigate that shock and prepare teachers for the complexities of the classroom, the college is developing a yearlong teaching program, now in the pilot stage, through which college seniors observe and teach every week from the first through the final day of school. They participate in every part of a teacher’s work, from setting up a classroom to administering assessments, and they experience the ever-changing energy of the classroom and how teachers adjust their methods of engaging with students as the school year progresses.

While reworking the curriculum for current and incoming students, the college faculty and administration are also developing robust recruitment efforts to drive up enrollment, like an annual Become a Teacher Day to encourage high schoolers to pursue degrees in education through interactive activities, campus tours, and meetings with college administration. This event is hosted by the college’s teacher education recruiter, Abigail Laufman (MS EDU’15), who brings seven years of experience teaching elementary school and an intimate knowledge of the Purdue master’s program to her recruitment efforts both on and off campus. She casts a wide net when engaging prospective students, with outreach targeted as early as middle school. As Marchand-Martella says: “It’s never too early to talk about being a teacher and elevating the teaching profession.”

The college does not limit its outreach to young people who have expressed an interest in teaching, Marchand-Martella says. They’re also recruiting Purdue students with undecided majors and developing tutoring opportunities to give students an opportunity to discover whether they have an interest in teaching. Spanke, who recruits in districts throughout Indiana, also engages with students who are not traditionally associated with teaching; he looks for young people who are “wired to be educators but just have never had that spark ignited for them,” he says. “I’m interested in the dispositions of a teacher — the traits that make lifelong educators and lifelong learners: charisma, creativity, and curiosity.”

Laufman identifies those students in meetings where “they are proactive and come with questions. That’s a good teacher.” She also notes that while college admissions recruiters often look at students’ grade-point averages and test scores, “that’s just a snapshot of a day when they took a test. What’s more important to me is looking at how students interact with their peers and what kinds of experiences they have working with kids.”

Elevating the Profession

“Why would young people choose this profession when they hear how hard it is to do and how little they get paid?” Buckles asks. The popular answer is that teachers are martyrs to education driven by the need to serve despite the poor pay and hardships of their profession. “We get reduced to being public servants or social workers, and people thank us for our service, but we’re not of the same caliber as lawyers and engineers,” whose effort and expertise is regarded and compensated at a significantly higher level, Spanke says.

One of the college’s primary goals is to elevate the teaching profession and to advocate for teachers to receive support and fair compensation. Spanke highlights two approaches of marketing the profession to prospective students and to the public at large: “One way is to sweep the absurdities of it under the rug and to only highlight the great things that make a difference in kids’ lives. I’ve never really been a big fan of that because it ignores the difficulties of our job. Teaching is very, very hard, which is why people deserve a lot more money to do it. 

“The other way is to address the difficulties head-on and then sell it. You sell the difficulties and the struggle and the elite power that comes from being one of the few people in the world who can do this — because not everybody can be a teacher, but for those it’s made for, it is a truly blessed and sacred life. You have to pump that message and the privilege and honor of teaching.”

The college stresses that honor on Signing Day, during which the faculty and administration travel to high schools to celebrate incoming students in the manner of star athletes. They gather the students, parents, and teachers before a Purdue banner and “elevate these students and what they’re about to embark on and why it’s so vital to their communities and make sure they feel recognized,” says Tonya Agnew (LA’01), director of communication for the College of Education.

The college also disseminates that message through marketing campaigns and by advocating for teachers in Washington, DC. Purdue faculty and administration work closely with the University’s government relations team, participate in conversations with lawmakers at the Indiana State Capitol, and host roundtables with legislators to discuss issues like training requirements and teacher pay. 

Spanke suggests that fostering public appreciation for the teaching profession will go a long way toward changing how people vote on issues vital to education, and he points to the spring of 2020 as a unique opportunity. As schools closed throughout the nation in response to COVID-19, parents took on the daunting task of homeschooling their children and expressed their dawning appreciation for teachers on social media. Spanke hopes this new awareness of teachers’ work will lead to policy changes.

“I think we’re on the brink of something truly profound in the field of education,” he says. “Five days into e-learning, parents are realizing that it’s hard to be around your children all day, let alone 100 more of them! People are going to wake up to the fact that what these teachers are doing is hard, and it deserves more compensation in more ways than just financial; that education and funding schools matter; that schools serve more of a purpose than just teaching kids how to pass a test. It will be a watershed moment in our country and our world that will change how we vote. I think there’s going to be a resurgence of the social capital of a teaching degree.”

Even as classrooms were shuttered, teachers offered online lesson plans and mapped out curricula for the fall. The administrators at the College of Education moved forward with their plans to refresh the longstanding programs and develop new initiatives, and seniors graduated from the College of Education. The college’s administration, faculty, and teachers offered their support and encouragement to the graduates as they embarked upon their essential career; each future teacher received (by mail, this year) a copy of the teacher’s creed that ends: I am a teacher. I change the world one student at a time.