The teacher shortage is more severe than we first believed, and it is genuine, widespread, and expanding. High-poverty schools are disproportionately affected by the teacher shortage, which is even more severe when quality indicators such as certification, appropriate training, experience, etc. are taken into consideration.
Why it matters
Students, educators, and the public school system at large all suffer from a teacher shortage. High teacher turnover costs money that might be used more effectively elsewhere, and a shortage of competent instructors and staff instability jeopardize children’ learning and diminish teachers’ effectiveness.
Building a strong reputation and professionalizing teaching are made more challenging by the teacher shortage, which further contributes to its continuation. Furthermore, the purpose of the educational system, which is to provide all children with a quality education in an equitable manner, is challenged by the fact that the scarcity is spread so unequally among pupils from various socioeconomic backgrounds.
What we can do about it
Address the working conditions and other issues that are driving English tutors to leave the profession and deterring others from pursuing it. These issues include low pay, a demanding school climate, and a lack of recognition and support for professional development, all of which make it more difficult for school districts to retain and recruit highly qualified teachers.
Along with addressing these issues for all schools, we also need to provide high-poverty schools more resources and assistance, since teacher shortages are a greater issue there.
The teacher shortage is real and has serious consequences
The nation’s K–12 schools are experiencing an increasing teacher shortage, which has drawn attention in recent years from education academics and media covering education. They point to a number of signs of the shortage, such as decreased enrollment in teacher preparation programs, personal testimonies and statistics from state and school district officials, and topic area vacancies by state. These signals are crucial markers.
In a labor market that functions differently from other labor markets, they assist analysts in identifying instances in which there are insufficient competent instructors to meet staffing demands. The pay of school teachers is determined by school districts via labor-intensive contracts that are not influenced by the market. Thus, as the textbook explanation would suggest, economists cannot use pay trends—either abrupt or steady wage increases—to prove that there is a labor market shortage. Direct measures of the number of instructors required and available (i.e., “missing”) are equally challenging to generate.
The Learning Policy Institute’s groundbreaking 2016 research, A Coming Crisis in Teaching?, provides the first precise assessment of the extent of the teacher shortage in the country to date. Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas (2016) discuss the supply, demand, and shortages of teachers in the United States. After years of teacher layoffs during and after the Great Recession, the research found that many school districts “had serious difficulty finding qualified teachers for their positions” when they eventually resumed hiring.
The authors pointed out that school districts faced difficulties in meeting anticipated increases in student populations, expanding curricular offerings, and bringing student-teacher ratios back to pre-crisis norms. According to the authors, who defined shortages as “the inability to staff vacancies at current wages with individuals qualified to teach in the fields needed,” the yearly teacher shortfall would reach almost 110,000 by the 2017–2018 school year if no significant adjustments were made.
Shortage is even larger when teaching credentials are factored in
Because the projections take into account the new qualified teachers required to fulfill increased demand, the existing national estimates of the teacher shortage probably underestimate the severity of the issue. Not all present educators, meanwhile, fulfill the training, work history, and certification standards necessary to be considered highly competent educators.
In order to determine the proportion of teachers in all public non-charter schools who possess teaching qualifications linked to more effective instruction, we use data from the U.S. Department of Education’s 2015–2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey.
These qualifications include having completed a traditional certification program (as opposed to an alternative certification program), having more than five years of experience, having an advanced professional certificate or a regular standard state certificate, and having an educational background in the main assignment’s subject. Additionally, these qualifications are in line with the U.S. Department of Education’s Educator Equity Profiles and the government definition of a “highly qualified” teacher.
The teacher shortage is more acute in high-poverty schools
Since the scarcity of competent teachers is not uniformly distributed across all schools but is particularly severe in high-poverty schools, the published estimates of the growing teacher shortage further underestimate the severity of the issue. The following premises and our own data analyses allow us to deduce that there is a greater shortage of highly qualified teachers in high-poverty schools, even though we do not have precise estimates of the shortage in low- and high-poverty schools comparable to the national shortage estimates of Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas (2016).
First, since they are more in demand, highly qualified teachers often have more choices for where they choose to teach. Higher-income school districts are more likely to attract them, and they are more inclined to join the faculty of schools that provide them better working conditions, greater assistance, and a wider range of grades and topics to teach.
Second, there may be a less correlation between retention and excellent credentials at schools with high levels of poverty, even if instructors with better credentials are less likely to leave the field or transfer to another school. Given the data demonstrating that other criteria are reliant on school poverty, it would not be unexpected to discover that the retention power of high credentials differs between schools.
Strong new instructors would be searching for alternatives to the low-income schools where they are more likely to start their careers, since this diminished retention impact may also apply to new teachers who lack experience but possess the other qualifications of highly qualified teachers.
We use the same National Teacher and Principal Survey data from 2015–2016 to demonstrate that the proportion of highly qualified teachers is lower in schools with high levels of poverty than in schools with low levels of poverty. Due to the facts at hand, we examine the makeup of the class of kids being taught by the instructor in this study rather than the school’s student body composition, which is the common indicator of school poverty.
If fewer than 25% of the pupils in a teacher’s class qualify for free or reduced-price meal programs, we consider the school to be low-poverty. If at least half of a teacher’s pupils qualify for such programs, the school is considered high-poverty. Children from low-income families are consistently, if somewhat, more likely to be taught by less experienced and licensed educators.
Compared to low-poverty schools, the number of instructors in high-poverty schools who are not completely credentialed is over three percentage points greater. In addition, the proportion of teachers who are inexperienced (having five years or less of experience) is 4.8 percentage points higher in high-poverty schools than in low-poverty schools; the proportion of teachers who entered the teaching profession through an alternate path is 5.6 percentage points higher in high-poverty schools; and the proportion of teachers who lack a formal education in their primary subject is 6.3 percentage points higher in high-poverty schools.
