Teacher Recruitment and Retention Must Keep Pace with Charter and Private School Demand
Commentary
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott recently introduced the
According to a May 21
Additionally, on May 16, during National Charter School Week, the Department of Education
Education Secretary Linda McMahon
This new investment in charter school programs, combined with the extensive expansion of school choice legislation over the past four years, creates a far-reaching market demand for education options outside the residentially assigned district public school.
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Regarding private school choice, since 2021,
An essential component of school expansion—whether a new school or the growth of an existing school—is an adequate number of teachers to staff classrooms.
Public schools are plagued by staffing challenges. According to a
Additionally, per the report, only 20 percent of 'teachers say they are very satisfied with their job.' And only 16 percent of teachers 'recommend the teaching profession to others.'
There are many reasons why teachers are dissatisfied and leaving the profession.
Within district public schools, the reasons are increasingly related to woke agendas prioritized within school practices, policies, and curriculum. Many educators do not want to be forced to follow, enforce, and teach these radical ideologies. Additionally, the so-called restorative justice philosophy that fails to hold all students accountable for behavior, and the growing
Furthermore, the seniority salary schedule that fails to recognize professional performance, subject matter expertise, and related outside experience makes traditional public schools less attractive to enter or remain for high-quality teachers.
For charter schools and private schools, the challenges related to recruiting and retaining teachers frequently center on school culture and leadership, which can more easily be remedied once accurately and specifically diagnosed. Yet, typically, school leaders are unsure how to resolve their recruitment and retention issues, or they would have done so already.
One company,
With the increasing demand for these education options, it's essential that the teacher recruitment and retention problems hindering school flourishing and growth are adequately addressed. Arcadia Education's faculty assessment is an example of a practical tool that can provide a timely solution, arming administrators with actionable insight into their school setting them on a course for success in attracting and keeping high-quality teachers.
As more public school educators exit the system, there will be a timely opportunity for charter schools and private schools to recruit the best and the brightest who align with the school's mission. With a strong pipeline of educators flowing to charter schools and private schools, and solid retention of existing quality faculty members, these education alternatives will not only be better positioned to meet the rapidly increasing demand but will also be able to exercise the necessary selectivity in staffing. The ultimate beneficiaries will be students.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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Yahoo
an hour ago
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Student loan quagmire frustrates borrowers - and alarms some Trump voters
By Julia Harte (Reuters) -Kelly Belt, 33, a high school life-sciences teacher in Provo, Utah, is ready and willing to repay her student loans. But like 8 million other U.S. borrowers on an affordable repayment plan created by former President Joe Biden, she has not been able to for nearly a year. Federal courts halted parts of the Biden plan last spring and summer after Republican-led lawsuits and in February an appeals court blocked it altogether. But when Belt tried to switch to another plan in March - so she could resume payments - the Education Department had removed its online application portal. Even after the website was restored, it had technical problems that prevented Belt from switching to her preferred plan. Instead it offered Belt a third plan that would require her to make monthly payments of $608, more than triple her old rate of $198. The cost was more than she could afford on her public-school salary. President Donald Trump, who called Biden's efforts to alleviate crushing student loan debt "vile" on the campaign trail, is upending the system relied on by many of the 42.7 million Americans who borrowed money for their education and collectively owe more than $1.6 trillion in debt. Workforce cuts at the U.S. Department of Education, the ending of pandemic-era amnesty for defaulted borrowers, and the elimination of the most affordable repayment plans are impacting those with perfect repayment records like Belt as well as those delinquent in their payments who got amnesty during the pandemic but were required to start repaying their loans in May. Since Trump took office, thousands of complaints have poured in, according to internal data obtained by Reuters. The backlog of unprocessed applications for low-cost repayment plans has risen from 1,494,792 on February 4 to 1,985,726 on April 30, according to Education Department data. STAFF CUTS The Trump administration cut the Department of Education staff by 50% in March, vastly reducing its capacity to assist borrowers like Belt, according to six current or former department officials and student borrower advocates interviewed by Reuters. They say the changes are making it difficult for student loan borrowers to access affordable repayment plans just as the Trump administration is starting to crack down on borrowers who can't afford theirs. A Department of Education spokesperson blamed the Biden administration for the application backlog but acknowledged that the Trump administration had not started processing applications