Heather Long is a member of the Washington Post editorial board. She pinpoints the reasons for the national teacher shortage: low pay, but also pandemic stresses, and the ongoing political attacks on the teaching profession by extremists who want to prevent any teaching about racism or sexuality.
Message: pay teachers as professionals and let them teach as professionals, without censorship or interference by busybodies.
Long writes:
The U.S. economy hit a milestone this year: All 22 million jobs lost during the coronavirus pandemic were fully recovered. But that doesn’t mean workers went back to the same jobs. One of the sectors struggling the most to rebound is K-12 public education, which is still down more than 270,000 employees.
There is an educator shortage in the United States, but it is crucial to understand the details. First, this is about more than teachers. That 270,000 figure includes a lot fewer bus drivers, custodians and other support staff. Second, education isn’t simply about getting enough warm bodies into classrooms; it’s about having effective and qualified teachers and staff. The best analysis of the situation this fall, from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, indicates a teacher shortage of nearly 2 percent, but more than 5 percent of positions are currently held by under-qualified teachers. Third, the shortage isn’t nationwide. It’s much worse in some schools and in some subjects.
In October, nearly half of public schools were still struggling to fill at least one teacher vacancy, according to a recently released Education Department survey. But schools in high-poverty neighborhoods were significantly more likely to have unfilled positions. Similarly, school districts report having an especially hard time finding special education, computer science and foreign language teachers, and bus drivers and custodial staff.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, but many signs indicate it worsened during the pandemic. Teachers experienced extreme levels of burnout from Zoom classes and safety concerns during the early days of the pandemic. Then came the culture wars that put teachers and staff under constant scrutiny over any conversations involving history, racism and sexuality. Throw in the Great Resignation, a tight labor market and rapidly rising pay in other professions, and the net result has been some teachers and staff retiring early. Others have quit and gone to work in different professions. And some recent graduates have decided not to enter education at all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s regrettable to see the intellectual decline of someone who was once a serious thinker into a fanatic and pure polemicist. You constantly write on this blog about “extremists who want to prevent any teaching about racism or sexuality.” The percentage of people who support that position is in the single digits, and public opinion surveys have shown that. I read a wide diversity of publications across the political spectrum, and not once have I come across conservative authors or commenters who favor no teaching about the racial shortcomings of American society, past and present. I know a lot of conservatives on a personal basis – none of them are like that, either. They oppose shoehorning race into every topic, but they all acknowledge the sins of slavery, Jim Crow, and other discrimination. Same for the issue of sexuality; they don’t want it obsessed over and they don’t want young kids indoctrinated into the current transgender mania. Friendly advice: venture out of your bubble and interact with people who don’t always agree with you like the commenters on this blog do. Your thinking might become nuanced again rather than being an ideological sledgehammer 24/7.
Your statement assumes that there is rampant “wokeness” in public schools. This is factually untrue. Your belief is an baseless assumption. Most teachers stick with facts and content. I taught in public schools for over three decades and never witnessed any teacher “indoctrinating” anyone. There were no attacks on library books, curricula or teachers, and most parents today are over 70% happy with their current public schools. I left the classroom about ten years ago. The main difference between then and now is that there is a systematic propaganda campaign to foment distrust in public institutions, especially public schools in order to promote privatization of public services.
“I read a wide diversity of…”
Have you missed this one?
It’s MINE,MINE
dammit, and I’ll wash it
as fast as I want to…
Let’s take the Jim Crow era. I’m guessing you don’t know a damn thing other than the false assumption that it was a minor inconvenience and people got what they deserved since they were too lazy to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Does that cover it? Or perhaps you might venture out of your bubble and read Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told or, for a more recent edition, Margaret Burnham’s By Hands Known. Get out of your bubble and visit Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans and walk in the neighborhoods where real people live, people neglected and denigrated by people like you.
