CLARKSDALE — Clarksdale had the second highest teacher shortage in Mississippi last year — 40 posted vacancies in July. 

For district administrators, that staffing challenge hits particularly hard each year in late summer when they try to fill vacancies before the new school year begins. The problem affects students, too, when they’re taught by substitute teachers for weeks at a time. 

Clarksdale schools leaders have also tried a solution that researchers and think tanks suggest: Identifying potential teachers early — before they even graduate high school. This approach also in local teacher workforces, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Nearly half of Mississippi public school students are Black, but about a quarter of their teachers are, according to . The gap has only shrunk by roughly one and a half points in the last 10 years.

“We cannot continue to work in the education arena like it’s a factory putting out the next product,” said Adrienne Hudson, who runs Clarksdale-based nonprofit organization , which assists aspiring educators with licensure requirements. “As we can see in the numbers, we don’t have enough products. The supply and demand are not matching.” 

“We have to do better at cultivating the educators in our schools and communities.”

Cultivating educators in the community would also address disparities between the demographics of teachers and their students. 

 A way ‘to change kids’ lives’

One way the district is trying to cultivate educators is through a vocational educator preparation class Candace Barron teaches at Clarksdale Municipal School District’s Carl Keen Career and Technical Education center. 

Triccia Hudson, the center’s director, had the goal of widening the pipeline for future educators in Clarksdale. She first recruited Barron to teach the course during the 2021-2022 school year.

“You don’t see as many families of educators any more,” Hudson said. “It was clear to me that aspiring teachers needed more mentorship.”

More than a dozen Clarksdale students are getting a feel for a career well known to them: teaching. In a classroom once devoted to a cosmetology course, students are learning how to plan lessons, manage classrooms and about the different roles in a school district.

In Barron’s course, students start their first semester learning about the origins of public education. The introductory lectures fascinate students.

It was interesting to learn that it’s always been about helping people by “spreading information,” Clarksdale High School sophomore Khloe Reed said.

Beyond having the opportunity to join a profession that predates the country’s founding, students in Barron’s class say they are drawn to education because of their lived experiences in their community. 

Barron has observed that high school-aged students understand the obstacles facing their fellow students and are in a good position to learn skills teachers employ to educate and inspire developing minds.

For sophomore Leah Myles, helping kids with learning disabilities inspired her to take the course. She saw how her brother struggled with his reading lessons, and she was moved “to learn how to help students like him.”

Sophomore Jamarick Davis said education has the power to “change kids’ lives.” He remembers his assistant teachers fondly and saw the impact a good teacher can have on a student who struggles in the classroom and at home — and might act out in class for attention.

Davis’ favorite teacher never seems to be in a bad mood despite challenges that educators face outside and inside the classroom.

Some students come from teacher families, while others admire alumni who entered the profession. All were aware that a teacher’s role involves more than what is in the textbook. 

As Reed put it, teachers are a positive role model in a young person’s life. Myles said teachers help students by challenging them, and demonstrating how they care.

“Teachers play a very important role in our community because without them, we wouldn’t really know anything,” said Reed. “It wouldn’t be a very lively life if you didn’t know anything at all. 

22 years in the classroom

Candace Barron has taught elementary school for 18 years and high school for four, but she still lights up with admiration when a student grasps a new concept or demonstrates eloquence. 

The Clarksdale native has taught hundreds of students and seen her corner of the world regress and progress from under the fluorescent bulbs in Clarksdale’s city classrooms.

When she graduated college, Barron followed in her parents’ steps when she became a teacher. She realized how important empathy was to a teacher whose classroom has students from various households and skill levels. 

“I do have bad days, but I try not to bring it to work,” Barron said. “I don’t know what (students) have been through at home and I don’t want to add to that by coming in and bringing my problems. So I come in, I have my game face on, I’m going to do what we have to do.”

That dedication matters as the teacher shortage has gotten worse in Clarksdale in the past year. 

“We really have lost a lot of the efforts that were put in place to combat the teacher storage crisis, ” Adrienne Hudson said. “Many of the scholarship incentives that used to be prevalent and professional development opportunities no longer exist.”

Barron said she believes the program can ignite students’ interest in an education career. The lessons give students the confidence and skillset to pursue careers where communication and project management are components — even those who don’t end up pursuing education, Barron said.

One student told Barron the class helped her with a speech impediment. The student felt more confident delivering presentations, and began to imagine careers that she felt discouraged from pursuing previously. 

“At this age, they’re still trying to decide what they want to do. So the more you expose them to every different area, it’ll help them decide,” Barron said.

Outside of the state-approved curriculum and textbook, students learn the art of crafting classroom bulletin boards. Fewer craft projects conjure as much nostalgia and appreciation. Some teachers spend hours with a ruler and yards of colored construction paper decorating their classroom in late July before school starts.

Creativity is the key to a successful poster board, Barron said. One student was inspired to construct a data wall with construction paper made to look like wood, while another put together a yellow bulletin board with crayons bearing the name of students. 

