Over at Mother Jones, we have this headline today:
The Real Crisis Driving America’s Teacher Shortage
The article describes a real problem: in some areas of the country, housing is so expensive that teachers can't afford a place to live. But the premise is still wrong. There's no overall teacher shortage in the US:
This is overall education employment, including administrators, but teacher employment follows it very closely. Comparing August to August, the number of ed workers is slightly lower in 2023 than before the pandemic, but the number of students is also down. The ratio of ed workers to students is higher in 2023 than in 2019.
As always, this doesn't mean there aren't shortages in particular places or among particular specialties. But it does mean that, for the country as a whole, things are about the same as they've always been. Unless there's something very wrong with the BLS numbers, there's just no overall teacher shortage in the US.
UPDATE: I originally combined state and local ed workers, but state workers are mostly higher education. The chart now shows only local ed workers, who are mostly K-12 teachers and administrators. I also switched to numbers that weren't seasonally adjusted so you could see the summer downturn more clearly.
So how many places in America would need to have a teacher shortage before you considered it an overall issue? Considering the ripple effect that educational issues can have on a community, and the ripple effect that problems in a community can have more broadly, I'd say the general premise is fine, and you're just being narrow sighted.
Further, who said we had enough teachers in 2019?
Kevin appears to assume away the problem.
1) Assume that the qualified teacher to other education employees ratio has stayed the same over time.
2) Assume there was no teacher shortage pre-pandemic.
3) Conclude that local shortages dont count as long as we assume there is no national shortage.
None of these are justified in any way.
The latter is particularly ridiculous. Shortages are almost always localized events and cannot be waved off just because additional supply is elsewhere but unavailable and inaccessible.
A while back (before the pandemic) I wrote about the teacher shortage: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2017/12/24/wherefore-and-whither-the-teacher-shortage/
If you consider behavior as revealed preference, it's pretty obvious there's a teacher shortage. Principals who were required to use test scores in evaluations juked the stats to avoid giving consequences. While it is a hassle to fire a teacher, it's hard to believe they wouldn't be more aggressive on putting together the paperwork if they knew they could easily get a replacement--and surveys show that principals don't fire because they aren't sure they can get anyone better.
Nationwide, over and over again, principals surveyed and through behavior reveal that hiring, not firing, is the pain point.
Parents, too. Remember how pissed off parents were during the Common Core accountability phase, resisting the call to "fire bad teachers". Would they have done that if they thought there were a ready supply of good teacher replacements?
I think you know this as well: charters and private schools have far *more* shortages than publics.
Other ways in which we could have a teacher shortage even if teacher count seems unaffected:
1) In 2002, NCLB required middle school teachers to have high school single subject credentials. This has thus increased the number of higher-qualified teachers needed, even if teaching population remains constant.
2) Charters by definition increase the number of required teachers. They create more schools for the same number of students.
3) Increased special ed and immigrant population create the need for smaller classes and thus more teachers per student. It's not uncommon for an increase of refugee students to create a need for more teachers when English speaking students would be absorbed into the general population.
Also, teachers show themselves very sensitive to working conditions and their ideal job. There are tons of elementary school teachers who work in a school district as a sub or even a secretary until a job opening appears, because they only want a particular type of job in a particular type of school. Thus even though we definitely produce more elementary school teachers than we need, something like 75% of them might not be working in a teaching job at any particular point in time.
So whether or not the numbers show it, the people involved in schools sure act as if there is a shortage.
Good grief! Panic-induced reading disability.
Original headline says "The Real Crisis Driving America’s Teacher Shortage." Not the "Kalamzoo Teacher Shortage." AMERICA'S Teacher Shortage.
Kevin says "The article describes a real problem: in some areas of the country,..."
Not that the article makes up a problem that doesn't exist. That the problem is in some areas of the country.
Then Kevin goes on to say "But There's no overall teacher shortage in the US."
Apparently, it's too much trouble to pay attention to all those little details. Instead, it's much more satisfying (for some readers) to just wring their hands and say that Kevin is "just being narrow-sighted" and "assuming away the problem."
Bullshit!
enough local problems can translate into a national problem, especially when they are spread across the nation.
This is becoming more common in the comments. Most of the time Kevin is only pushing back against poorly stated narratives from the media.
I think this is one thing that frustrates a lot of commenters here. Kevin having more of a problem with details of how an issue is presented than with the actual issue. E.g., it’s not a National shortage, it’s just a shortage in many different places across the nation. Ok, great. That’s what you choose to focus on? Plus it often comes with an assumption that because things haven’t gotten worse that they were fine to begin with.
If this was an issue in only Kalamazoo, or even in several isolated locations, you might have a point.
America is a collection of all the places that make up America. What does it even mean to say that there is no national shortage even if there are shortages all over the country?
Is there no national poverty problem because while there may be lots of individual poverty, if you look at how much wealth is in the US overall, there is no poverty.
No homelessness problem because while some individuals and individual locations might have issues, the total supply of housing units looks okay!
Kevin assumed away the problem by telling us to assume that there was no teacher shortage in the past and to assume that means there is no teacher shortage now. Lazy, phoned-in post.
On top of the local nature, that graph is flat at best! It shouldn't be flat! Population isn't flat!
But it's also not flat - it shows that education employment dropped during COVID and still hasn't recovered.