And pay a teacher to teach real history, like this passage from Blackmon:
“At least 2,500 men were being held against their will at more than two dozen labor camps across Alabama (in 1903)…More than nine hundred were in the Pratt Mines. Sloss-Sheffield held nearly three hundred. The McCurdys still controlled one hundred in Lowndes County. Scores more were imprisoned in the turpentine and lumber camps of the Henderson-Boyd and Horseshoe Bend lumbar companies and other remote prison compounds scattered deep in the forests of southern Alabama. Payments to the state that year exceeded a half million dollars, the equivalent of $12.1 million a century later and a figure nearly equal to 25 percent of all taxes collected in Alabama.
“As the dark cloud of the new slavery was descending on those men and the hundreds of thousands of friends, acquaintances, and family members across the South, the descendants of the old slave Scipio struggled to maintain emancipated lives. Abraham Cottingham and his sons Jimmy and Frank, descendants of Mitt, another son of Scipio, were among nearly four hundred black voters who still participated in Shelby County elections in 1892. Defiant, even as the vast majority of other Black men in the county we intimidated or obstructed from the polls, Abraham paid an increasingly onerous poll tax and complied year after year with burgeoning requirements established by the state of Alabama for Blacks to qualify for a ballot. Each election year, under hostile eyes, he signed his name boldly in the register of voters maintained in the worn-brick county courthouse across the street from the jail. But even Abraham could not resist the new state constitution adopted in 1901, under which virtually no Black person could again cast votes in Alabama. No Black Cottingham would cast a ballot for at least six decades.”
How’s that for popping a bubble of intolerance, disrespect, and political narcissism? Please respond with your “wide diversity of publications” (that is very funny).
As always, the Ravitch groupies here are enraged by any comment that doesn’t conform 100% to the party line. A partial list of publications I regularly read:
NY Times; The Atlantic; The New Republic; Nation; Washington Monthly; National Review. I watch very little TV news.
I’m well-read about the Jim Crow era; because people might have a different perspective doesn’t mean they are uninformed.
“They oppose shoehorning race into every topic, but they all acknowledge the sins of slavery, Jim Crow, and other discrimination…I’m well-read about the Jim Crow era”.
Test question (not standardized!): How does one teach about slavery, Jim Crow, and other discrimination AND claim to be well read in the Jim Crow era? AND do so without discussing the role of race in policy making and determining what remedies, if any are needed (if you have time, explain the concept of “shoehorning”)? AND if remedies are inappropriate and wrong, please explain why.
For extra credit: explain how the quoted Blackmon passage above is relevant to our times.
You’re ridiculous. Timothy Snyder is a giant of an intellectual who knows more about the rise of fascism in his little finger than you will ever know. Just because you have been warped by right wing “news” doesn’t mean he isn’t right.
As for people not wanting teachers to teach anything about racism or sexuality, you obviously aren’t teaching in a red state, as those of us who are are being attacked on a constant basis for bringing up ANYTHING on those subjects. And don’t even get me started on the dozens of books being banned. Talking to a few friends or reading a couple of polls doesn’t make you knowledgeable about what’s happening on the ground.
Kindly stuff it. I don’t normally say something like that, but your comment is so ridiculous.
You are correct. They spend so much time on politics in school that they have forgotten how to teach kids to read.
The leftists in education don’t know how to walk and chew gum simultaneously. It is too much to ask that they teach kids how to read in the thirteen years allotted to them?
Paolo Friere is the third most-cited person in education journals. Our kids go to Paolo Freire’s schools. Look him up and his cult follower Henry Giroux, it will explain a lot.
Another idiot. Kids can read. But you all are banning books that some of them WANT to read
https://foxbaltimore.com/amp/news/project-baltimore/more-than-75-percent-test-elementary-level-math-reading-baltimore-city-high-school
Hey! Thanks for the scold. My year is now complete!
Illinois is examining having Education majors be substitute teachers.