until three months after inauguration. The spokesperson did not comment on the number of complaints or the technical errors that prevented Belt from switching plans. In May, the Trump administration ended a pandemic-era program that allowed 5 million other borrowers who had defaulted on their loans to pause payments for five years. Those bills started coming due again in May; those who default face having their wages garnished. Trump is pushing to eliminate the most affordable loan repayment plans as part of the massive "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" now before the U.S. Senate. The Department of Education spokesperson said the bill would "simplify" the repayment process and hold "institutions financially accountable for defaulted student loans." In the meantime, Belt says she's struggled to sign up for a new plan via the department website or by calling the federal student aid help center where she has "been unable to get a hold of a person to help me navigate my options." The department has disbanded a support team that formerly reviewed and helped solve borrower complaints and removed a complaint button that used to appear prominently on every page of the department's student loan website, according to a current department official. Even so, through a harder-to-find "feedback" button, the agency has received 8,400 complaints about income-driven repayment plans since February 1, of which nearly half mention the plan Belt is now on, the official said. 'JUST WRONG' After she was unable to apply online, Belt mailed in a paper application for her preferred plan, but it might take months to process. Meanwhile, by the time her application is processed, her preferred plan could be outlawed by the tax-and-spending bill now before the Senate. Belt's predicament alarms her mother-in-law, Lesa Sandberg, one of 20 Trump voters Reuters is periodically interviewing about his administration's policies. Sandberg, who has been "on the Trump train" for a decade, said the administration is betraying its deal with borrowers like Belt by leaving them either unable to pay down their debt or stuck in unaffordable plans. Belt said she could have sought a more lucrative job, but she chose to teach at a public school in part because she was counting on affordable income-driven repayment options. "They make choices in their careers, based on having that loan [repayment] program available, and now they don't. It's just wrong," Sandberg said. Sandberg says she still supports shuttering the Education Department because she favors state control over education. But she is disappointed that the administration has pursued that goal without allowing borrowers like her daughter-in-law to keep paying off their loans. "It doesn't look to me like there was a plan," Sandberg said. "I don't understand why people aren't inundating their representatives or even the White House with, 'what the heck are you going to do?'" 'I WISH I COULD REWIND THAT VOTE' Sandberg isn't the only Trump voter disappointed by how his administration is making student loan repayment more complicated. Tammy Sabens, 64, a grandmother in Kentucky, borrowed $25,000 in the 2000s to go back to school for a nursing degree. Today, accrued interest has left her with a nearly $52,000 balance, leaving her unable to retire despite a doctor's recommendation that she do so for her health. Sabens voted for Trump in November because she "didn't want our economy to turn into a socialist economy, which seemed to be the way it was heading under Biden," she said. But she, like Belt, was dismayed when the federal portal for changing repayment plans went down for a month, preventing her from adjusting her monthly payment to reflect her current income. Instead, she had to enter the same limbo as Belt, unable to make progress toward repaying her loan. "Boy, I wish I could rewind that vote," Sabens said of the ballot she cast for Trump. "I can't sleep at night worrying about all this stuff."
Business Insider
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Millions of student-loan borrowers are getting a 'financial scarlet letter' that could risk their home purchases and job prospects, Elizabeth Warren says
Millions of student-loan borrowers could be facing a financial strain that will hinder their abilities to buy a house or get a new job, Sen. Elizabeth Warren said. Ahead of a Tuesday meeting with Linda McMahon, President Donald Trump's education secretary, Warren published a blog post — first viewed by Business Insider — detailing her concerns with the Trump administration's move to restart collections on defaulted borrowers' student loans. After Trump announced on May 5 that consequences for student-loan defaults would resume after a five-year pause — including garishment of wages and federal benefits — the New York Federal Reserve released a report that said 8.04% of borrowers moved into serious delinquency in the first quarter of 2025, putting them at greater risk of defaulting this summer. Most federal student-loan borrowers enter default after falling behind on payments for more than 270 days. Additionally, 2.2 million of the newly delinquent borrowers saw their credit scores drop over 100 points after negative credit reporting resumed in October 2024, the New York Fed said. Warren wrote in her blog post that a "damaged credit score is a financial scarlet letter that can follow consumers for years." "It can mean borrowers paying thousands more in interest rates on car loans, if they can get approved at all. It can mean being rejected for mortgages, forcing people into expensive rental markets where they build no equity. It can mean paying security deposits for utilities, cell phone plans, and apartments that those with good credit get for free," she wrote. "Nearly half of all employers now run credit checks, meaning damaged credit can cost someone a job opportunity." Warren also said that Trump's