“I really hope that by the end of the program that they feel like they can make an impact on somebody’s life by becoming a teacher or getting into the education field,” said Barron. “That is my hope. So all of the negatives that they hear, I hope that I can dismiss some of them. 

“Students tell me at the end of (the course), they want to be successful like teachers.”

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New data shows that while has climbed in recent years, Hoosier educators still earn less than peers in neighboring states — a gap union leaders and some legislators say threatens teacher retention and classroom success.

Members of the Interim Study Committee on Fiscal Policy spent much of their final meeting on Friday examining teacher and administrator salaries, student-to-teacher ratios, and other education funding trends. 

The statewide median teacher salary was $60,100 as of the 2025 fiscal year, compared with $98,193 for school administrators and $114,825 for corporation administrators, according to a presentation prepared by the Legislative Services Agency.

The mean salary across Indiana was $63,424 for teachers; $99,556 for school administrators; and $116,731 for corporation administrators.

Though average salaries rose about 4% from 2024 to 2025, LSA staff told the committee that when adjusted for inflation, median wages for teachers and administrators have actually declined since 2020.

Suburban districts continue to pay the most, while teachers in rural and small-town schools saw the smallest wage growth, according to the LSA analysis.

Public schools spent roughly $824 million on teacher and administrator benefits in 2024, nearly 80% of it for health insurance.

‘We simply have to raise teacher pay’

Joel Hand, representing both the American Federation of Teachers Indiana and the Indiana School Social Workers Association, told the committee that Indiana “still lags far behind our other Midwestern states.”

He pointed to Wisconsin, for example, where teacher salaries averaged $65,196 for the 2023-24 school year. Ohio, meanwhile, reported average teacher pay at $72,644.

“If we want to keep those students who are getting degrees in education from leaving to go to Illinois or Ohio or Wisconsin or Michigan, we simply have to raise teacher pay,” Hand said.

He emphasized that Indiana currently ranks 39th in the nation for average teacher salary, citing data from the National Education Association. 

“If we want to address teacher retention … we have to raise teacher pay across the board,” Hand told lawmakers.

Gail Zeheralis, with the Indiana State Teachers Association, echoed those concerns. She reminded the committee that the 2019 Governor’s Teacher Compensation Commission had set a goal of a $60,000 average teacher salary.

“A $40,000 salary in 2019 equates to roughly $50,000 today, and a $60,000 average in 2019 equates to about $76,000 in today’s dollars,” she said. “Indiana must continue increasing state funding.”

LSA staff told lawmakers that statewide, student-to-teacher ratios have declined — from 17.6-to-1 in 2019 to 15.6-to-1 in 2025 — while the student-to-administrator ratio dropped from 208-to-1 to 196.9-to-1 over the same period. 

The trend, said LSA Assistant Director Austin Spears, mirrors national patterns but is “really driven by an increase in the count of teachers” rather than student enrollment growth. 

Still, Sen. Fady Qaddoura, D-Indianapolis, noted the roughly 1,300 open, unfilled teaching positions on the Indiana Department of Education’s website.

But other committee members questioned whether funding decisions at the local level steer too few dollars directly to classrooms. 

“����’s frustrating up here … that we want to take care of teachers as best we can, because we think that helps us educate kids better,” said Sen. Scott Baldwin, R-Noblesville. “But dollars going into the school system from this body don’t seem to always make it into the classroom or teachers’ pockets.”

Hand responded that “the erosion of collective bargaining for teachers at the local level” has weakened educators’ ability to advocate for fair pay and working conditions.

Hand additionally called attention to Indiana’s severe shortage of school social workers, which he and others flagged as a “critical” issue in the midst of growing mental health needs across the state’s schools.

The latest data from the state and national school social worker associations showed that Indiana has a student-to-social worker ratio of 1,829 to 1 — massively above the recommended ratio of 250 to 1.

“With the enormous crisis we have in Indiana — and really throughout the country — with mental health in our schools, this is a ratio that I would strongly challenge you as members of the General Assembly to work on,” Hand said.

School social workers are different from school counselors and are primarily focused on students’ lives outside of the classroom and on helping deal with issues outside of school that interfere with academic progress. 

Hand said that despite holding master’s degrees and being specially-certified, school social workers are typically not considered to be teachers and many are not on teacher contracts. 

He urged legislators to include social workers in the state’s definition of “teacher” for funding purposes, arguing that change will make it easier for school social workers to get hired or be qualified for raises.

Possible legislative solutions

Lawmakers and education advocates pointed to — approved earlier this year — as a starting point for potential reform, but said additional changes are needed to make teacher pay competitive.

That law from $40,000 to $45,000 beginning June 30, and increased the share of state tuition support that school districts must spend on teacher compensation from 62% to 65%.

It also created a statewide Teacher Recruitment Program to help fund training and placement in high-need schools, while requiring annual reports on expanding affordable health plan options for educators.

