Teacher Shortages: Why Is There a Teacher Shortage?

The teacher shortage is a widespread problem that affects the entire US education system. Although states, districts, and schools are affected differently, the majority of them are facing increasing difficulties in filling available educator job openings with qualified candidates.

In this article, we’ll define what a teacher shortage constitutes, how it happened, the main reasons behind this phenomenon, and the impact it’s having on the education process, society, and the economy. We’ll also look at what the private and public sector have done to address this challenge and what solutions are available to education institutions with teacher vacancies.

Meanwhile, Fullmind virtual staffing services can help you fill existing vacancies with qualified, state-certified K-12 teachers in all subjects in a few days.

What the Teacher Shortage Is

The U.S. education system is facing a chronic problem of teacher shortage that has been exacerbating over recent years. Teacher shortage refers to the general inability to fill existing teacher vacancies with qualified candidates at prevailing wages. This signifies two things. First of all, there are vacant positions that remain unfilled, which means that schools and districts don’t have enough teachers to provide quality education to their students in all required subjects. Second, many teaching positions are filled by individuals who are not qualified enough for the position, undermining the quality of instruction that students get.

According to data cited by the Learning Policy Institute, there are at least 42,000 unfilled positions across the US, while other sources place this number at 55,000+, and still others are saying that the number might be close to 100,000. Additionally, the total number of unfilled positions and positions filled with teachers who are not fully certified for their assignment exceeds 407,000. Out of a total teacher population of about 4 million in the US, this means that there are issues with at least 10% of educators.

It’s important to note that while teacher shortages are a growing problem across the entire US, there are significant discrepancies based on various factors. At the state level, based on data from District Administration, Arizona, Utah, California, Nevada, and Florida are disproportionately affected by this problem. At the district and school level, schools with higher rates of poor, minority, and low-performing students suffer from more exacerbated teacher shortages than institutions located in more prosperous communities. Additionally, the issue is the most serious at the high-school level. With regards to subjects, more demanding subjects such as science, special education, foreign languages, and English are more vulnerable than others.

How the Teacher Shortage Got Noticed

The problem of teacher shortages started developing as early as 2014, driven by multiple factors to be discussed shortly. However, it got particularly amplified after the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to the increasing difficulty that districts and schools reported in recruiting good teachers, another clear indicator that put this issue on the radar of education policymakers and stakeholders was the sharp decline in the ratio of hires to job openings in the education sector.

Based on analysis conducted by the National Education Association (NEA), the ratio of educator hires to educator job openings went down below the threshold of 1 for the first time in 2014, and it’s been consistently below 1 since 2017. Indeed, the ratio has been consistently dropping year after year, already reaching 0.55 by 2022. This means that education institutions are able to recruit teachers for just about half of the available vacancies, while the remaining nearly half openings remain unfilled.

In other words, there is an increasing gap between job openings in public education and hires. Available jobs started outpacing hires as early as 2014, but the trend accelerated in 2017-2018. At the moment, the gap is clearly widening, with more and more schools left unable to find and hire the teachers that they need in order to continue providing the expected educational services with the required quality.

While the teacher shortage crisis was not started by Covid, the pandemic had an evident negative impact on the availability of teachers. In the face of the global pandemic, many teachers decided to leave their jobs because of a number of reasons, the main ones being:

• Increased health risk: After all, teachers have significantly more social interactions than other professions, which came with elevated health concerns at the time of a global health crisis.
• More stress: The switch to remote learning and online teaching met many teachers unprepared as not all of them were trained appropriately to handle this teaching reality.
• Limited professional development opportunities: The social distancing policies of the pandemic left educators with fewer options for professional development, which is a crucial part of the job qualifications and of remaining up-to-date with the most recent best practices in the field.

These pandemic-driven factors contributed to the already existing environment pushing more and more existing teachers out of the profession and attracting fewer and fewer young people to the field.

What Impact the Teacher Shortage Is Having

The growing problem of teacher shortages is having a negative impact on the education process and outcomes in both the short term and the long run. In general, the quality of education is deteriorating, leading to long-term degradation in student knowledge and skills that would affect the labor market and the economy over time.

