According to the from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public K-12 schools added 160,000 jobs last year. Coming on the heels of big gains in 2021 and 2022, the country has now had the biggest three-year gain since the mid-1970s.

Of course, 2020 was a historically bad year, and schools still aren鈥檛 fully back to their pre-pandemic employment highs. But they鈥檙e close. Meanwhile, student enrollment is down, with on the horizon, which means staffing levels per student continue to fall.

With all this hiring, there鈥檚 been a lot of attention to the number of people that schools would like to bring on. That number has gone up as schools look to replace employees who leave, while trying to hire new tutors, mental health counselors and other staff.

But it鈥檚 worth putting public education鈥檚 hiring challenges in the context of other sectors in the economy. In the Bureau of Labor Statistics chart below, each line represents a major industry. The data lump all of public education together under 鈥渟tate and local government education.鈥� That group (in turquoise in the graph) includes both K-12 and higher ed.

As the chart shows, all the lines have gone up over time 鈥� meaning all employers are struggling to fill their job openings. But public education regularly has the lowest job opening rate among all major industries.

In percentage terms, as of the latest data in November, public education employers had a job opening rate of 2.8%, the lowest on the chart. That means, for every 100 employees, schools were trying to hire 2.8 more. In comparison, the private sector as a whole had job opening rates twice as high. So did other state and local government employers. 

These data are seasonally adjusted, which helps to smooth out things like the large number of cashiers and delivery drivers hired by retailers in the weeks leading up to the December holidays.

The seasonally adjusted data are better for comparing across industries, but there is one time of year where schools hire at similar levels as other employers, and that鈥檚 the back-to-school rush. Every summer, K-12 schools 鈥渓ose鈥� about 1.5 million workers, including teachers, aides, bus drivers and other staff, only to rehire the same number of employees back in the fall. 

This makes the fall hiring season especially chaotic. The graph below shows the raw, non-seasonally adjusted hiring rate for public education by month; August is the one time of year when these employers go into full-on hiring mode.

We’re now in a moment of relative calm. Job opening and hiring rates are both trending downward as the market cools, and that鈥檚 likely to continue as school districts spend down their remaining federal ESSER funds.

As noted at the beginning, the big hiring numbers over the last few years have more than made up for elevated rates of employee departures. But turnover rates also seem to be coming down. 

For example, after in teacher turnover in 2022, new data out of , , and all show teacher turnover rates were down slightly in 2023.

There are other signs of progress in the education labor market as well. A over the summer found teacher stress and anxiety levels were back to pre-pandemic levels. After years of slow progress, the teacher workforce diversified rapidly during the last few years, fueled in part by temporary waivers of state licensure requirements. And the latest show that teacher salaries finally outpaced inflation after a few years of lagging behind.

In other words, 2023 was a year of progress for the American education workforce. That should be welcome news after a tumultuous time.

And then there are the polls.

Since 1936, Gallup has asked Americans if they approve of labor unions. Every year but one (2009), a majority approved. This year, , down slightly from 2022.

Further results from the poll are entirely positive for the labor movement. Large majorities support unions over management in disputes. Most respondents say unions are good for everybody and think they will become stronger in the future.

, showing similar results, with support strongest among those under the age of 30.

The AFL-CIO had to to get these outcomes, but it makes sense that since most Americans are employees, they would more closely identify with the status of workers than with employers.

Let鈥檚 not begrudge unions their day in the sun, because it inevitably leads to their winter of discontent.

That鈥檚 because every January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its . And unfortunately for unions, the graph of the percentage of American wage earners who belong to a union looks like this:

It鈥檚 a pretty steady decline throughout the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden years, which suggests that changing politicians doesn鈥檛 change union fortunes.

How to reconcile the support for unions with the falling membership levels?

Last year, Gallup took this question head-on, asking non-union workers to express their level of interest in joining a union. This is how they responded:

This seems to be human nature at work. Saying you support something is a lot easier than doing something about it. But as discouraging as this result is, it actually understates the problem for unions.

Joining a union is not a difficult process for most workers. Sign a card and pay dues. The hard part is forming a union in your workplace for the specific purpose of collective bargaining with your employer. Doing so is akin to starting a nonprofit charity or small business. It鈥檚 a big job, and most people aren鈥檛 interested in pursuing it unless they are very, very unhappy at work.

Claiming, as the AFL-CIO does in its survey, that we would all be better off if we just fell in with union wishes is also a hard sell, considering the disputes major national unions are having with their own employees.

is a union of professional staffers who work for the National Education Association. They have been without a contract since June 1 and .

Staffers of the Service Employees International Union headquarters have authorized a strike against the union, as they have been .

Even workers at AFL-CIO headquarters are working under an expired contract. The AFL-CIO managers want to reduce employee retirement benefits.

