The Teacher Shortage Crisis Is Overblown, But Challenges Remain
The teacher shortage facing the nation's public schools reached new heights this year, according to multiple reports this past summer and fall from major media outlets. Officials at the Department of Education have added to that narrative. Outgoing Secretary of Education Arne Duncan discussed the shortages in an August Los Angeles Times op-ed, writing:
This situation is compounded by shortages of qualified math and science teachers, which disproportionately affect schools serving low-income and minority students. In California, teacher shortages in math, science and computer education have persisted for more than a decade. This school year, California districts will need to fill more than 21,000 teaching positions, many in hard-to-staff STEM subjects.
John King, Duncan's replacement, also made similar statements at an American Enterprise Instituteevent earlier this summer. On the whole, the coverage suggests a looming crisis for staffing public schools.
But the national data tell a different story. Last week, the National Center for Education Statistics released a report (which I authored when working for a prior employer) that shows the difficulty public schools have filling vacant teaching positions has dropped considerably over the past dozen years. The report uses data from the Schools and Staffing Surveys from 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012, which asked a national sample of principals about vacancies in their schools and the difficulty they faced filling them. The percentage of public schools with at least one difficult-to-staff position dropped by more than half between 2000 and 2012, from 36 to 15 percent.
These pronounced decreases in staffing difficulty were evident across the board. To be sure, as Duncan accurately states above, the challenges principals face in staffing teachers is greater in certain schools and for certain positions, particularly high-minority, high-poverty schools and for math and special education teachers. High-poverty and high-minority schools appear to have somewhat smaller reductions over time compared to low-poverty and low-minority schools. However, across every The Teacher Shortage Crisis Is Overblown, But Challenges Remain - US News:
