Because it's the season for stories about teachers, here's the latest BLS report of public school employment for September:¹
Employment in 2023 is the highest it's been in the past 15 years, and the ratio of students per ed worker is down to 6.16, the lowest over that period. This is a pretty good year for public school staffing.
¹As usual, this is all local government education employees, not just teachers. However, teacher employment tracks total ed employment very closely.
Examining K-12 public education in the US requires looking at the local and state situations, which vary widely. State policies are very different, and local districts will have different staffing needs. The national picture might look fine while you have a crisis in specific areas. As a wise superintendent once said, in a small district, all it takes is one special needs student's family to move in to the district to significantly raise the cost per student. In addition, staff turnover matters a lot in education. Look at TURNOVER, because skilled, experienced professionals are only good to your district if they stick around. "Teacher turnover increased 4 percentage points above prepandemic levels, reaching 10 percent nationally at the end of the 2021–2022 school year. Principal turnover increased too, reaching 16 percent nationally going into the 2022–2023 school year." https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA900/RRA956-14/RAND_RRA956-14.pdf
The BLS establishment survey gives this different graph for local government education employees:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=19XDp
What is the source of Kevin's graph and why is it different? It is not the raw BLS data. According to the establishment survey data, employment has not recovered to the January 2020 level, much less to trend, although the whole graph should probably be normalized by school-age population.
Students of whatever age should always show their work.
Not only does Kevin scrunch his graphs down vertically, but the data occupy only a small range in the center.
It appears that he is using only the month of Sept for each year and asking us to assume the ratio of teachers to other education employees is unchanged over time.
Education employment had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, but it appears to have recorded to Sept 2019 levels. Very Wall Street Journal'ish, when you have a narrative that you really like, just create a graphic, any graphic, to sell the narrative. The data doesnt determine the narrative, instead the narrative determines the data presented.
"the ratio of students per ed worker is down to 6.16"
How is "ed worker" being defined here? Are the administrators and custodial staff "ed workers"? Because you've labeled the right side of the chart "Student-Teacher Ratio" even though it's "Student-Ed Worker Ratio" and the best data I can find online about actual Student-Teacher Ratios put Vermont as having the lowest at 10:1, and the national average sitting around 15:1.
If your "ed worker" ratio number is correct, that means less than half of "ed workers" are actually teachers teaching students in classrooms. In any event, using this ration to track anything and claiming that "teacher employment tracks total ed employment very closely" seems suspect especially when it seems like teacher employment data isn't impossible to find. Why use this rough estimate instead of the actual numbers?
Once again Kevin, you miss the point. Education employment is driven solely by the number of students. Schools are not allowed to hire fewer teachers just because they can't afford them: they just hire worse teachers.