The main immediate and remote consequences of the teacher shortage crisis are:

• Larger class sizes: The fastest temporary solution to the problem of not having enough teachers at schools is to increase the size of classes. However, larger classes lead to poorer-quality instruction and less time allocated to each student, worsening the general student experience and quality of education.
• Bigger student-to-teacher ratios: As the number of teachers goes down, the student-to-teacher ratio obviously goes up. This means that teachers can spend less time and effort on each individual student inside and outside the classroom, while having to put more effort into the process.
• More subjects covered by a single teacher: As schools are not able to hire all required educators, they are forced to have an average teacher teach more classes and more subjects than usual. In some cases, teachers might not be experts on the new subjects they need to handle.
• Unqualified instructors: One part of the teacher shortage situation is that schools end up hiring educators who are not ideally qualified and positioned for the job description. This is another quick mechanism to address the immediate challenge with negative long-term consequences.
• Quicker teacher turnover: With many unfilled positions, teachers leave as soon as they are not entirely happy with their current setup, looking for better opportunities. Higher teacher turnover creates a sense of lack of stability and continuity in the education process within institutions.
• Limited subject availability: As schools are not able to find professionals to teach all subjects, they are forced to shut down certain options, especially electives, which results in less diverse opportunities for students to pursue their academic interests beyond the pure basics.
• Extracurricular activity cutdowns: As teachers are overloaded in the traditional classroom, they don’t have the time and energy to offer extracurricular activities. Consequently, students are left without options to explore new passions and develop new skills outside the strictly academic domain.
• Poorer student achievements: As a result of all the above, students perform worse and graduate from school with poorer-quality education than a few years ago.
• Negative economic impact: This deterioration in the quality of education of an entire generation will have an inevitable negative effect on the qualifications of the future labor force and the economy as a whole.

So, first of all, the teacher shortage is bringing worse academic achievements to students, impacting the economic potential in the long term. Second, it’s putting more pressure on teachers who are already overstressed, exhausted, and discouraged, making even more of them quit their jobs and look for alternatives, turning into a vicious circle.

Why Teacher Shortage Happened

The teacher shortage is a multifaceted problem that occurred as the combination of a few actors that came into play. On the one hand, there are demographic trends at play. As the teacher population is generally aging, more and more experienced educators are retiring. Some are also seeking early retirement due to exhaustion and burnout as a result of the ever-increasing demands of the profession.

Meanwhile, a profession in the education sector is perceived as an attractive and desirable career path by fewer students going to college, which means that fewer young people choose to study to be teachers than a couple of decades ago. This is the result of a general decrease in the appeal of the teacher profession. Between 2014 and 2018, for the first time the percentage of Americans who would not like their child to become a public school teacher surpassed the percentage of those who would want their child to be a teacher, according to a survey conducted by Langer Research Associates.

Therefore, the teacher shortage dilemma is the ultimate result of a declining teacher pool as there is an increase in the number of teachers exiting the profession and a decrease in the number of young professionals entering the job. This is the classic formula for creating a shortage within any professional field.

What Is Contributing to the Teacher Shortage

The dynamics in the education-related job market that led to the sharp shortage in teachers resulted from a number of factors that have been developing and unraveling for decades.

The main reasons behind this challenging situation include:

• Decreasing absolute wages: NEA reports the national average teacher salary at $69,597, which - when adjusted for inflation - means that now teachers are making 5% less than what they used to make 10 years ago. Moreover, the national average salary for a starting teacher is only a fraction of this, at $44,530, which is rather discouraging for young individuals. For comparison, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median salary for individuals with a bachelor’s degree (the same educational attainment as teachers) is $77,636. This means that teachers make an average of 12% less than other professionals with the same level of education. 
• Uncompetitive incentives: Unlike professions in the private sector, teachers don’t have access to the same benefits and performance-driven incentives as others.  For instance, tech-based startups and corporations offer monetary bonuses to their employees for achieving certain targets, while this is not a feasible option in the education sector, especially in public institutions. So, teachers not only earn lower base wages than counterparts in other fields but also have virtually no opportunities to supplement this income, no matter how much effort they put into the job. This is rather discouraging, especially for young people who want to compete with peers to prove their skills and be rewarded for it.
• Growing workload: Being a teacher is a very demanding occupation as you have to juggle multiple tasks at all times, including lesson planning and preparation, instruction, grading, office hours, extracurricular activities, staff meetings, and professional development. Moreover, teachers sometimes have to manage large classes and to teach more courses than before to make up for the already existing teacher shortages. In addition, the need to get on board with new technologies and incorporate them in the classroom is adding to the workload. Considering the below-average remuneration, working in the education field is just not worth it for many.
• Stressful work environment: Teachers work under extremely taxing circumstances where they have to handle students, parents, coworkers, and school administrators. Meanwhile, they feel the pressure to achieve academic benchmarks and standardized test results in addition to meeting administrative requirements and leading extracurricular activities. All this is putting a lot of stress on educators, leading to deteriorating mental health and early exhaustion.
• Teacher burnout: The increasing workload and stressful work conditions result in burnout, which forces young teachers to look for alternative career paths away from education and more experienced teachers to seek early retirement.
• Lack of administrative support: Amid the increasing demands of the workplace, teachers don’t get the assistance and help they need from the district and school administration to achieve the expected positive outcomes and to facilitate their working conditions. Part of the reason is that in many cases school administrators are just as overloaded and overworked as teachers.
• Worsening student discipline: In a survey by EdWeek Research Center shows, 70% of teachers, principals, and district leaders reported that in 2023 students were misbehaving more than in 2019. However, student behavior inside and outside the classroom, discipline at school, and attitude towards teachers has been deteriorating for a much longer period, mostly driven by the general lack of respect for the educator figure. This means that teachers have to deal with increasingly problematic behaviors among students.
• Fewer options to deal with challenging situations: Meanwhile, teachers have fewer options to discipline students, albeit for the right reasons, amid efforts to decrease the punishment of negative behaviors and introduce strategies that stimulate positive behaviors. While research is showing the overall positive impact of alternatives to suspension, they are more effort-intense and time-consuming for teachers.
• Professional development and certification requirements: Unlike many other professionals, teachers are required to renew their state certification every 5 years and to complete a certain number of professional development hours every year. This not only takes time from the already busy schedule of educators but also puts additional stress as they need to continuously meet specific requirements to remain eligible to practice a profession that’s paying less and less.
• Limited career progress opportunities: Career advancement options are generally restricted in the education field. After long years of teaching, some manage to become chairs of departments, but that’s about how far you can get in the hierarchy.
• New challenges to a relatively traditional profession: Finally, with the development of new teaching software technologies and tools, teachers have to continuously adopt new practices and apps in the classroom. This can be very challenging for many educators who generally miss technical education, especially among the older generations.

