Last year, desperate for a math teacher, he recruited a waitress from a local restaurant, even though she did not have a college degree. She still works in the district while she earns her college degree.
Research published Wednesday shows that teacher shortages are worsening in several states, and it was not a pandemic aberration. Instead, it seems to be part of a worrisome trend: Teachers are leaving the classroom at higher rates, and the pool of candidates is not big enough to replace them.
Tuan Nguyen, a Kansas State University education professor, last year set out with two colleagues to collect statewide data on teacher shortages. They counted more than 36,500 vacancies in 37 states and D.C. for the 2021-2022 school year. On Wednesday, they published updated data and found that teacher shortages had grown 35 percent among that group, to more than 49,000 vacancies.
Schools in Arizona had 2,890 openings in the 2022-2023 school year — more than 1,000 above the previous year’s total. Teacher vacancies in the state rose from 15 per 10,000 students to 26. West Virginia was missing 1,500 teachers last year, a 50 percent increase from the previous year. That’s nearly 60 positions it could not fill per 10,000 students — the worst out of the 44 states in which researchers collected data. Kansas, where Nguyen is a professor, saw a more than 30 percent rise in teacher vacancies last year, with over 30 unfilled positions per 10,000 students.
Even in states that saw a drop in vacancies, there is growing concern about who is filling those jobs. In response to the pandemic, many states lowered job requirements, and schools increasingly relied on instructors with fewer qualifications. The data set contains information about how many teachers are considered underqualified. They range from credentialed educators who are teaching out of their area of expertise to people with no credentials and, in some cases, no college education. Nguyen said underqualified teachers turn over more quickly than those who have been trained.
“They tend to leave the teaching profession at a much higher rate,” Nguyen said. It creates a churn that ultimately hurts student learning, he added.
Those without teacher training often lack good classroom management skills, such as the ability to refocus a class after a disruption, Green said. Those skills are becoming even more important as misbehavior at his school rises. And it can be a self-reinforcing problem.
“When you have a shortage of certified teachers who have been trained combined with an increase in student misbehavior,” Green said, “that drives a lot of people away from the position.”
Evidence suggests that more teachers are leaving the profession. Outside D.C., many large suburban districts in Maryland and Virginia saw teacher turnover above pre-pandemic levels. An analysis of teacher retention data by the education news outlet Chalkbeat found that turnover rates were the highest they had been in at least five years in eight states. Nguyen’s team, examining teacher turnover data from 34 states with the help of the National Center on Teacher Quality, found that it rose to a historic 14 percent during the 2021-2022 school year.
Nearly a quarter of teachers surveyed by the Rand Corp. in January said they planned to leave by the end of last school year, citing stress, low pay and long hours. The survey also showed that their well-being had improved from 2021 and 2022 levels.
Nguyen’s team, along with the National Council on Teacher Quality, anticipates that turnover will drop in the coming years. There is also some evidence that more people want to go into teaching. The number of people in teacher training programs increased in over half of states in the first full school year of the pandemic, according to the Education Department.
The crisis is not limited to teachers. Schools are struggling to find staff across the board. School bus driver shortages in many places are forcing children to endure earlier pickups and longer routes home. In Louisville, Jefferson County Public Schools ended up delaying school for a week after a new busing system dropped students at the wrong schools — and delivered others home well after dark — according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. Many superintendents have also struggled to find cafeteria workers and instructional aides.
Substitute teachers, too, have been hard to come by — a problem for schools that are already short-staffed. The substitute teacher shortage forced some schools to close late last year after outbreaks of influenza, covid-19 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in schools.
The nature and extent of shortages are highly localized, but they appear worse in states where teacher pay is low and in schools that serve high concentrations of students of color and students in poverty. A nationally representative survey conducted by the Education Department last year found that 57 percent of high-poverty schools had at least one vacancy in October 2022, compared with 45 percent of public schools in general. Sixty percent of schools where more than three-quarters of the student body were kids of color had at least one vacancy.