The teacher shortage crisis is here


As students headed back to school this year in and around Tampa, Florida, thousands of teacher positions had yet to be filled. It followed a year in which tens of thousands of teachers were hired on emergency or temporary credentials to help fill empty slots around the country – 900 of them in Oklahoma alone. And in Arizona, which has one of the highest teacher turnover rates in the country, school districts routinely report having unfilled teaching positions three months into the school year.

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The teacher shortage crisis is here, at least according to a new report from the Learning Policy Institute, and it stands to get worse.

"We are experiencing what appears to be the first major shortage since the 1990s," said Linda Darling-Hammond, professor at Stanford University and president and CEO of the institute, a nonpartisan education organization launched last year. "And teaching is, in some respects, as an occupation, at its lowest point in 20 years."

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The report, more than a year in the making, uses data sets from the Department of Education and provides one of the most comprehensive looks at the teacher shortage to date.

The problem is multipronged: At a time when public school enrollment is on the upswing, large numbers of teachers are headed for retirement or leaving the profession because of dissatisfaction with working conditions in a profession seen as less desirable than it once was. Meanwhile, enrollment in teacher preparation programs is dropping dramatically, falling 35 percent nationwide in the last five years, the report found.

The shortages are particularly severe in special education, math, science, and bilingual or English-learner education, as well as in locations with lower wages and poorer working conditions. And while geography plays a role – poor urban and rural school districts shoulder the most shortages – by and large, they disproportionately impact low-income students and students of color.

The teacher supply and demand landscape is a sea change from the years surrounding the Great Recession, when school districts were forced to hand out thousands of pink slips amid budget cuts, resulting in a surplus of teachers. However, as the report outlines, teacher demand has rapidly increased as the economy has improved, especially as more schools adopt lower teacher to pupil ratio policies.

"Demand will continue to increase over the next decade as the school age population increases," said Leib Sutcher, a research associate at the institute and one of the paper's authors. "Shortages aren't an issue because they're a headache for the HR department, but rather because they impact students. Districts cancel courses, hire unprepared or substitute teachers."

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By far, the biggest culprit of the current shortage, the researchers found, is attrition rates among teachers, which account for as much as 95 percent of the entire educator drought. At 8 percent annually, the attrition rate in the U.S. is about twice as high as the rates in countries like Finland and Singapore, often thought of as the education superstars of the world.

"We knew it was high, but we were really surprised to see it was such a huge share of the demand," Darling-Hammond said.

If supply trends were to persist at these current lows, the researchers said, by 2018, the annual shortfall could grow to 112,000 teachers.

One potential solution the researchers offer is that while much focus is placed on recruiting new teachers into the workforce, policymakers should instead focus on ways to keep the teachers that are already there, especially those working in hard-to-staff schools.

Cutting the attrition rate by half, to 4 percent, the researchers underscored, could solve the entire teacher shortage problem.

"Teaching conditions have hit a low point in the United States in terms of salaries, working conditions and access to strong preparation and mentoring – all of which would attract and keep a stronger, more sustainable teaching pool," Darling-Hammond said.

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