All these factors are playing their role in intensifying the teacher shortage crisis and turning it into a full-blown catastrophe.

What Are Solutions to the Teacher Shortage

Resolving the teacher shortage crisis requires permanent, long-term changes that need to address the root causes that led to the problem. There need to be significant updates to the education system and improvements in the conditions that teachers face to make this potentially very rewarding profession once again appealing to young people.

Meanwhile, educational institutions need to find short-term solutions to the teacher shortage in order to be able to continue the education process in the best possible way given the circumstances. Some actionable strategies include:

Increase Pay and Offer Benefits

The number one reason why young people don’t want to become teachers and why teachers quit is the lack of competitive remuneration. After all, despite all additional incentives and rewards, everyone works in order to be able to provide a decent life for themselves and their family.

Thus, schools and districts need to put extra effort into finding ways to boost teacher salaries through additional funds and grants. Moreover, higher wages need to be accompanied by attractive benefits packages including but not limited to paid annual vacation, paid sick leaves, health insurance, dental insurance, mental health, wellness program, commuter benefits, professional development, and retirement plan.

Improve the Working Conditions

A second step towards reversing teacher shortage, at least at the local level, is actively working towards providing a better work environment for teachers. This starts as soon as you hire a new teacher by supplying effective onboarding which helps them get introduced to the community and the school culture and helps them get started on the right footing.

It also includes providing paraprofessionals to help with classroom management, decreasing class sizes, offering access to adequate teaching resources and materials, implementing flexible scheduling, and starting Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) programs to prevent stressful situations with students.

Provide Support to Teachers

While teachers are the face of education in the eyes of students, providing an effective education is not a one-man show. It’s a group work that requires the help and support of different district and school representatives.

In other words, teachers should know that they are not alone and that they have a wide support network of administrators and coworkers who are there to help within their capacity. This includes specific tasks such as lesson planning and preparing, managing student behavior, and communicating with parents. It also covers the need for truly efficient professional development programs that help teachers acquire new practical skills with real value added in the classroom.

Benefit from Virtual Staffing

Another effective way for schools and districts to address the teacher shortage challenge is to resort to virtual staffing. There is an increasing number of online education platforms that offer solutions for short-term and long-term teacher vacancies.

Fullmind is a top-ranked provider of virtual staffing services to fill teacher openings with qualified, state-certified educators. Our customizable solutions help you meet your short-term and long-term teaching needs for courses of all sizes and in all subjects. Fullmind educators teach your curriculum via live, synchronous instruction that mimics the in-classroom experience for easy, problem-free switches between in-person and remote learning. Our educators are fully integrated in the school community via daily attendance, staff meetings, parent teacher conferences, and - most importantly - real-time interactions and communication with teachers. Get in touch with the Fullmind team to discuss how we can help solve teacher shortages in your institution.

