During the April 18-19 meeting of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, commissioners were presented with two key annual reports related to the teacher supply in California and received an update on the work staff is undertaking in the early childhood education field. In addition, the commission considered a rare complaint regarding program approval related to reading instruction.
Teacher-related reports
A teacher supply report is required by California Education Code to be presented to the commission each April detailing the number of teachers who received credentials, certificates, permits and waivers to teach and serve in the state’s public schools as well as information on current teacher candidates. The following are key findings from Teacher Supply in California, 2022–23: A Report to the Legislature:
- There were 14,836 new credentials issued, an 11.7 percent decrease from 2021–22. This marks the second decrease of new teaching credentials issued since the prior seven-year increase starting in 2014–15.
- The number of new credentials issued showed a decrease for California institutes of higher education (IHE)-prepared (-11.3 percent), California LEA-prepared (-20.2 percent) and for out-of-state/out-of-country prepared (-7.6 percent) from the prior year. Even so, IHE’s prepared 73 percent of the new teaching credentials.
- There was an increase of Short-Term Staff Permits (STSPs) and Provisional InternPermits (PIPs) issued between 2021–22 and 2022–23 (82.7 percent and 73.1 percent, respectively) — when combined, there was a 79.6 percent increase.
- The proportion of teaching credentials issued in the past five years shifted slightly with Multiple Subject credentials decreasing by 3 percentage points, while the proportion of Single Subject and Education Specialist Instruction credentials both increasing by 1.5 percentage points between 2018–19 and 2022–23.
- More than 1,800 Career Technical Education (CTE) credentials were issued in 15 different industry sectors. More than one-fifth (22.7 percent) were issued in the Arts, Media, and Entertainment pathway.
- There was a 31 percent decrease in the number of waivers issued from the previous year.
- The majority of newly enrolled teacher candidates were female, accounting for 71.4 percent of enrollees. Race/ethnicity categories held steady from 2021–22, with Hispanic candidates at 39.7 percent, white candidates at 33.5 percent, Asian enrollees at 8.5 percent, candidates of two or more races at 4.5 percent, Black or African American enrollees at 4.3 percent, American Indian/Alaska Native candidates at 0.8 percent and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander at 0.6 percent.
The presentation also included demographic information on California’s current student population, and commissioners were encouraged to see those numbers align more than in the past. For example, 4.7 percent of students are African American, and 4.3 percent of new teacher candidates are African American. Hispanic students, however, account for 56.1 percent of students, while Hispanic teacher candidates represent nearly 40 percent.
While staff and commissioners were alarmed by the large jump in STSPs and PIPs, staff shared that even with the increase, these permits and waivers account for just 4 percent of the teaching workforce.
Teacher Residency Grant Program
The 2018 state budget funded the Teacher Residency Grant Program (TRGP) to help address the state’s goal to administer grant programs that expand pathways into credentialing and support the effort to have California’s educators reflect the diversity of the students they serve.
WestEd is providing analysis of the program and found that while cohorts for the TRGP are small at about 15 or fewer residents per program, the 428 participants are more representative to the student population they serve than those in traditional pathways. This trend is predicted to continue as the funding provided for the program in 2021 added to the eligible criteria: “local efforts to recruit, develop support systems for, provide outreach and communication strategies to, and retain a diverse teacher workforce that reflects a local education agency community’s diversity.”
In fact, 61 percent of the 2021 grantees qualified under the diversity criteria. In the 2022–23 cohort, 53.4 percent is Hispanic/Latino, 17 percent is white, 11.7 percent is African American/Black and 8.8 percent are of Asian descent. Of the program completers in 2022–23, 52.4 percent are Hispanic/Latino, 18.8 percent are white, 16.7 percent are African American/Black and 11.4 percent are of Asian descent.
WestEd researchers found that around 90 percent of the graduating cohort was hired as an educator and 74 percent remained in the district they did their residency. In the future, WestEd plans to investigate how TRGP resident retention rates compare to those of similar teachers from other preparation pathways and how those retention rates vary by teacher demographics and characteristics of their placement school and district.
In other CTC news:
- The Child Development Permit Workgroup gave an update on its work to provide recommendations to the commission on the structure and requirements of the Child Development Permit in alignment with the state’s Master Plan for Early Learning and Care and current needs of the field. Concerns were expressed from the field about possibly requiring an associate degree for early childhood education (ECE) teachers instead of the current required units.
- Staff gave an update on the pilot of the California ECE Formative Teaching Performance Assessment, an optional, formative locally administered and locally scored performance assessment.
- A complaint was received regarding program approval for Mills College at Northeastern University’s Preliminary Multiple Subject program. Decoding Dyslexia of California, California Reading Coalition and Families in Schools charged that the recently approved program did not meet the literacy requirements of Senate Bill 488; Mills College denies the assertion. The commission moved to remand the issue back to the Committee on Accreditation as they saw “no evidence of procedural violation that might warrant an investigation nor a need for technical assistance by this body.”
The next meeting of the Committee on Teacher Credentialing is June 20-21, 2024.
