Teacher shortages improve, but not everywhere

The post-COVID-19 teacher shortage is dwindling, but significant gaps linger in the field as the new school year arrives. 

While some recovery from the pandemic shortages is a hopeful sign for the profession, experts say schools, particularly low-income ones, are struggling to fill positions.

“We would definitely still think that there’s a teacher shortage. It is improved in some ways, and in other ways, it’s stayed the same,” said Hilary Wething, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. 

“I think there is some good news in that we’ve seen state and local education employment fully recover to pre-COVID levels — to February 2020 levels — of employment, but that’s not really the full context, because the employment levels in that industry in February of 2020 were still below what we would expect to have a fully robust education employment in our country,” Wething added.

In June 2020, teaching jobs were down more than 15 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By this June, the numbers have reached prepandemic levels of a 0.7 percent annual increase.  

“This is good, but it’s not the level that we really want to settle for when we think about public education, employment. We never really fully recovered from the austerity measures that were put in place following the Great Recession,” Wething said.  

“Once we had COVID, both private and public employment dropped, and private employment actually rebounded much faster than public employment. One of the reasons for that was because private sector wages managed to grow pretty fast, and so that induced more people into the private sector,” she added. “Public sector wages were pretty stagnant in the kind of months and years following the pandemic, but within the last year have finally begun to keep pace with private sector wages. And so, it’s possible that we think that one of the reasons why that gap finally in public sector employment has closed is because of those rising wages in the public sector.” 

This June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 290,000 job openings in state and local education jobs but only 152,000 hires.

And wages may not solve all the problems as the education sector has seen for years a decline in those going into teacher programs, part of what created a compounding problem during the pandemic.

“I think that teacher shortages have existed in the United States for a long time. The pandemic has certainly made the teacher shortage worse in many ways, right? In particular, what we’re seeing is that enrollments and completion in teacher preparation programs have decreased 30 to 35 percent over the last 10 years, so the number of people who are enrolled to become teachers have just decreased substantially over the last 10 years,” said Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor at the University of Missouri who has studied teacher vacancies.

“We have less teachers who are coming into the profession and we have now more teachers who are leaving the profession over the last several years.” he added. 

Experts say teachers’ shortages vary greatly state by state, especially as emergency pandemic funding comes to an end.  

In September, the almost $200 billion that was given to schools during COVID-19 will disappear, and some districts may have to lay off staff they hired using the relief money.  

“I think we’re actually going to see some layoffs happening in some states where they have hired several thousand additional teachers. And then, there’ll be states like Kansas and Missouri, where I am now, that you will see continuing a worsening of the teacher shortage,” Nguyen said.  

Some experts argue the new emphasis on teacher shortages has been shortsighted due to the continuous difficulties with the issue that were only exacerbated by COVID-19.  

According to data from the National Center of Education Statistics in 2023, 45 percent of public schools felt understaffed, an improvement from 2022, when 53 percent of schools felt the teacher shortage.

Most of the drop came from schools in low-poverty neighborhoods, with a 10-point drop in concerns of staffing shortages from 2022 to 2023.

But for schools in high-poverty areas, fears of vacant positions among educators held at the same level between 2022 and 2023 at 57 percent.

“There were and will continue to be schools and school districts that struggle to hire teachers, and there will, there were and will continue to be subjects in which it’s much harder to hire teachers,” said Dan Goldhaber, vice president of American Institutes for Research and director of the CALDER Center. 

“And so, a lot of the stories about teacher shortages tend to be pretty generic and say the teacher shortage without the nuance that it’s always been much harder to staff special education and STEM classrooms than elementary ed classrooms. It’s always much more challenging to hire teachers into high-poverty schools. So I think that those challenges, those sort of more specific challenges are likely to continue even when there’s not a big focus on the teacher market overall,” Goldhaber added.  

Updated at 10:46 a.m. ET