Maryland State Schools Superintendent Carey Wright said Tuesday that school leaders must work harder to diversify and boost the state’s teacher workforce.
“It has to be a conscious effort,” Wright said during a break at the State Board of Education meeting in Baltimore. “Are we really going into our HBCUs? Are we recruiting? What do those techniques look like?”
Her comments came as the board reviewed a recent report from the Department of Education, which found the state has made little progress in diversifying its teacher workforce in recent years. According to the report, 68% of the state’s teachers in the current school year are white, compared to 20% Black and about 5% Latino or Asian.
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But Wright said another challenge for school systems is hiring and retaining teachers in the state.
“We’re not producing enough of those candidates internally, so we have to think about what else we’re going to do,” she said.
A few ideas were highlighted as part of a teacher workforce report that included several data points, including teacher retention across all 24 school systems, those enrolled in state preparation programs and the number of those receiving National Board Certification.
A working group will meet in two weeks to assess the recruitment and retention of a diverse teacher workforce. The task force will include representatives from the Maryland Higher Education Commission, the state’s historically black colleges and universities, the College of Southern Maryland and at least seven school districts: Baltimore, Dorchester, Frederick, Kent, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and Baltimore City.
“We have a very diverse group of stakeholders from all of these entities,” said Kelly Meadows, assistant state superintendent in the Department of Education Certification and Program Approval. “Our mission is to come together [find] solutions and overcome the challenges of recruiting and retaining our high-quality workforce here in Maryland.”
Meadows said other solutions include marketing the revamped teacher recruitment website, producing short YouTube videos to summarize the teaching profession and visiting school districts to inform officials about different teacher pathways and certification opportunities.
The report also found that of the 1,626 “experienced” educators – those designated as National Board Certified – 1,204, or 74%, were concentrated in four counties: Montgomery, Prince George’s, Anne Arundel and Howard.
The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform plan called for salary increases for teachers with that national designation starting in the 2021-2022 school year. About 976 teachers enrolled in the program that year. When the salary increase was increased a year later to as much as $10,000 per year, more than 3,000 teachers signed up, followed by another 3,800 in the current school year.
As of December, Meadows said every jurisdiction in the state has at least one teacher with that designation.
Among teachers with conditional certification — those who have a bachelor’s degree but have not met the requirements for a professional teacher license — more than half were Black in the past five school years, the report said. By comparison, white teachers accounted for about 32% of those conditionally certified during the same period.
“Our conditional certificate teachers better reflect the communities. That’s where a lot of people come from,” said Joshua Michael, vice president of the board.
Last year, the Legislature passed House Bill 1219, which required the department to create a teacher recruitment, retention and diversity dashboard. Data from that dashboard will be publicly available on January 1. Some data includes gender, race, new hires, and attrition rate. Meadows said the dashboard will also highlight teacher interns.
“The key is to hopefully follow this person into the school system, into the workforce and really get the word out about the diversity of our classrooms so that there is awareness of what we need in Maryland,” she said.
A gift
In other business, the board voted unanimously to approve the use of $350,000 to implement a reading science program for an estimated 30,000 paraprofessionals, teachers, school literacy supervisors and school administrators across the state. The money will be used for meeting space, stipends and other administrative costs of the program, which focuses on teaching students basic phonics, comprehension and vocabulary.
Wright, who led the Science of Reading program when he was superintendent of Mississippi public schools, announced that the money is tied to a four-year, $6.8 million grant from Washington nonprofit Ibis Group. D.C.
About $5.3 million will go to the State University of New York (SUNY) and the AIM Institute for Learning and Research of Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, to provide online training for the Science of Reading program. The remaining $1.5 million is for Johns Hopkins University and the department to study the impact of teacher effectiveness, teacher background knowledge, and literacy and leadership development.
The training, which will be free for Maryland teachers, will begin July 1.
Tenette Smith, executive director of literacy programs and initiatives at the department, said the training will take about 35 hours to complete. Smith worked with Wright in Mississippi on the Science of Reading program.
The reading science program must be implemented in all Maryland school systems by the 2024-2025 school year.
This story was originally published in Maryland Matters.
