Why We Still Haven’t Solved Teacher Shortages (Despite Decades of Trying)

Media coverage about dire teacher shortages goes in cycles. Stories showed up in the 2014-15 school year, during the height of test-based accountability. And in 2008 and 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession. And in 2000? The conventional wisdom had it that the nation would soon need “2 million new teachers.”

It goes back much further, too. In the 1950s, researchers warned of a critical need for additional elementary school educators amid a post-war baby boom.

Today, even as districts weigh teacher layoffs to cope with shrinking enrollment, they still struggle to fill positions in science and special education—perennial shortage areas. Some districts have had difficulties filling other positions, too.

As the teacher workforce discourse evolves with each generation, so come new attempts at solutions, often focused on training candidates who will stay in the field for the long haul.

Thirty-five years ago, Pearl Rock Kane, an education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, proposed a shift in thinking. Private schools regularly hired promising graduates without teaching degrees, aware that they would need some additional support—and that they would eventually move on to “more lucrative careers,” she wrote in a 1989 Education Week opinion essay.

To fill high-demand roles in urban public schools, she wrote, administrators and policymakers should formalize the arrangement, forming a “kind of domestic Peace Corps that would recruit able young people to work for a few years in our most troubled public schools.”

“We should capitalize and improve on this system of temporary employment that has been operating unofficially on a small scale for decades,” wrote Kane, who later served on Education Week’s board before she died in 2019. “Rather than look down upon young people who see teaching as temporary work, we should seize the opportunity to increase their ranks and direct them to our inner-city schools, where we need them most.”

Turning the ‘Me Generation’ into civic-minded teachers

Sound familiar?

It should: Kane’s essay came just a year before Wendy Kopp trained the first corps of Teach For America members—successful college graduates who commit to teach for at least two years in hard-to-fill positions.

Though some elements of Kane’s proposal differed, it paralleled ideas Kopp outlined in an undergraduate thesis at Princeton University, which would later grow into the popular nontraditional pathway to teaching. (Among the differences: Kane proposed a minimum of a three years commitment, while Kopp proposed two; and Kane framed her proposal as a “way station between undergraduate and professional schools,” while Kopp saw her effort as a way to drive social change.)

Kopp, now the CEO and co-founder of Teach For All, an international teaching program, wasn’t aware of Kane’s essay until Education Week contacted her recently. And, though Kane later went on to support Teach For America, Kopp doesn’t think she was aware of the budding program when she wrote her opinion piece.

“I actually think she just had the same sixth sense that I did,” she said. “There was just something going on on college campuses.”

But while Kane’s plan largely focused on addressing teacher shortages, Kopp had a broader vision. Corps members, she theorized, would get a close look at persistent inequity, and that would drive them to contribute to social change, whether they stayed in the classroom long-term or moved to other sectors.

“Our generation was called the ‘Me Generation,’” Kopp said. “People thought we all wanted to work in banks and make a lot of money for ourselves. As a college senior, I felt that label was completely misplaced. There were thousands of people out there just searching for something.”

Starting with fewer than 500 members in its initial cohort, Teach For America peaked at about 6,000 members a decade ago. The 2024 corps has 2,400 members. TFA alumni have worked as state education chiefs, principals, charter school founders, and elected officials.

TFA is not without its critics—on both the left and the right. Education Week once called the organization “a proxy for advocates’ best and worst dreams about the teaching profession.”

Its most vocal progressive critics have accused it of “deprofessionalizing” teaching by providing limited training and accepting short-term commitments, while more recent criticism on the right has critiqued corps members’ interest in social justice.

A shrinking teacher pipeline brings new demands

How do today’s challenges with teacher hiring and staffing differ from what came before? For one thing, today’s teacher pipeline is shrinking, as is interest in the teaching profession. Amid divisive debates about education, 60 percent of Americans responding to a recent poll by PDK International said they would not support their children choosing public school teaching for a career.

But even as completion of traditional teaching degrees has declined over the past decade, completion of programs not affiliated with institutions of higher education—programs run by school districts, states, charter schools, local or national nonprofits, and even for-profit businesses—has remained steady.

New forms of preparation (or remixes of existing programs) pop up in every round of the teacher-shortage discourse, said Dan Goldhaber, the director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and the director of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington.

“The solutions have changed, but the underlying dynamics of the teacher labor market haven’t changed for a very long time,” Goldhaber said.

Notably, there is little market differentiation for different teaching professions.

In the for-profit sector, businesses adjust pay and benefits to attract candidates to hard-to-fill positions. But that’s largely not true in public education, where teachers are typically paid on the same scale, whether they teach in easier-to-fill positions, like elementary education, or the hardest-to-fill roles, like special education.

Some states and districts have experimented with financial incentives to address this dynamic. The Detroit district began offering an ongoing $15,000 bonus for special education teachers in 2022, which it has credited with reducing a long-standing need for special educators.

But incentive programs and differentiated pay by specialty are often disfavored by teachers’ unions and viewed as politically complicated by policymakers.

Playing whack-a-mole to solve teacher shortages

Until the sector becomes more nimble, education leaders will have to continue playing whack-a-mole, patching holes in the teacher pipeline with new programs and approaches to meet evolving labor needs, Goldhaber warns.

Ten years ago, the buzz was centered on district-run teacher-residency programs. Under the Biden administration, at least 30 states have received approval for teacher-apprenticeship programs, making them eligible for federal workforce-development funds to pay for this on-the-job training in partnership with school districts, universities, and other entities.

Each approach brings its own advantages, but none is without criticism, and none provides a comprehensive solution, Goldhaber said. But, until schools have a better tool to address their most pressing needs, they should embrace a multitude of approaches, he said.

“While I think that, over the long run, it may be good to do things to professionalize teaching, we have these immediate problems in these schools that we have to address,” Goldhaber said.

And for the time being, that may mean accepting programs like TFA that appeal to young people interested in teaching’s inherent variety, even if they don’t all plan to stay long term.

Or, as Kane put it in 1989: “It makes sense to target the nation’s most valuable human resource—well-educated young people—where we need it the most, in improving the quality of urban schools.”