As the 2023-2024 school year ramps up, schools districts across the country are confronted with yet another year of staff shortages. From lowering teacher certification standards, hiring virtual instructors to recruiting lunchroom and custodial staff, schools are finding creative short-term solutions to address the ongoing shortage crisis.
Last year, the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) School Pulse Panel reported 42% of all principals, said that teachers and staff leaving the profession became a “more pressing concern” during the last school year.
Trends in staff shortages are even worse for schools with large numbers of minority students. About four in 10 schools with more than 75% minority populations have multiple teaching vacancies, according to NCES.
Here’s how teacher shortage trends vary by region and what subject areas are the most strained.
Teacher shortages in the south
Two-thirds of Tennessee schools started the 2022-2023 school year with vacancies, with an average of 20 openings per district, according to a report from the Tennessee Department of Education. Nearly 3,900 positions were either vacant or held by someone with an emergency teaching credential, the data showed.
Virginia had more than 3,500 full-time teacher vacancies for the 2022-2023 school year, a rate of about 3.9% unfulfilled positions, according to Virginia’s Department of Education. Vacancies were worse than the year before, statistics showed.
The Mississippi Department of Education reported 2,593 vacancies for the 2022-2023 school year, a decrease in vacancies from the previous school year.
And in South Carolina, the 2022-2023 school year started with 1,474 teacher vacancies, according to a report from the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement.
How are southern states addressing teacher shortages?
Virginia is partnering with a for-profit online teacher credentialing company, as a way to fast-track getting more teachers into classrooms without the barriers of high tuition costs at traditional universities.
Virginia is now one of 11 states that is working with Iteach—an alternative teacher certification service. The other states include Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.
Education Week reported that close to a dozen states had eased credentialing standards for teachers or were considering doing so last year.
Oklahoma passed a law in 2022 to remove the requirement for a general-education exam as a part of the teacher certification process.
Charleston County schools in South Carolina used a virtual instruction company called Proximity Learning to teach core subjects when teacher vacancies were unable to be filled. At least 13 other South Carolina districts have used Proximity over the past two school years to fill gaps, according to the 74 million.
In Mississippi, where teacher shortages are among the worst in the nation, starting teacher pay increased from $37,123 to $41,638 in the 2022-2023 school year. This number falls below the national average teacher salary at $65,293. The historic teacher pay raise boosted the average salary by $5,140.
How do teacher shortages in southern states compare to the rest of the nation?
Researchers at Kansas State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign compiled a record of available state reporting on teacher vacancies. Their research found that Mississippi had the most vacancies, followed by Alabama and West Virginia — some of the poorest states in the nation.
However, it’s difficult to compare teacher vacancy data between states. Not only does the data the researchers found differ in the time it was last updated, states define “vacancy” differently, and teacher certification requirements differ between them.
What subject areas have shortages?
In Virginia, there is a critical shortage of special education teachers, followed by elementary educators, middle school educators and career and technical educators. In Mississippi, there is a critical shortage of special education, followed by math, foreign language and science teachers.
Here’s how national teacher shortages compare by subject area.
Why is there a teacher shortage?
In some states, the increased cost of living outpaces the rate of teacher pay.
The combination of rising costs of college and stagnant teacher salaries has made it extremely difficult for aspiring teachers to pursue this career. Federal data shows that enrollment for traditional teacher preparation programs dropped by nearly a third between 2010 and 2018.
It’s not just unreasonable costs of living and low salaries that are discouraging teachers from continuing. Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a downward trend of teachers agreeing the “stress and disappointments” of their job are worth it. According to annual educator surveys from the RAND Corporation, only half of all teachers agreed with this notion, compared to three-fourths of teachers who said the stress of teaching was worth it, just a few years ago.
That’s nearly as problematic as not having enough teachers: “Low morale matters in and of itself, whether or not teachers quit,” Heather Schwartz told USA TODAY. Schwartz is RAND’s director of the Pre-K to 12 educational systems program and a senior policy researcher. Almost half of the teachers who voluntarily stopped teaching ahead of retirement in 2020 did so because of pandemic-related stress, RAND’s data suggests.
Where is teacher shortage data missing?
There isn’t reliable national data for tracking teacher vacancies. And some states fail to track whether educators are qualified to teach the classes they’re teaching, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
After evaluating states for their data collection practices, researchers at the council found that only 16 states published teacher demand data. While some states partially publish data on teacher demand, such as vacancy data, researchers are left with a patchwork of data sources, making it difficult to fully understand the national landscape of teacher shortages.
Dive deeper:Here’s what the data says about teacher shortages