It鈥檚 hardly a ringing endorsement for unions when the people who work for them can鈥檛 get a contract.

So enjoy the latest spate of , and calmly await the spate of excuses when reality doesn鈥檛 conform with dreams. It鈥檚 the circle of union life.

Mike Antonucci鈥檚 Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Employee turnover rates remain high this year, but schools are more than replacing the people who leave. 

In fact, all the job losses have come from part-time workers. And, once you factor in the number of hours those employees work, schools actually had slightly more staff than they did pre-pandemic. 

These are just some of the findings from the latest national data. Here are five key takeaways:

1. The number of people working in education is still down 

The chart below uses the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics through June 2023. Employment fell immediately as COVID-19 hit, and private-sector employers cut 16% of their workforce in the span of two months. But they have more than bounced back (the gray dotted line). 

Public education’s job losses never got as bad as those in the private sector, but they’ve been slower to recover. At their worst, public K-12 and public higher education were both down about 9% (245,000 and 730,000 employees, respectively). As of the June data, public K-12 is still down 1.2% from its pre-COVID peak, whereas higher ed is still down 2.7%. 

In contrast, private day care providers had a much steeper fall (down 36% in just those first two months) but have made a steady comeback. As of June, private day cares had 49,000 fewer workers than they did pre-pandemic (down 4.6%).  

Note that these numbers represent individual people: a part-time worker and a full-time one are counted the same, no matter how many hours they work.

2. The recovery in K-12 looks a lot like the rest of local government 

As shown above, the private sector looks different than the public sector. But within state and local governments, the pandemic recovery appears very similar. The graph below uses the same data as before, but this time it compares public K-12 employment against all other local government jobs (think  and fire departments, parks, libraries, etc.). 

Education had a rockier recovery path in 2020 and 2021, but the different local government sectors have been on a remarkably similar trajectory throughout 2022 and so far in 2023. 

3. Public K-12 and higher ed are both growing 

The public education sector is expanding, and has been throughout 2021, 2022 and now 2023. It鈥檚 a simple function of how many employees leave (which the bureau calls 鈥渟eparations鈥�) versus how many people are hired. The chart below compares these trends across all facets of public education. Unfortunately, K-12 and higher education are lumped together here, but as a reference point, K-12 represents about three-fourths of the total. 

The data for 2023 are projections based on the data through May, but it provides some good news. Whereas employee turnover in education hit in 2022, it looks a bit lower so far this year. Meanwhile, public education hires are tracking slightly higher than for 2022, which was already one of the biggest years on record.

4. Education has a lot more job openings than normal, but it鈥檚 filling those openings at decent rates 

There鈥檚 been a ton of interest in labor shortages within education, but how does it compare to other sectors? For starters, public education has the lowest job opening rate of any major industry tracked by the bureau. As of the , there were 3.2 job openings for every 100 public education employees. That鈥檚 a rate of 3.2%. For comparison, the federal government rate was 5.6%, the private sector as a whole was at 6.1%, and other state and local governments were at 6.2%.

So how is education doing at filling its openings? Not terribly. The graph below shows an estimated fill rate by sector, which is the number of job openings divided by the number of new hires that month. 

These have declined over time, save for a brief surge in summer 2020 when private-sector employers were rehiring workers without posting official job openings. It may not give much comfort, but public education employers (in green) are having an easier time filling their job openings than other state and local government agencies are in filling theirs. 

5. The job losses were all among part-time workers, and total staffing has fully recovered 

The data presented so far looks at individual employees, and when readers think of a typical education employee, they might naturally picture a teacher. But full-time classroom teachers represent only about 40% of the total K-12 workforce. 

As I found earlier this year, public schools actually employ more teachers than they did pre-pandemic. They also had more school psychologists, district administrators, student support staff and guidance counselors. 

So which jobs were lost? Mostly paraprofessionals and support staffers, including janitors, bus drivers and food service workers.

The latest data provides another way to slice it. It shows that public schools employed more full-time instructional and non-instructional staff in March 2022 than they did at the same point in 2019. What changed was a major decline in part-time workers. 

This is why it鈥檚 important to look at total staffing rather than counting individual employees. Schools cut back on the number of part-time workers and the number of hours those employees worked. But total staffing levels (in full-time equivalents) are now above where they were coming into the pandemic. 

Given that these data end in March 2022, and employment numbers are showing continued growth since then, it鈥檚 quite likely that staffing levels are even higher by now. And, because student enrollment remains depressed, that means student-to-staff ratios continue to fall. 

We鈥檒l have to wait for state and local data for finer-grained data on turnover rates and employment numbers by role. But for now, it’s safe to say that school staffing weathered the COVID dip and is now back above pre-pandemic levels.