Teacher shortages should be assessed state by state, as teachers are licensed by states. There are also huge salary disparities from one state and locality to another.
Yes, and it's why shortages in one state aren't solved by teachers moving in from another state. Teachers are not roofers and electrical line workers; they are generally embedded in a community, and often for decades. Even if a teaching license in one state can be used in another, that doesn't mean that teachers from a mobile workforce. Teachers are also mostly women, which is also a factor in mobility. If they do move, women who teach are often more likely to move in response to the demands of their spouse's career, not in order to fill a need in another state that's offering inducements.
But "administrators" are not teachers. And here in Albuquerque, we've seen the administrative staffing levels explode, processing and generating reams of paperwork that the few remaining teachers are inundaded by. Which, in effect,decrease the available teaching capacity.
Each student needs their own action plan. Each class needs a plan. Each activity has to be evaluated. Plans required for standardized testing. Documentation for every decision to comply with every mandate (all levels). And people have to keep track of all of that so they can write reports, and reports about those reports, and...
Not to mention applying for grants and complying with those reporting requirements.
I think you've identified the problem. Now, if an AI chatbot could deal with 95% of all that paperwork, it might be worth something. That is, if other chatbots could read and file said reports...
I was researching this a bit while you were changing the chart. and the adjusted chart doesn't support your point as well, as numbers are below pre-pandemic levels (which, of course, assumes we had just the right number of teachers then). Your data shows that overall teacher numbers are not declining precipitously, which is not the same as showing there isn't a teacher shortage. You can take umbrage with media often writing as if this is an EMERGRING problem, but you haven't gotten to the underlying issue. A better measure here may be to look at average class size over time. That may tell us more about why there is a least a perceived shortage, and perhaps even a real one.
What's with the periodic dips? Are they all summer recesses?
yes
Where I taught, we were paid 12 months (a 9-month salary spread out into 12 checks) but worked only during the school year and we had multi-year contracts. This graph's dips suggest that teachers are starting over every school year without continuity of employment or pay during summer. Is that correct?
Population around 332 million, ca. 74 million school age, and ca. 8 million local education employees....so 1 for every 9 kids?
I would think the number of teachers would be greater than the combined number of principles, deans, nurses, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, aids, etc.
Ok, average student:teacher ratio is 15:1....so this works out.
Student:teacher isn't as accurate as Average Classroom Size. There are lots of districts employing teachers as staff and they count in the ratio.
While the graph Kevin uses doesn't make it look like there's been a huge fall-off in teacher numbers, we're talking about several hundred thousand personnel nationwide here. That's not nothing. And because you can't extract administrators and staff from those figures, it may be concealing a larger drop in the numbers of classroom instructors.
In my district, not only is there a teacher shortage in a number of subjects, but there's a particularly acute shortage of substitute teachers that has lingered on since the pandemic, as well as bus drivers. Bus drivers and subs are definitely some of the lowest-paid people in a school district, so this is not surprising.
More troubling is the shortage of school bus drivers:
"School districts have been struggling with a shortage of drivers for years, but the problem is finally coming to a head. A survey from HopSkipDrive, a school transportation service, found that 92% of school officials reported bus driver shortages interfering with operations, an increase from 88% last year and 78% in 2021. The top reasons for the shortage, cited by the over 220 school leaders and staff surveyed, were "issues recruiting new bus drivers" and "drivers retiring." The respondents also cited "driver pay," "losing drivers to private industry," and "Covid-19 concerns." The company also found 3 out of 4 respondents said school transportation issues hurt student attendance. " https://theweek.com/education/1026197/school-bus-driver-shortage#:~:text=A%20recent%20USA%20Today%20analysis,are%20having%20a%20hard%20time.
Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, I know you love charts (and we love you for loving charts!), but sometimes you publish the charts and accompanying text without fully thinking through if you’ve charted and said things in a way to maximize reader understanding.
A general quibble (goes beyond this post): too often your charts have info that makes no sense simply by looking at the chart. In this post, your red numbers (7.12, 7.07) make absolutely no sense without reading your entire post. The best charts make pretty good sense just by looking at the chart. All you’d need to fix this is some red text stating what those numbers mean. You readers should have minimum of WTF? moments when viewing your charts!
A specific quibble: When I read the post and read “ The ratio of ed workers to students is higher in 2023 than in 2019,” I thought to myself, “Aha, the red numbers must be the ed workers:students ratio. But then I thought, “Wait a minute…Kevin said the ratio had gone UP, but the more recent number is LOWER!” But THEN I thought, “OK, the chart is showing the students:ed workers ratio, but his text talks about the reciprocal ratio.” DON’T DO THINGS LIKE THIS!!
Sorry, but Kevin lost it on this one.
There are always the same number of teachers: this is not like Police or Computer Engineers where you can just say you'll get along with fewer.
You can't turn away students at the door, and you can't have more than 30 per class. So if you can't hire enough teachers then you hire warm bodies: like a waitress that hasn't finished college* to teach math (her students will be really good at calculating 18% of something).
This is what the numbers show. In California, 40% of school districts in 2018 reported that more than 25% of their new hires were unprepared teachers.
Substandard permits and credentials core than doubled in California between 2012– 13 and 2016–17.
It will get worse. Enrollment in teacher preparation courses has dropped by 2/3 over the last two decades.
Yes, there is a teacher shortage and it is getting worse.
*Yes, this happened this year.