The STEM teacher workforce is under acute stress as schools are being tasked to provide more STEM instruction with the least stable segment of the public teacher workforce and increasingly fewer teacher candidates stepping in to help. Research is particularly warranted as demand for STEM content has increased in recent decades while the supply of teacher candidates into the field has simultaneously dwindled.

David Devraj Kumar, Ed.D., a professor of science education and founding director of the STEM Education Laboratory, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, within Florida Atlantic University’s College of Education, is co-author of a study published in the Annenberg Institute at Brown University’s EdWorkingPapers series examining the characteristics and qualifications of the STEM teacher workforce in high-need schools in the United States and how they have evolved over nearly 30 years of national workforce surveys.

The study primarily used high-poverty schools as the lens for examining differences in STEM teacher qualifications and characteristics over time.

Results show STEM teachers in high-need settings are now more likely to have a master’s degree than they had in prior decades. Teachers in both math and physical sciences are now more likely to hold any degree in their aligned field than they had in the past and are more likely to hold any field-aligned qualification in computer science. These gains are observed in high-need schools even as qualification levels in low-need schools stymy or retreat.

Though many prior studies have examined teachers in high-need settings, including some that have focused on the STEM teacher workforce, there is little understanding about how the STEM workforce in high-need settings may be changing separate from other segments of the workforce. Also, contrary to conventional belief that the STEM workforce in high-need settings might reveal subtle signs of decline over time, the study discovered the STEM teacher workforce has been surprisingly resilient over time, not only maintaining qualifications levels but also modestly improving on several dimensions.

“STEM subjects are integral to economic growth and national security, which attracts a lot of policy interest. But STEM teachers are also really hard to keep in the classroom, as they often have higher-earning job opportunities outside of teaching,” said Michael Hansen, Ph.D., first author of the study, and a senior fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy and the Herman and George R. Brown Chair on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Overall, the study reveals encouraging signs of improvement in qualifications for STEM teachers in high-need schools, particularly in physical sciences, math, and computer science. However, biology shows a decline in qualifications despite a surplus of teachers in that field, highlighting an ironic trend.

Not all findings from the study are optimistic. For example, gains in field-aligned teachers over time are driven by those who are certified in-field only (without an academic degree), which is a relatively weak qualification standard when considering the importance of subject matter knowledge.

Significant need-based gaps in qualifications persist across the board, having remained for nearly three decades. Therefore, while there seems to be some modest improvements, they must be viewed in the context of a long-standing history of unequal access to qualified teachers.

Analysis also shows that the majority of teachers leading physical sciences and computer science courses in 2020 in both high- and low-need settings are either unqualified to teach the field or are weakly qualified with field-certification only and no academic degree. Math teachers are modestly better on these metrics, though more than 20% of them in both high- and low-need settings have no aligned qualifications. These facts have discouraging implications for the quality of and access to robust STEM instruction for students across all school settings.   

Prior evidence indicates that the STEM teacher workforce, particularly in schools serving socioeconomically disadvantaged students, faces significant staffing challenges, leading to declining teacher qualifications and instructional quality. This unequal access to quality STEM instruction threatens to widen existing educational and economic gaps based on family backgrounds. Recent trends suggest the STEM workforce may become increasingly constrained.

Schools vary in the level of staffing challenges they face, and those serving high-need student populations typically face the greatest difficulty in securing access to a qualified supply of STEM teachers for their students. A weak STEM teacher supply has downstream implications for industries in STEM fields, which include many of those that propel economic growth and support national security.

Weaker STEM instruction in high-need areas risks perpetuating social inequalities by limiting students’ access to rigorous content and lucrative college majors and careers. Inadequate teacher compensation contributes to high turnover and results from relying on an inexperienced workforce.

“In this context, we still have a long way to go in making quality STEM education available for students across all socioeconomic barriers in our schools,” said Kumar.

Additional co-authors of this National Science Foundation-funded study are Li Feng, Ph.D., a professor of economics at Texas State University; and Nicolas Zerbino, MPP, a senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution. 

-FAU-