How the Private and Public Sector is Addressing the Teacher Shortage?

As the teacher shortage crisis affects all elements of society and all sectors of the economy, both the private sector and the public sector have been actively looking for ways to alleviate the short-term negative impact of the problem while looking for a comprehensive, long-term solution.

Following are some major initiatives led by the private and public sector in addressing teacher shortages:

Private Sector Initiatives to Address Teacher Shortages

There are two main ways in which the private sector has been able to contribute to alleviating the issue of teacher shortages and its negative consequences:

Private Funding to the Education Sector

Although the government remains the main source of funding for schools, individuals, corporations, and foundations contribute significant funds to the education system each and every year. Much of this funding is channeled towards innovation in an effort to decrease the workload and stress on teachers and make the educator profession more attractive and appealing to young individuals.

Virtual Instruction Services

Simultaneously, a number of e-learning startups have developed digital platforms that offer virtual staffing services aimed at providing alternative, tech-driven solutions to teacher vacancies. Some notable examples include Fullmind, Proximity Learning, Swing Education, and Stride. The best of these companies have a pool of state-certified, online instruction-trained educators in all core subjects plus special education and a range of electives and extracurricular activities to match each school with the exact professionals that it needs.

Public Sector Initiatives to Address Teacher Shortages

Meanwhile, the government - as the main provider of K-12 educational services - has also put efforts into handling this growing problem. Some programs include:

Raise the Bar: Lead the World

Raise the Bar: Lead the World is a program of the U.S. Department of Education that aims to ensure that all students receive education that enables them to thrive in school and in life. This initiative capitalizes on national unity and education transformation to deliver comprehensive, rigorous education to each student, improve conditions for learning, and provide each student with access to multilingualism and college and/or career.

On the teacher side, this program works towards:

• Improving compensation and working conditions
• Supporting affordable, quality pathways into the profession
• Enhancing induction and professional learning
• Promoting teacher excellence, leadership, and advancement
• Pushing for educator diversity via recruitment, preparation, and retention

Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief

The U.S. Department of Education launched the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) in March 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the $122-billion fund has been contributing to eliminating educator shortages and stabilizing the profession. Some specific initiatives funded by the program include recruitment, preparation, training, and retention of teachers across the nation.

Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants

Through the Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) of the Department of Education is providing State Educational Agencies (SEAs) with over $2 billion to alleviate teacher shortages through projects.

Eligible state-level activities include but are not limited to:

• Reforming teacher and principal certification programs
• Supporting new teachers
• Offering professional development to teachers and principals

At the same time, eligible local-level projects focus on:

• Recruiting and retaining effective teachers and principals
• Supplying professional development opportunities to teachers and principals
• Reducing class sizes

Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) Grant Program

The Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) Grant Program provides discretionary grants to a wide range of stakeholders for the implementation of evidence-based practices that prepare, develop, and enhance the skills of educators to increase the number of highly effective educators. Charter Management Organizations (CMOs), Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCCUs), for-profit organizations, non-profit organizations, and consortia can apply.

Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program

The Teacher and School Leader (TSL) Incentive Program, managed by the OESE, supports institutions in the implementation, improvement, and expansion of their Human Capital Management System (HCMS) which incorporates a Performance-Based Compensation System (PBCS). The TLS program focuses on educators in High-Need Schools who succeed in raising student academic achievements and closing the achievement gap between high-performing and low-performing students. Initiatives include the recruiting, selecting, supporting, retaining, and professionally developing teachers, principals, and other school leaders. Eligible entities comprise individuals, CMOs, Local Educational Agencies (LEAs), non-profit organizations, SEAs, and consortia.

National Professional Development Program

The National Professional Development (NPD) Program, implemented by the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), provides grants to HBCUs for professional development activities that improve instruction for English Learners (ELs) and help educators working with ELs meet the high professional standards. This program focuses exclusively on building bilingual and multilingual teacher pipelines. Eligible activities include both preservice and inservice initiatives.

Bottom Line

The teacher shortage is a grave national education problem that started developing in the mid-2010s but truly exacerbated after 2020. The inability to fill teacher vacancies with qualified and motivated educators is a challenge with major repercussions on all of society and the entire economy. While both the private and public sector have put efforts into addressing this crisis, more robust, long-term solutions are needed to tackle the root causes of the problem by changing perceptions about the teacher profession, raising remuneration, and building a more attractive working environment.

If your school or district is struggling with filling teacher vacancies, check out Fullmind virtual staffing services. We can provide qualified, state-certified teachers for all grades and all subjects to build your faculty community with the required professionals. Get in touch to discuss your specific needs.