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THE PRIVATE SCHOOL TEACHER SKILLS GAP What K–12 Private School Educators Know and What They Need to Know Michael Q. McShane ABOUT EDCHOICE EdChoice is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing full and unencumbered educational choice as the best pathway to successful lives and a stronger society. EdChoice believes that families, not bureaucrats, are best equipped to make K–12 schooling decisions for their children. The organization works at the state level to educate diverse audiences, train advocates and engage policymakers on the benefits of high-quality school choice programs. EdChoice is the intellectual legacy of Milton and Rose D. Friedman, who founded the organization in 1996 as the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. FEBRUARY 2019 THE PRIVATE SCHOOL TEACHER SKILLS GAP What K–12 Private School Educators Know and What They Need to Know Michael Q. McShane, Ph.D. TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Introduction .....................................................................................................................................................3 Teaching and Leading in Public and Private Schools ..............................................................................4 Methods .............................................................................................................................................................4 Results ................................................................................................................................................................5 Demographics ......................................................................................................................................5 Most Important Skills for Success ...................................................................................................6 The Onboarding Experience .............................................................................................................6 On-the-Job Training ...........................................................................................................................6 Professional Development ................................................................................................................7 Preparation Before Entering the Workforce .................................................................................7 Private vs. Public..................................................................................................................................7 Discussion .........................................................................................................................................................8 The Opportunity ..................................................................................................................................9 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................................11 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Which of the following do you believe are the most important skills to being a principal/teacher at a private school?” (Teachers) ............................. 14 Figure 2: “Which of the following do you believe are the most important skills to being a principal/teacher at a private school?” (Administrators)...................15 Figure 3: “Which of these skills, if any, did you have to learn while being a leader/teacher at a private school?” (Teachers) ................................................................ 17 Figure 4: “Which of these skills, if any, did you have to learn while being a leader/teacher at a private school?” (Administrators) .................................................... 18 Figure 5: Private and Public School Skills Overlap ............................................................................22 LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Descriptive Statistics for Respondents ................................................................................... 12 Table 2: Descriptive Statistics for Schools ............................................................................................ 13 Table 3: School Actions for New Hires ................................................................................................... 16 Table 4: Further Training Opportunities .............................................................................................. 19 Table 5: Pre-Service Preparation ............................................................................................................ 19 Table 6: Attributes and Skills ................................................................................................................... 21 Table 7: Responsibilities ...........................................................................................................................23 The great painter Bob Ross popularized the saying, EXECUTIVE SUMMARY “There is no such thing as mistakes, only happy accidents.” One of the happy accidents of our I host EdChoice’s Cool Schools Podcast, interviewing survey sample was the fact that 51 percent of survey the leaders of cool and innovative schools around respondents had taught in both public and private the country. I ask them about the story of their schools, with an average public school tenure of 9.39 school, the lessons that they’ve learned, the years. This allowed us to ask a rich set of questions challenges they face, and the hurdles they’ve had to comparing teaching and leading in private schools overcome to get to where they are today. versus in public schools. Finding great teachers and leaders is usually The similarities and differences are best expressed toward the top of the list of challenges that the in the Venn Diagram on page 2. leaders of cool schools face. If schools want to do something different or have a different pedagogical As it turns out, the vast majority of skills that philosophy than the dominant model practiced by make an educator successful in the private sector local public schools, they can struggle to find good are also important in the public sector. Managing educators to work there. classrooms, planning instruction, administering assessments, and much of the day-to-day work of Their experience meshed with stories I have heard educators looks the same in both sectors. throughout the past several years from private school leaders across the country, so I thought There is, however, a discrete set of skills that private it was time to try to systematically measure this school educators need that their public school phenomenon and see if there was anything that can colleagues don’t. Because private schools often act be done about it. as independent and autonomous organizations, leaders need more preparation in legal compliance This paper set out to answer a simple question: and accounting and finance than their public Do private school educators need a different set of school peers. Because they almost always exist in skills to be successful than public school educators? a competitive space, private school educators were also more likely to indicate that they needed more To answer that question, I, in partnership with public relations and marketing skills. Because Hanover Research, administered a detailed survey private schools are more likely to be faith-based, to private school teachers and leaders across three both teachers and leaders indicated the need to act states. In total, 447 respondents (281 teachers and as faith leaders and models of faith. 166 administrators) answered questions about what skills were important in their jobs, what This presents an opportunity. Entrepreneurial skills they had to learn “on the job,” and, for the educator preparation programs could take substantial subset of respondents who had taught advantage of this gap in the market and, with a few or led in both the public and private sectors, how changes, provide pathways for pre-service private was teaching in or leading a private school different school educators. By simply cross-listing courses than teaching in or leading in a public school. from other departments and giving students credit for taking them, any number of deficiencies After identifying the key skills that they found to in knowledge around budgeting, finance, legal be important, they identified the skills that they compliance, or even theology could be addressed. had to learn “on the job.” This is an indirect way of Particularly in states with large private school identifying holes in their pre-service preparation. populations or large school choice programs (that are growing the number of private schools and thus the need for educators), programs could create 1 EDCHOICE.ORG whole streams, concentrations, or certificates for Finally, educators in our sample requested private school educators-to-be. Some of these professional development in areas where they feel programs already exist across the country, but their pre-service preparation came up short. This more could be of use. provides an opportunity for one-off courses and workshops in these particular areas that could be There is also an opportunity for schools that provided either by colleges of education or outside might only prepare a subset of educators today organizations. (like elementary school teachers) to grow their programs with private school-specific, or

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