The teacher shortage that began after the COVID-19 pandemic is easing, but large gaps remain on the ground as the new school term begins.
While the recovery from the pandemic-induced teacher shortages is a silver lining for the teaching industry, experts say schools, especially low-income ones, are struggling to fill positions.
“We’re pretty confident that the teacher shortage is still there. It’s getting better in some ways, but it’s staying the same in other ways,” said Hillary Wessing, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“I think it’s good news that state and local education employment has fully recovered to pre-COVID levels, to February 2020 employment levels, but that’s not the whole picture, because employment levels in that industry in February 2020 were still below the levels that we would expect for education employment to be fully robust in our country,” Wessing added.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, teaching jobs fell by more than 15% in June 2020. By June of this year, that figure had reached the pre-pandemic level of 0.7% annual growth.
“That’s a good thing, but it’s not really satisfactory when you think about public education and jobs. We’ve not fully recovered from the austerity measures that were put in place after the Great Recession,” Wessing said.
“Both private and public employment fell during the pandemic, and private employment recovered much faster than public employment. One reason for this is that private sector wages rose fairly quickly, drawing more people into the private sector,” she added. “Public sector wages were fairly stagnant for a few months and years after the pandemic, but they finally started to catch up with private sector wages over the last year. So one might think that one of the reasons the public sector employment gap has finally closed is because of public sector wage increases.”
In June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported there were 290,000 state and local education job openings, but only 152,000 were hired.
And wages alone may not solve all the problems in education, as the sector has seen a long-standing decline in the number of people entering teacher training, something that has compounded the problem during the pandemic.
“I think the U.S. has had a teacher shortage for some time, and the pandemic has certainly exacerbated the teacher shortage in many ways, right? In particular, teacher preparation program enrollment and graduation have fallen 30 to 35 percent over the last decade, and the number of people enrolling to become teachers has fallen substantially over the last decade,” said Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor at Kansas State University who studies teacher vacancies.
“In recent years, fewer people have been entering the teaching profession and more are leaving,” he added.
Experts say teacher shortages vary widely by state, especially as pandemic emergency funding expires.
By September, the roughly $200 billion provided to schools during the COVID-19 pandemic will be gone, and some school districts may have to lay off staff they hired using relief funds.
“I think states that have hired thousands of additional teachers are actually going to see cuts, and states like where I am now, Kansas and Missouri, are going to see an even worse teacher shortage,” Nguyen said.
Some experts argue the new focus on teacher shortages is shortsighted given ongoing issues that have been exacerbated by COVID-19.
According to 2023 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, 45% of public schools are experiencing staffing shortages, an improvement from 2022, when 53% of schools experienced teacher shortages.
Most of the decline came from schools in low-poverty areas, where concerns about staffing shortages fell by 10 percentage points from 2022 to 2023.
But for schools in high-poverty areas, concerns about teacher vacancies remained at the same level at 57 percent for 2022-2023.
“There have always been and will continue to be schools and districts that are struggling to recruit teachers, and there have always been and will continue to be subjects where it’s much harder to recruit teachers,” said Dan Goldhaber, associate director of the American Institute for Research and director of the CALDER Center.
“So a lot of the talk about teacher shortages is pretty general and people tend to talk about it without the nuance that it’s much harder to fill special education and STEM classrooms than elementary school classrooms. It’s always much harder to hire teachers for high-poverty schools. So I think those challenges, the more specific challenges, are likely to continue even without a big focus on the teacher market as a whole,” Goldhaber added.
