America's Teacher Shortage And Why It Matters for Economic Development
School officials across America are scrambling to ensure that as students return to classrooms someone will be there to educate them.
Question: Should we be surprised by an emerging labor market crisis in K-12 schools with teacher shortages nationwide?
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona says Americans shouldn’t be surprised.
“Are we supporting them? Are we giving them a competitive salary,” Cardona asked during a speech at Bank Street College of Education in New York City. “That's the question that we need to ask ourselves today, and it shouldn't take schools to be closed and the crisis that we’re seeing where we don't have enough teachers to understand and appreciate what teachers contribute.”
Experts point to a variety of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators’ sense that politicians and parents — and sometimes their own school board members — have little respect for their profession.
This is happening at a time when an escalating educational culture war is taking place which has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation.
The culture wars have been expanded into large book banning initiatives that take aim almost exclusively at titles that deal in feminism, social justice, LGBT themes, and the labor movement, calling many of them pornography. It’s led to teachers being afraid to even talk about the stripping of their libraries.
Today, state legislators are introducing — and in some cases passing — educational gag orders to censor teachers, proposals to track and monitor teachers, and mechanisms to facilitate book banning in school districts. In April of this year, nonprofit organization PEN America found that 1,586 book bans targeting 1,145 unique books had occurred in the past nine months.
Not a New Problem
For decades, declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs has created persistent and mounting vacancies in schools. And compared to other professions requiring similar levels of education, teaching has experienced relatively flat wage growth, largely at the expense of rising retirement and health care benefits.
But the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the problems, forcing school districts to redirect central office staff to classrooms, asking recently retired teachers to return and putting parents on a rotating schedule to provide support in their childrens’ classes.
New Mexico and Massachusetts mobilized their National Guards to step in to teach, drive buses and serve meals.
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“I have never seen it this bad,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, told The Wall Street Journal. “Right now it’s number one on the list of issues that are concerning school districts ... necessity is the mother of invention, and hard-pressed districts are going to have to come up with some solutions.”
No national database precisely tracks many U.S. classrooms are short of teachers for the 2022-2023 school year. But state-and district-level reports have revealed staffing gaps ranging from the hundreds to the thousands.
The Nevada State Education Association estimated that roughly 3,000 teaching jobs remained unfilled across the state’s 17 school districts as of early August. Last year, the West Virginia Department of Education reported 1,196 teacher vacancies, with officials believing that number will increase this year.
The Illinois Association of Regional School Superintendents in January found that 88 percent of school districts statewide were having “problems with teacher shortages” — while 2,040 teacher openings were either empty or filled with a “less than qualified” hire.
And in the Houston area, the largest five school districts are all reporting that between 200 and 1,000 teaching positions remain open.
Carlton Jenkins, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin, told the Journal that teachers are so scarce that superintendents across the country have developed a whisper network to alert each other when educators move between states.
The Missouri Department of Education and Secondary Education says there were more than 3,000 in-state teaching positions that had to be left vacant or filled by unqualified candidates last school year. Around 135 districts statewide are implementing a four-day week to combat the shortages.
Education is an Investment in Economic Development
The importance of knowledge and learning has been recognized since ancient times. Plato wrote: “If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.”
Two Nobel-winning economists, T.W. Schultz and Gary Becker, contend that investment in education is largely responsible for economic growth. Becker's Human Capital Theory states that investment in an individual’s education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. In a nutshell, the Human Capital Theory posits that investing in education has a payoff in terms of higher wages.
It only stands to reason that the knowledge and skills of workers available in a local labor pool are a key determining factor for economic growth within a community. Industries with higher education and training requirements tend to pay workers higher wages, which is a principal goal of economic development organizations.
Differences in training levels are a significant factor that separates communities that a growing and those that are stagnant. That is because a local economy’s productivity rises with the number of educated workers since skilled workers can perform tasks more efficiently.
BBA is a national network of consultants offering objective insight to economic development organizations and companies. We find practical and tactical solutions that work. For more information, contact Dean Barber at dbarber@barberadvisors.com Need a speaker? Better call Dean.
Special Education Teacher
1ySchool districts are actually part of the problem. No matter how good of a job you do, or how much you invest yourself in a school, a non-tenured teacher can be let go for ANY reason. Teachers are at the mercy of a school budget and Administration for their first few years until receiving tenure. Perhaps this is why many teachers are leaving the profession and pursuing other careers paths instead. Also, many schools claim they desperately need teachers and have immediate vacancies, but then offer a salary that does not accurately and fairly reflect a teacher's prior experience. And if the teacher is lucky enough to get compensated for all prior teaching experience, there is no guarantee he or she will have a job the following year due to budget constraints. In fact, letting go (non-tenured) teachers every year is a strategy than many Districts use in order to save money. I've worked in schools where Administration will purposely not fill a position and then pay other teachers a stipend to teach during their prep periods. This saves on healthcare and benefits.
Bureaucrat Dad - filing reports and coaching sports
2yTeacher husband here of a 10year vet who will not be returning to the classroom. From my perspective across the dinner table, it seems like our social services have failed us so badly that the public institutions that hold our childrens' world together are schools and police, both of which are woefully underfunded, understaffed, and underpaid to prop up our society. If the teacher's responsibility were to the students, their education, and their parents, then extra money should retain veteran teachers. But increasingly, teachers' reposibility is to the state, who controls the schools' budget and needs reports from teachers. According to the state, teachers wouldn't teach unless endless amounts of paperwork were submitted to ensure all students take the state's standardized tests with all of the help they received fully documented and accounted for. Teachers apparently don't need lunches or planning periods, but they do need to be in staff meetings and their paperwork must be flawless. The money must be accounted for, not the children's education. This institutional mindset is killing the once noble profession.
Experienced Leader in Digital Transformation, Innovation, Community Technology, Staff Development, Training, Administration, and Operations Management. Living in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. Open to remote work.
2yI also think the personal responsibility of parents to the educational system is out of balance. The teachers job is not to raise and discipline our children. They should only have to teach them and encourage them. For many reasons, that often deal with social and economic injustice imbalances, many children are not having rich two parent home experiences where they feel secure, loved, and wanted. Thus, they can act out in class, because the lessons they could and should be getting at home are simply not present. They simply are not getting prepared in the home to be ready for school and to be good learners. Until we also add fixing the broken homes, often caused by missing fathers or abusive home environments, solving the teacher shortage may not be enough to build the prepared workers of the future.
Owner and Vice President of Operations at-IMAE
2yI guess now that the books are banned and the words-language have been banned, our schools are SO MUCH better! Drucker said, “ Is it movement or progress”? We fail to focus on what needs to be done rather than going around the problem. It is really sad to see what a legacy we as mature adults are doing to our children. Certainly not Value-Added!
Consultant senior chez Corevalue
2yRight and same thing fundamentaly in Europe!😉😊