In Utah, all you need is a high school diploma and a background check. They’re hiring student teachers to teach full time and some teachers now don’t even have college degrees.
That is news to me as an Utah teacher. This may be true for tutors or charters but not any of the public school teachers I know of. I will accept that student teachers are sometimes hired to replace a needed teacher. These teachers are in their final semester of study. They have passed all of the required tests and are closely monitored during this time by their university as well as mentors and administrators. I know that UEA has looked at these as possibilities but these teachers ARLs (alternative to licensure )are closely monitored and must pass the required testing to continue in the job.
We’re in the same district. You teach elementary so maybe it’s easier to find subs. In high-risk secondary, where I teach, what I have said is very much the case
We’re in the ge same district. Maybe you folks in elementary are able to get people with credentials, but in high-risk secondary, where I teach, I am speaking from daily experience.
Teacher pay is part if it but not all if even the most important part.
Large class sizes, lack if respect, and inability to teach due to policies that don’t allow for it. I’d love to get back into a classroom that was pre nclb. But I will never get in a classroom today due issues that are not related to pay.
You are right.
The stuff driving teachers out and making it less likely new people will cone in long predates the pandemic.
And a lot of it can be summed up with three words “lack of respect”.
It’s actually absurd to think one is going to attract people to teaching (even with higher pay) when teachers are treated like absolute dirt and blamed for every ill in our society (and even blamed for having foreclosed on the futures of millions of students during the pandemic)
The politicians, columnists and others who have done the latter are little more than cockroaches.
Meanwhile, the Utah State Legislature is floating the idea of a $6000 pay raise for teachers, but ONLY if vouchers are approved. https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2022/12/08/gov-cox-wants-give-teachers-6000/
Although we ignored it, the public schools have had an attrition problem for decades. When I entered the profession in 1982, it was not uncommon to find articles that claimed half of all teachers entering the profession left by their fifth year. I loved my job as an art teacher and was fortunate to be in a district, Charlotte Mecklenburg, that supported the arts. However, this was not the rule in districts across the country. My oldest taught in the public schools for five years and did amazing things with eighth grade social studies at a high poverty school. She began with supportive leadership, but the district moved in a young green horn for principal that had an overblown sense of self and little faith in his staff. My daughter left and is now very happy teaching in an independent school that has, in less than a year, given her a meaningful raise and is helping pay for graduate school. Nothing like support. Public schools in America have struggled with its bureaucratic leadership models since at least the 19th century. Our credentialing has not been focused on improving our teaching force, but isolating district, state, and federal leadership. I learned as a principal that the people in the building who had the greatest impact on students were, duh, the teachers. Yet, in my thirty eight years at the school house, I rarely saw district leadership consult with teachers about curriculum or student need. Most of the district leaders I encountered had a very high opinion of their capacity and simply consulted among themselves for solutions. Perhaps the most stunning example of this was when I happened to attend a school board meeting in the late 1990s where they were discussing the district’s high teacher attrition rate. Not a single teacher was involved in the conversation. It was simply HR and the board. If the public schools are to recover from this crisis of site based under employment, we are going to have to give teachers, counselors, and principals more autonomy in using resources to serve our students. We will need the US Department of Education to focus on teacher preparation and much higher pay. We tend to have little faith in the ability of the general population to think, but if it became obvious that teachers had significantly more autonomy, you might have more interest from the best and the brightest to chose to teach. Teacher working conditions have never been great, especially in schools serving underprivileged communities, but now it is obvious through public test shaming and culture wars that it has gotten much worse. If we want teachers, we will need to provide the resources and get out of their way.
Thanks for your insights. I taught in a diverse public schools in a NYC suburban district roughly during the same era as your tenure in public education. When I started the 1970s it was a fairly hostile, paternalistic culture in the schools. There was a lot of strife and teacher strikes until the mid-1980s. From around 1985 to 2000 there emerged a highly collaborative and respectful attitude toward education and teachers as many more female administrators assumed leadership roles. Salaries and benefits improved as well during this time. In the 2000s NCLB, with all of its draconian, test and punishment consequences, ushered in a new era of teacher bashing and mistrust.
