Combatting Teacher Shortages May Start With Community Colleges

In her second-grade classroom outside Seattle, Fatima Nuñez Ardon often tells her students stories about everyday people realizing their dreams. One day, for example, she talked about Salvadoran American NASA astronaut Francisco Rubio and his journey to the International Space Station.

Another day, she told them her own life’s story — how she, an El Salvadoran immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in middle school speaking very little English, came to be a teacher.

Nuñez Ardon took an unusual path to the classroom: She earned her teaching degree through evening classes at a community college, while living at home and raising her four children.

Community college-based teaching programs like this are rare, but growing. They can dramatically cut the cost and raise the convenience of earning a teaching degree, while making a job in education accessible to a wider diversity of people.

In Washington, nine community colleges offer education degrees. Nationally, Community College Baccalaureate Association data indicates just six other states — Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Nevada and New Mexico — offer baccalaureate degrees related to K-12 education. (Two other states, Texas and Wyoming, offer early childhood education degrees.)

The expansion comes at a good time: Teacher shortages have worsened in the past decade, and fewer undergraduates are going into teacher training programs. A report in March from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education showed that the number of people completing a teacher-education program declined by almost a third between the 2008-09 and 2018-19 academic years. And many educators fear the pandemic worsened the crisis.

More community colleges around the country are starting to offer teacher education, said CCBA President Angela Kersenbrock. In all, 51 community college-based K-12 teaching programs have launched across the country since the early 2000s.

And they’re attracting students like Nuñez Ardon, who became certified to run a K-8 classroom in June, at the age of 36. It’s likely she wouldn’t have pursued a classroom career otherwise.

Teacher shortages predate the pandemic. For years, the number of people graduating from teacher education programs has fallen short of teacher demand. In 2018, 57,000 fewer students nationwide earned education degrees than in 2011.