The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought
The first report in “The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market” series
This report is the first in a series examining the magnitude of the teacher shortage and the working conditions and other factors that contribute to the shortage.
What this report finds: The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought. When indicators of teacher quality (certification, relevant training, experience, etc.) are taken into account, the shortage is even more acute than currently estimated, with high-poverty schools suffering the most from the shortage of credentialed teachers.
Why it matters: A shortage of teachers harms students, teachers, and the public education system as a whole. Lack of sufficient, qualified teachers and staff instability threaten students’ ability to learn and reduce teachers’ effectiveness, and high teacher turnover consumes economic resources that could be better deployed elsewhere. The teacher shortage makes it more difficult to build a solid reputation for teaching and to professionalize it, which further contribute to perpetuating the shortage. In addition, the fact that the shortage is distributed so unevenly among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds challenges the U.S. education system’s goal of providing a sound education equitably to all children.
What we can do about it: Tackle the working conditions and other factors that are prompting teachers to quit and dissuading people from entering the profession, thus making it harder for school districts to retain and attract highly qualified teachers: low pay, a challenging school environment, and weak professional development support and recognition. In addition to tackling these factors for all schools, we must provide extra supports and funding to high-poverty schools, where teacher shortages are even more of a problem.
The teacher shortage is real and has serious consequences
In recent years, education researchers and journalists who cover education have called attention to the growing teacher shortage in the nation’s K–12 schools. They cite a variety of indicators of the shortage, including state-by-state subject area vacancies, personal testimonials and data from state and school district officials, and declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs.1 These indicators are critical signals. They help analysts detect when there are not enough qualified teachers to fill staffing needs in a labor market that does not operate like other labor markets. School teachers’ wages are not subject to market pressures—they are set by school districts through contracts that take time to negotiate. Therefore, economists can’t use trends in wages—sudden or sustained wage increases—to establish that there is a labor market shortage (as the textbook explanation would indicate). It is also hard to produce direct measurements of the number of teachers needed and available (i.e., “missing”).
To date, the only direct estimate of the size of the teacher shortage nationally comes from the Learning Policy Institute’s seminal 2016 report, A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S. (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas 2016). The report noted that many school districts—finally hiring again after years of teacher layoffs during the Great Recession and in its wake—“had serious difficulty finding qualified teachers for their positions.” As the authors noted, school districts were challenged with not only restoring student-to-teacher ratios to pre-crisis levels but also with broadening curriculum offerings and meeting projected increases in student populations. Defining shortages as “the inability to staff vacancies at current wages with individuals qualified to teach in the fields needed,” the authors estimated that, barring any major changes, the annual teacher shortage would reach about 110,000 by the 2017–2018 school year.
Figure A replicates Figure 1 in their report and shows the gap between the supply of teachers available to enter the classroom in a given year and the demand for new hires. As recently as the 2011–2012 school year, the estimated supply of teachers available to be hired exceeded the demand for them—i.e., there was a surplus of teachers in that year’s labor market. But estimated projected demand soon exceeded the estimated supply and the projected gap grew sharply in just a handful of years—from around 20,000 in 2012–2013, to 64,000 teachers in the 2015–16 school year, to over 110,000 in 2017–2018. In other words, the shortage of teachers was projected to more than quadruple in just five years and the gap to remain at those 2017–2018 levels thereafter.
The teacher shortage has serious consequences. A lack of sufficient, qualified CONTINUE READING: The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought: The first report in “The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market” series | Economic Policy Institute
