One Researcher Reveals the True Extent of the Teacher Shortage
Data shows that as more teachers leave the profession, fewer new teachers are waiting to replace them
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It’s not just you—the teacher shortage is getting worse, and now new data shows exactly how bad it’s gotten. The research is a collaboration between education researchers across several institutions, and represents some of the most thorough work to date.
Looking at 37 states and the District of Columbia where reliable data could be sourced, the team found that teacher shortages had increased 35 percent since the 2021-22 school year. They now estimate around 55,000 vacant teaching positions and 270,000 positions being filled by under-qualified teachers—among other startling revelations.
“Our results clearly indicate the majority of states are experiencing some degree of teacher shortages and teacher turnover surged during the pandemic with more teachers leaving the profession than ever before,” write the researchers in a new report, available via interactive maps and graphs at the aptly-named teachershortages.com.
Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor in the College of Education at Kansas State University, led this effort. He recently spoke with me about how he collected his findings, what they really say, and why they’re important. What follows is a lightly-edited and condensed sampling of our conversation.
Warning Bell: Were there any surprises in your research?
Tuan Nguyen: Over the next couple of years, there are other issues that are going to come into play. We're thinking about student enrollment, for instance.
For some states, like California, they lost about a quarter of a million students during the pandemic. With ESSA [Every Student Succeeds Act] funds, some districts are using some of that money to recruit more teachers. Potentially, you may see districts where they have a quote-unquote “surplus” of teachers, because now they have more teachers than they need. And yet you will also see states and districts where teacher shortage, vacancy and under-qualification will continue to worsen over the next couple of years.
Why did you and your colleagues decide to research teacher shortages? Did you notice that there just wasn’t a lot of good data out there?
So that’s exactly it. My work really revolves around the teacher labor market and teacher policy. I myself was a math teacher for seven years before going back to graduate school. I’ve seen a lot of news and reports about how there’s so many teacher shortages across the country. I thought: Hey, there’s got to be a source out there that’s collecting all this information so that we can talk specifically about the number of vacancies and under qualifications that we have in the United States. But lo and behold, nobody was doing that.
This is something that the federal government should be doing so that we can have an informed picture to make decisions about education in this country. My team and I over the last few years have systematically collected all the information that we can on teacher vacancies and under qualifications in the United States.
Can you explain your methodology?
Sure. Let’s start with teacher vacancy. We have a specific search string that we use, and we rotated through different states. It would be something like “California teacher shortage;” “teacher vacancy.” And we would go through literally hundreds of pages to see: Do we have information on the number of vacant positions? We collect all that information and then we compare and verify. Do these numbers seem to match up? Do they come from credible sources?
For some states, there just isn’t any information on a number of vacant positions over the last several years. For Oregon, we cannot find this information anywhere. For California, we couldn’t find any information for this year. We found some information for some districts, so that's why we have a lower-bound estimate for California. Some states just don’t produce this information. We don’t have any idea how many vacant positions there really are in California or New York. Some states do a better job of producing this information like Florida. They have a centralized data system that allows them to look at vacant positions.
The official unemployment rate is pretty low. Are your findings surprising in light of that?
We know that when the economy is in a recession, more people will stay in education because it’s seen as a sort of safe profession. You always need teachers. So when you have low unemployment, that means people have options elsewhere. I don’t have to be a teacher. I can use my skills as a mathematician or as a physicist or look for jobs in industry. So when we have low employment, we should expect higher turnover and fewer people who are interested in becoming teachers.
The challenge here is that it’s not just about what’s going on this year. We have evidence now from my work and other people’s work, that there is a pattern of decrease in interest in the teaching profession. There are fewer people who are enrolled in teacher prep programs, fewer people who have finished all the requirements to become teachers over the last 10-15 years. This is an ongoing issue.
What about the teacher pipeline—how many people are training to become teachers?
We’re relying on Title II data here. So this provides you with the enrollment and completion for every state, for every institution of higher education that certified teachers in the United States—whether or not it’s the traditional route or alternative certification; for-profit as well as non-profit programs. What we’re seeing here is in the early 2010s, there were around 700,000 teachers enrolled in teacher prep programs. That dropped to a low of around 560,000 in 2018-19. That has gone back up a little bit—it’s around 600,000. But that’s still a substantial drop from what it was 10 years ago.
The challenge here isn’t just the number of people who are enrolling, but those who are completing all their requirements to become teachers. We're seeing that there is a near monotonic decline in the number of people who are finishing their requirements to become teachers. So in terms of the supply what this is showing—and this goes hand in hand with our research showing the decline of the prestige of the profession—is there are fewer people interested in becoming teachers, and that pipeline is either stagnated or worsening over time.
So to put it another way, that's 30- to 40,000 fewer teachers each year that are graduating and completing their teacher prep programs.
Yeah. So on the one hand, you have this substantial decline in the number of teachers who can teach, and then you have more teachers leaving the professions, increasing to 12% and in some cases—North Carolina, for instance—up to 16%, and then you have more vacant positions. So that’s fewer people coming into the profession, more people leaving the profession, and a higher number of vacant positions and under-qualified positions.
What do you think is the takeaway from putting all this data together?
I think it serves a couple of different purposes. So for researchers, like myself, what we need to do is to dig deeper, because it's not just about the number of vacant positions, but it's also about where they're located and what type of positions they are. Do they tend to be located in rural areas or urban areas, are they tend to be located in majority minority schools or high poverty schools, do they tend to be in STEM subjects or elementary education? We need a really fine grained breakdown of what type of teachers we need in order to think of specific policy solutions that can address those needs.
The second piece is this broader question of what is happening to the teaching profession in our country. I think a lot of this points to the fact that we need to change the narrative around what it means to be a teacher. We need to think about how to recruit people, how to create working conditions that compel people to stay and now just think about what we can do at a minimum to keep people from leaving. They need to have a better salary that is commensurate with the amount of education and expertise they have. They need to be respected as professionals.
👁️👄👁️ Show & Tell
—Florida AP Psychology teacher Robert Hovel via PEOPLE.
📚 Independent Reading
Washington Post: D.C. area teachers say that aggression from students and parents is on the rise, and it’s making it harder for them to do their jobs. “After two years, Tyler Johnson had seen enough. Fights had been starting more frequently at the Maryland school where he taught special-education social studies, and students were having verbal outbursts over what seemed like minor misunderstandings. Once, when breaking up a brawl between two teens, Johnson said he took a punch in the face.”
Education Week: More charts and graphs about the teaching profession. In 2008-09 there were 684,000 enrollees in teacher prep programs. Twelve years later there were just 431,000. Plenty of reasons are given, but it boils down to college students realizing that teaching just isn’t a particularly appealing profession these days and going in different directions. The outlook isn’t great, but it’s not quite as bad as it looks at first glance. “We don’t have to increase [teacher-prep] enrollment all the way back to [the levels of] 2009, because we don’t have as many students as we do in 2009,” said Penn State researcher and professor Ed Fuller. “If we just come partially back, it will help reduce the [teacher] shortage.”
New York Times: An effort to improve ventilation and air quality in schools could make them safer this winter. “The coronavirus is an airborne threat, and the incidence of Covid was about 40 percent lower in schools that improved air quality, one study found.”