Giving Compass' Take:

• Wayne D’Orio explains that colleges' efforts to improve the teacher pipeline to address the teacher shortage have fallen short in part because of low pay. 

• How can funders help to create a reliable pipeline of highquality teachers? 

• Learn about the pay gap for teachers. 

The teacher shortage is growing in the U.S., but it's an uphill battle for many colleges looking to create more candidates.

More institutions are starting boutique programs, taking the time to build relationships with high school and even middle school students to expand the pipeline of future teachers. Although the individual programs may be successful, their collective impact has been small so far.

Meanwhile, the teacher deficit is growing. Since about 2012, the number of teachers needed in K-12 public schools has outpaced the number of available candidates. That gap has grown to a shortage of more than 110,000 teachers projected for the 2017-18 school year, compared to 20,000 in 2012-13. And with relatively few students from racial and ethnic minority groups considering teaching, the limited supply of newcomers can have broad-ranging implications.

In response, some colleges have started or accelerated programs to entice students to choose teaching and become certified. But with a strong job market, most have not been successful in increasing their education majors.

"It's the same phenomenon. Every single teacher prep program is 50% of what it was" two or three decades ago, said Catherine O'Callaghan, chair of the education and education psychology department at Western Connecticut State University.

WestConn, as it's known, was founded in the early 20th century to train teachers. Today, the school of more than 4,000 full-time undergraduates has just 182 students in various education majors in order to become teachers.

While that's a slight increase from four years ago, the school used to churn out 350 teacher candidates a year in the 1980s, O'Callaghan said.

A host of factors prevents students from picking teaching as a possible career, ranging from low pay to a strong job market where work opportunities in other fields are plentiful. More than 70% of students responding to UCLA's latest annual survey of American freshmen say they attend college to "make more money." In the same survey, only 4.4% said they planned to become either elementary or secondary school teachers. Calculated against the 1.5 million students who start college full-time every year, that's just 66,000 potential teachers.

Today's teacher shortage is not limited to STEM fields and high-need school districts, Dunleavy and O'Callaghan said. While it can be hard to land a job at an elementary school, O'Callaghan said there is a shortage for secondary English teachers in Connecticut, where public school teachers' salaries averaged more than $76,000 for the 2018-19 academic year.

One reason for the shortage is a lack of students from racial and ethnic minority groups considering the field. While students of color are now the majority in U.S. public K-12 schools, only 20% of their teachers are nonwhite. And just 2% of the country's some 3 million teachers are black men.

Read the full article about the teacher shortage by Wayne D’Orio at Education Dive.