Today we are in a climate of stealth privatization whether it makes academic sense or not. The main objective seems to be to move as much money as possible out of democratic public schools on the basis of any flimsy excuse to do so, and it is particularly harsh and absurd in red leaning states.
This comment should be required reading at all administrative meetings!
See the “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” Report by the American Federation of Teachers, results of interviews with teacher across the nation with specific recommendations.. exceptionally well done
Duh?
It’s not just money; it’s also a hostile workplace created by politicians via subservient educational administrators to make political points among the gentry, one of whom suggested that cameras be installed in classrooms so that parents would know what their children were being taught. Teachers would be teaching to the camera and the parents when it is the children who are in the classroom to be taught. John Dewey would be appalled.
All I know is I worked three jobs, Saturdays, and coached to make ends meet. It was nice to know at a school board meeting it was revealed that our teachers were being paid at the poverty level. But, if we were just more professional! I paid for my art supplies and cleaning supplies so the kids would have what they needed (my kids were poor) and I felt good about teaching key concepts and having the tools I needed. Whining did me no good, so as a “Charvet” I made lemonade out of lemons. Rarely got home before 10 p.m. due to my second night job. But, you know, it was good. I helped a lot of people. But then somehow, people who drank the “Kook Aid” became in charge and because the kids came to me for help, starting looking for stuff to “get me on”. Wow, nice. The lack of respect. The not listening. The closing of my programs. The cutting of art programs. And never just saying, “We appreciate you and let me know how I can support you.” It was so hard to help students who really needed to get help. But, I did what I thought was right and as my friends said every time I wanted to quit, “Then who will your kids turn to?” Now after 32 years, the pandemic, and a “whole lotta other shiitake mushrooms,” I retired. I was there when we taught kids how to form words and how the air came out of their mouths…making sounds. Learning to read. And combing a kid’s hair because he was all ratted and no one took the time to make him smile. Keeping kids out of the “school to prison pipeline” Helping kids realize their dreams and a person who they could call on. Yeah, a lot has changed, but it seems the education world continues to do the “wrong things right” instead of simply doing the right thing. Happy New Year.
Nobody ever went into teaching for the acclaim or a “golden parachute,” but teachers should at least be able to count on respect and gratitude for their commitment and effort to what is a challenging career. Teachers at the very least should be able to have a dignified retirement after all their years of service. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
As a current teacher, more pay is always nice but my biggest concern is lack of prep time. I get 30 minutes a day scheduled for prep. The expectation for creating engaging lessons and using new scientific methods requires much more time than this. In addition the constant change of curriculum and in the approach to standards has increased the needed time to find materials, adjust them to our needs and file them so they are available if we need them next year. The state has also mandated new classes for reading instruction for elementary school teachers. Many elementary schools are also asking teachers to add classes for math instruction. The reading instruction class adds another 2-3 hours of time each week to my already over strained schedule. They are giving us a stipend for the class. I am at school most days for 10-11 hours and often again 8 hours on the weekend. I am still behind on grading and planning. It is exhausting. In case you think I am an anomaly, my team is there this long as well. Many others teachers are also in the building putting in extra hours. We are not paid for these but they are necessary for student and teacher success. If they really want to improve instruction, then time must be allocated for the preparation. I am exhausted and fight burn out on a daily basis. The job is not sustainable long term. No amount of money will change the outlandish hours a teacher must put in.