big spending bill, which the House recently passed, threatens to push "millions more over a financial cliff." The version of the bill that the House passed, which now sits in the Senate, would condense all existing income-driven repayment plans into two plans with less generous terms that would leave borrowers paying off their debt over a longer period of time with a potentially higher monthly payment. This comes amid a backlog of income-driven repayment application processing; recent data from the Department of Education showed that nearly 2 million borrowers still had pending applications. Former President Joe Biden's SAVE plan, which would have allowed for cheaper monthly payments and a shorter timeline to loan forgiveness, is also blocked in court. McMahon has previously said that restarting collections on defaulted loans would restore accountability to the student-loan system. "Borrowing money and failing to pay it back isn't a victimless offense," McMahon wrote in an opinion piece. "Debt doesn't go away; it gets transferred to others." Ellen Keast, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, confirmed to BI last week that while collections have resumed, the department is pausing Social Security garnishment. "The Trump Administration is committed to protecting social security recipients who oftentimes rely on a fixed income," Keast said. A separate noticed posted on the department's debt resolution website said that the garnishments will resume "sometime this summer," along with wage garnishment. Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute, told BI that while the collections restart was inevitable, its abrupt nature means that many borrowers probably aren't aware that they're in default, or of the options they have to get out of default. Some borrowers previously told BI that after five years of relief, they're not prepared for the consequences of defaulting. "I don't have any problem paying back what I borrowed, but I do have a problem with the lack of transparency and all of the false promises that I feel like the federal government has made to me over the years," Holly Bechard, a 42-year-old borrower, said.
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Colleges losing the blame game as D.C. aims to solve the student loan crisis
If the student loan crisis is our dreadful result, the rising cost of college is at least the chief cause. And it's easy to point the finger at those who set sticker prices. That's the position of Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. 'Colleges and universities call themselves nonprofits, but for years they have profited massively off the federal subsidy of loans, hiking tuition and piling up multibillion-dollar endowments while students graduate six figures in the red,' McMahon wrote in The Wall Street Journal in April. 'A widely cited 2015 study found that for every dollar of increased federal caps on subsidized loans, colleges raised tuition by 60 cents.' Yes, higher education institutions have played a role in a crisis that can't seem to get worse, yet does: We could see about a quarter of federal student loan borrowers — 10 to 11 million or more — in default this summer. Being in default means facing severe consequences like wage garnishment, federal benefit seizures, debt collections and credit harm. Besides a federal government that has, over the years, given borrowers whiplash with the amount of repayment programs that have appeared and disappeared, the schools themselves bear responsibility. The question is to what degree, and what comes next. The role of colleges in America's student loan debt If you think of the Education Department's federal student aid system as a spigot, it has been dispensing billions of dollars in aid to students via their schools over the last six decades, since at least the Higher Education Act of 1965. As federal loan limits have increased, the spigot has gradually turned into a firehose. The more money that's flowed from it, the more families can access, the more schools can raise their price tags. More, more, more and around and around we go. Skip ahead to today. It's difficult to square an apparent contradiction: One minute, you hear institutions of higher education express (cue a highfalutin voice) their noble mission of educating society writ large. The next minute, you realize some schools (enter the always-be-closing Glengarry Glen Ross guys) charge as much as they can get away with to families pursuing that education. But experts of varying ideologies worry that that's exactly what's happening. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Student Loan Ombudsman Julia Barnard told Bankrate in March that, before she was fired by the Trump Administration, 'literally 98 percent of colleges in the country were using data to do differential pricing for students.' Barnard has referred to this continuing trend as the 'financialization' of colleges. School-hired consulting firms also call it 'financial aid optimization,' as The New York Times reported in May. The firms' work boils down to algorithms that balance merit-based tuition discounts with a family's ability to pay — and use vast amounts of data to do it. 'Some of the things that we were learning about related to a kind of surveillance of [college] applicants — like what websites they were visiting and for how long,' Barnard says. 'We saw examples where was giving information about whether a person was a victim of domestic violence or even their documentation status, the education level of their parents, disciplinary records, religious activities. They had that information and were sharing it with colleges who were then using it to make admissions and pricing decisions.' So, the contention goes, it's the colleges and universities themselves that have figured out ways to game the system for the benefit of their bottom line. Learn more: Average cost of college for 2024-2025 Project 2025 — Republicans' widely-shared manifesto leading up to the 2024 election cycle — spends a chapter on the Department of Education and uses the words 'skin in the game' to describe the need for college accountability. McMahon also spent a paragraph of her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on this very topic. 