And on the other hand, there are policy experts looking at state-level data who are more cautious about making declarative teacher turnover claims about what’s happening nationwide. On the one hand, local news outlets are reporting on shortages in response to local vacancy numbers provided by school district leaders and principals, and union leaders are speaking out based on survey data from their member bases or other preliminary information.
“There are so many different measures of teacher shortages, and there’s no national standardized definition of what a teacher shortage is,” said Josh Bleiberg, a post-doctoral researcher studying school reform at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, who recently co-wrote a working paper about the challenges of studying the teacher labor market in real time. The first uncertainty is how a shortage is even defined. That has led to practitioners, education policy experts, and union leaders talking past one another.
But what’s happening this year might seem like a perfect storm: Long-term trends in the profession and a healthy job market in other fields are colliding with a couple of extremely difficult years in the classroom.Ī mass exodus from teaching, as more teachers quit and fewer newly minted educators are available to take their place, feels like it makes intuitive sense this year.īut is it actually happening? The US does not collect timely, detailed national data about teacher employment, so it’s difficult to definitively conclude whether there is a national teacher shortage going into the 2022-23 school year. The teaching profession has been perennially plagued by shortages for the last 50 years. Seventy-four percent of respondents in the American Federation of Teachers’ June survey of nearly 2,400 members were dissatisfied with the job, up from 41 percent in 2020, and 40 percent said they’d probably leave the profession in the next two years. Meanwhile, teachers have made it plain that they are unhappy. Some experts say that even school districts that don’t usually face shortages are struggling with vacancies, and it’s hard to hire teachers even for subjects that are typically easy to fill. The shortage is reportedly also dire in other states, including Nevada, California, Illinois, Arizona, and Missouri. In Florida, there are about 8,000 teacher vacancies, up from 5,000 at the start of school last year. Kansas is facing what has been called the most severe teacher shortage it has ever had: about 1,400 teaching jobs are unfilled. In Maryland, more than 5,500 teachers reportedly left the profession in 2022, leaving Baltimore with an estimated 600 to 700 vacancies going into the fall.ĭepartment of Education officials in Pennsylvania are calling that state’s shortage a “ crisis,” and experts there say the state will need “thousands” of new teachers by 2025.
In Texas, teachers are deserting the classroom at high rates, with Houston alone reporting nearly 1,000 vacancies in early August. With schools reopening across dozens of states this month, some education leaders are ringing the alarm: There aren’t enough teachers to fill open positions right now.
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