Money also does not alleviate the unsafe student behavior that we often deal with. Something needs to change here as well. Teachers are tired of being physically assaulted on the job and then being told they are at fault for student choices. That we need better management skills is a given. None of us are trained as counselors. We chose to become teachers. Dealing with one outburst is traumatic for all students. But some students have daily tantrums that can include hitting, biting, kicking, throwing chairs at others or slamming desks to the floor and damaging other student’s or teacher’s classrooms. While I like inclusion, teachers need to be trained and supported in dealing with children who have aggressive tendencies. Some of these children require more supervision that a single teacher in a classroom can provide particularly if the class has large number of students. And no one is addressing the needs of innocent children who are injured, or terrified by these outbursts. Maybe it is time to look at inclusion again and determine how this can be done safely.
If we want to increase teachers or other educational staff, pay is not the only issue that needs to be addressed. I personally know several teachers who left the field over strident behavior.
Many administrators mandate change without a consideration to what it actually means to teacher preparation and implementation. Sometimes, it takes getting your union representation involved or a collective job action as well. I know unions are not what they once were, but sometimes they are needed to enforce contracts.
A number of serious issues addressed here, and all need to be resolved. One of the things I discovered as I learned about schooling in other countries is that teachers spend about twenty hours in the classroom per week and the rest of the time planning through collaboration. What the general public doesn’t seem to understand in the US is the preparation required to teach an effective lesson. Dedicated teachers spend hours after work and during breaks to prepare for students. This lack of preparation time also impacts the ability to manage classrooms with troubled students. The problem you address with inclusion is the result of an unwillingness of states to adequately staff special needs and federal mandates. In my experience, the shift to inclusion, along with the negligence of NCLB limits on special education, became an excuse to underfund special education and underserve students with disabilities. Although the concept of inclusion has some validity, pretending that it can be executed with the same staffing used for resource and self-contained classrooms is simply instructional malpractice. At some point all the issues you raise from discipline support to planning time must be addressed if we are to revive our teaching force.
Increasing teacher pay will not be enough. When I became a teacher, it wasn’t the pay that attracted me. It was being a teacher working to teach children how to read, to love reading, to become life-long-learners.
When I started teaching it was 1975, before President Ronald Reagan declared war on our public education system, our teachers, our children, parents, and the teacher’s unions in 1983 with the release of the extremely misleading “A Nation at Risk Report”.
As a teacher, my experience with parents and students starting in 1975 was different than after 1983. Before 1983, students were easier to teach and most parents respected teachers. By the time I retired, there were students in every class that challenged the teachers’ ability to teach so it was an unending challenge and battle, and many parents did not respect or trust their children’s teachers.
When standardized test scores were reported each year, low scores were blamed on teachers not the students that took the test.
There is a simple formula that explains how K-12 education works.
ONE: Teachers teach
TWO: Students do what it takes to learn what their teachers teach them.
THREE: Responsible parents supported their children teachers and encouraged the children to pay attention in class, to cooperate with the teachers, and do the class work and homework that was designed to help them learn. Irresponsible parents did not do that.
After 1983, that formula started to fall apart.
I believe your statements about how students and parents became harder to deal with over time; I’ve heard that from every career teacher I’ve ever discussed this topic with. But come on, blaming it one President and a single report? Ridiculous, way over the top partisan. The problems you rightly identify have much deeper cultural roots, and lots of reasons and people across the political spectrum share the blame.
Here it is in a nutshell, folks:
Wouldn’t that be it in an orange peel?
DJT Donated his salary for the entire four years he was in office. It is time for he democrats to reveal their tax returns, so we can find out how sooooo many became multi-millionaires on their salary.
Not true. In DJT’s last year, he did not donate a penny of his salary. He kept all of it and gave $0 to charity.
In most years,he paid $750 in taxes. So many losses!
His taxes show he did NOT donate his salary.
Not a penny.
I stand corrected, SomeDAM!
Re: Educator shortage —- Throw in a union-busting national campaign from Freedom Foundation targeting individual members of teachers’ unions and a long-standing pervasive political attempt to denigrate public education and push for-profit private and charter schools and it’s no wonder that we have the current situation