'Many of the degree-granting programs that qualify for student loans are worthless on the job market, but colleges continue to accept students to these programs and encourage them to borrow to pay for them,' McMahon wrote. 'Accountability is a two-way street. As we push to hold student borrowers to account, we will also push colleges to be responsible and transparent.' The good news: Like bipartisan understanding of consumer debt, holding schools accountable is something we can all agree on. Dr. Lindsey M. Burke, the author of the education chapter of Project 2025, among other conservative voices, is on board: In her keynote at the 16th Annual Education Finance & Loan Symposium in Alexandria, Va. in May, Burke said, 'A lot of the reforms [under consideration] are — I would argue, I think a lot of people would agree — fairly common sense reforms. When it comes to skin in the game; when it comes to universities being allowed to cap lending on their own.' Meanwhile, James Kvaal, the Biden Administration's top higher education official, used the words 'cutting off programs that leave most of their students unable to repay their loans' in a March interview with Bankrate. And Colleen Campbell, a former Federal Student Aid executive, wrote on her 'On Detail' Substack, 'I will be the first to tell you that accountability for colleges is SORELY [sic] needed.' Of course, the devil — and potential disagreement — lurks in the details. The Student Success and Taxpayer Savings Plan within Congress's progressing budget reconciliation bill puts an emphasis on risk-sharing. In certain cases, it would force colleges to reimburse the Education Department for their former students' unpaid balances. The bill features a carrot-and-the-stick approach, however. In addition to penalizing schools for their borrowers' unpaid loans, it would also award PROMISE grants to schools that improve access, affordability and student success. While it awaits passage of Congress's student loan repayment-reshaping budget reconciliation bill, the Trump Administration is making the most of what it has at its disposal. In a May letter, it reminded schools of the 'core default rates' policy and pushed them to remind their former students to resume federal loan repayment. 'Part of the problem here is that we don't do accountability at all in our higher education system,' Campbell says. Core default rates is the Education Department's lone mechanism at present, Campbell adds, and it's '90s-era' or in desperate need of a makeover. In fact, many have significantly increased their spending on lobbying Congress, according to an Inside Higher Ed analysis. And as Campbell told Bankrate in April for a story about the potential demise of Direct PLUS Loans, if schools are banging on the doors of their representative in the House or the Senate, 'This is really when the rubber hits the road in higher ed.' I spoke with multiple financial aid representatives large and small at the May symposium (who weren't authorized to speak on behalf of their schools). A common refrain: Charging more to students who can afford it helps the schools charge less to those who can't. But schools' calls for self-policing are likely to be ignored, given that history isn't on their side. At this point, it may be safer to judge colleges and universities on their actions rather than their words. Since we now know that merit-based aid can be manipulated for a given school's bottom-dollar benefit, a renewed emphasis on need-based funding would seem to be a big step in the right direction. Already, more than a 100 colleges and universities nationwide offer tuition-free attendance — a discounted net price — to low- and middle-income families, according to Appily's tracking. They do so by replacing student loans in financial aid packages with institutional, state and federal grants and scholarships. (Just be mindful that tuition is one piece of your cost of attendance, alongside secondary but significant expenses like room and board). 'This is one place I can speak for my employer in that it's really clear for us because we have specific need-based aid funding, and that's how you can do it morally,' said Charles Pruett, Georgetown University Law Center's assistant dean for financial aid, during a symposium panel. 'If you're looking at a situation where it's just merit, that is who asks [for aid] the best, right?' First of all, get good at asking. It's a negotiation, and the financial aid award letter you receive is merely an opening salvo. Your school is sharing their desired numbers. Go ahead and proffer yours (perhaps via an appeal letter). A statistic to remember The average discount for first-year students at private, nonprofit colleges and universities for the 2023-2024 academic year was 56 percent, according to the National Association of of College and University Business Officers. Yes, there are ways to attend college for free (or at least try), but for many families, you might have to pay out of pocket or borrow for college. If you have a long runway, consider different college fund investment options. If college attendance is right around the corner, however, it can be helpful to lean on your prospective school's financial aid office. Just don't trust that whatever they say goes. As the CFPB's Barnard says: 'I hope that the public, student loan borrowers and families applying for college will look at what's going on and perhaps reach out about their discomfort if they feel uncomfortable with [speaking] directly to their college.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
