Staffing shortages are both a national challenge and a highly localized problem for districts. While teacher vacancies have risen significantly since the pandemic, the exact educators in demand vary considerably by field, and promising recruiting programs in one district may not transfer to another in a different state.
That’s why the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education’s research wing, launched a new center intended to understand the changing teacher workforce and find better staffing approaches for districts.
As of 2022-23, federal data show 44 percent of public schools—and a majority of high-poverty schools and ones that serve mostly students of color—started the school year with one or more teaching vacancies. These included both existing and new positions that were unfilled.
A majority of school leaders with vacancies say they can’t get enough qualified teachers to fill open posts, particularly in perennial high-need areas such as special education and science, technology, engineering, and math fields. As of December 2023, nearly 1 in 10 active teachers—270,000 nationally—was underqualified for their position.
The new center will study the costs, implementation, and effects of state and local efforts to improve staffing—from financial bonuses and alternative-licensure pathways to new teacher career ladders and working conditions—in the Atlanta and Houston area public schools, as well as in Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington. For the next five years, the center will lead researchers at 10 research institutions to evaluate policies and identify best practices in recruiting and retaining teachers, as well as bolstering the pipeline of new educators.
Dan Goldhaber, the principal investigator for the center and director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes for Research, spoke with Education Week about the evolving teacher workforce. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you think declining K-12 student enrollment will affect teacher labor markets and staffing?
I don’t know that we should expect that the declining enrollment is going to lead to a declining teacher workforce, because that depends on policies like class size and what localities choose to do funding-wise.
You could have declining [full-time employees] in elementary ed., at the same time that you’re still struggling to hire enough STEM teachers or special education teachers, because special ed. in particular is an area with a lot of turnover. Those things could happen within the very same school systems. I think you will see some cases where there are both layoffs and staffing challenges at the same time.
Some research suggests the pipeline for new teachers is stabilizing, but there are still shortages in key areas. What is the center exploring in this area?
One of the things that we’re interested in is, would providing teacher candidates with more information about their job prospects influence their area of specialization? As an example, the likelihood of getting employed is much higher if you get a STEM credential than an elementary ed. credential.
Well, if you tell someone that in their last semester before they are going on the job market, they probably can’t change what they’re going to do. But if you tell them that early on, then maybe they say, “oh, I was planning on being an elementary teacher, but maybe I’ll become a STEM teacher, or I’ll get a STEM-focused credential, so if I don’t get a job as an elementary ed., I’ve got a backup plan.”
We are surveying these teacher candidates across three states and [in] a bunch of different teacher education programs, early on in their training. And then for a subset of them, we’re giving them some information about what the job market has looked like in recent years, to see if it affects … ultimately what they actually do. We’re working with the teacher ed. programs to be able to link them to the state [student longitudinal data systems], so we can see, do they actually become teachers and if so, where are they employed? And if so, what is their area of specialization?
We are looking at teacher roles. North Carolina [one of the states of focus for the center] has been big on that, what they call “advanced teacher roles” or ATRs. If you are in an advanced teacher role school, what are the implications for teacher retention and student achievement?
How has the pandemic affected teaching as a profession?
I think a lot of people want to have schooling go back to the way it was pre-pandemic without much change. And I think that’s true in some respects, but one issue that I worry about, particularly for the teacher workforce, is that there’s a lot more post-pandemic flexibility about remote work. And, you know, we don’t think remote works all that well for teachers.
I do wonder whether the fact that you are tied to a location, you have less flexibility of travel and what you’re doing with teaching, whether that effectively disadvantages teaching as a profession when competing with some other jobs.
In just talking to practitioners, I’ve seen that there’s been a real shift in the way that they think about a teaching career. We see more of these alternative programs that make it easier to transition to teaching from other careers. I do think there is recognition by policymakers, at least, that people move around more or at least are thought to move around more in their career.
Licensing and certification are key areas of focus for the center. How is alternative certification affecting teachers entering the profession?
In recent years, if you look at [federal] Title II data [on teacher quality], there is a higher share of people getting licensed that come from non-[institutions of higher education] programs. Sometimes it’s easy to think that half the teachers in the country come from alternative programs. It’s nothing like that; roughly 85 percent of licenses are still being granted by traditional college- and university-based institutions. But it varies from state to state.
So, in Texas, roughly half the teachers are coming from these non-IHE based programs. And what’s less well known … is diversity in the teacher workforce has increased in the last couple of decades. I think a lot of the diversity of the teacher workforce is coming from these alternative routes.
There’re two avenues of research that go on with regards to alternative routes and certification: How effective are the teachers that get different kinds of credentials [and] … what does it mean for supply and demand?
What do we know about the role of local school districts in developing their own teachers?
The idea behind grow-your-own programs is often that there is a more diverse workforce within the local labor market—oftentimes employed by the school system as paraeducators and whatnot—and if we grow those people into teachers, it accomplishes a couple of goals. One, it might help to diversify the workforce.
Two, because of the localness of teacher labor markets, those are people that are likely to want to be employed in that school system because they’re already employed and ensconced in the local community.