Several lawmakers on the committee signaled interest in going further. 

Rep. Jeff Thompson, R-Lizton, suggested offering weighted funding or incentive pay for shortage areas such as special education and STEM fields — “a market-based approach,” he said, that would help schools recruit for the hardest-to-fill roles.

Baldwin continued to push for greater transparency in local spending to ensure that “dollars reach classrooms and teachers,” rather than being absorbed by administrative growth.

Qaddoura additionally proposed a deeper analysis of district administrative structures to distinguish between small charter schools and large corporations when comparing salary ratios, noting that such distinctions “would give us a clearer picture of where our dollars are actually going.”

Other ideas discussed included restoring stronger collective bargaining rights for teachers and giving districts more flexibility to redirect certain capital project funds — like those used for athletic facilities — toward salaries. 

“We just need to somehow loosen up that money for teachers over another astro-turf football field,” said Sen. Travis Holdman, R-Markle.

No formal recommendations were adopted, but lawmakers said the findings will guide education discussions in the 2026 legislative session. 

“We’ve seen the data,” Thompson said. “Now we need to figure out what levers we can pull.”

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These are among key findings of a new into ways to address the continuing turnover and shortage of special education and ESL teachers that has existed for more than three decades. 

The analysis showed that mentorship, teacher and principal preparation standards, tests of reading instruction knowledge, pay and professional development are key to retaining and recruiting these educators.

Students with disabilities and English learners face some of the most persistent academic challenges, partly because of a lack of access to high-quality teachers, said NCTQ President Heather Peske.

“Despite their potential, many of these students are not meeting even really basic thresholds in reading and math, and this is not for any fault of the students themselves,” she said. “It’s really because they don’t have access to the kinds of qualified and effective teachers that they need.”

The report recommends improved state policies to address attrition in these areas:

Teacher mentorship

The analysis found that half of states don’t require prospective educators to complete their student teaching under the supervision of an educator who is certified in the same subject area they are training to work in. Most are in the western United States, including states like Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho and Nevada. 

Having a mentor certified in the same field allows the college students to see what teaching special ed will actually be like and increases their chances of staying in the subject area once they finish their degree, according to the report. The analysis highlighted a study of more than 250 people who completed special education teacher preparation in Massachusetts, which found that those with a supervisor licensed in special education were 12% less likely to leave the workforce.

Teacher preparation standards

Clear state standards for teacher preparation programs ensure that aspiring educators get the skills needed to serve students with disabilities, the report said. Ten states don’t have explicit special education standards for teacher colleges, while 16 lack defined English learner standards.

The analysis highlights Texas, which created for ESL and bilingual education in 2019. These include understanding the foundations of language acquisition and adapting instruction to meet student needs.

Principal preparation standards

Less than half of states require principal preparation programs to address special education in coursework, while only 13 do the same for English learners. Without an understanding of effective ways to serve students with disabilities or English learners, principals are less prepared to improve outcomes for them and retain the teachers who serve them, the report said. 

Research has that principals are a key factor in creating an inclusive environment for special education students. One said that many new school administrators “find themselves suddenly thrust into situations in which they must be the final arbiter on matters related to strange-sounding issues such as IEPs [individual education programs], 504 [disability discrimination] decisions, due-process hearings and IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] compliance.”

In Iowa, teacher colleges are to provide evidence that candidates are equipped to address the needs of English learners or students with disabilities, the report said. 

Reading instruction

The analysis found that 17 states require special education teacher candidates to demonstrate their knowledge of literacy instruction using a test the NCTQ deems effective. In 2023, the nonprofit reported that 29 states and the District of Columbia use weak reading instruction tests that aspiring elementary educators must pass to obtain a license. NCTQ studied 25 tests that states use and identified 15 as weak — with only four considered acceptable and six considered strong.

Just five states — California, Idaho, New Mexico, Louisiana and Maryland — require English learner teacher candidates to pass acceptable tests, the report said.

“Wisconsin, for example, uses a strong or acceptable reading licensure test, but they don’t presently require special education teachers to take that test and pass it,” Peske said. “We would say that this is an example of low-hanging fruit when it comes to policymaking.”

The NCTQ reported that 70% of fourth graders with disabilities and 67% who are English learners scored below the basic level in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

English learners are also at an increased risk of being identified for special education because of literacy-related struggles, the report said.

“With so many states right now focused on reading and implementing relatively new reading laws, it was surprising to us to find that states are also not requiring their teachers, especially of students with disabilities, and their English learner teachers to take and pass an acceptable reading licensure test,” Peske said.

Teacher pay

The report said that paying teachers in critical shortage areas more than those in general education can improve retention and recruitment in hard-to-staff areas. But has found that the additional compensation must be at least 7.5% of a teacher’s base salary — about $5,000 — to make a difference.

Only 18 states offer higher salaries or bonuses for special education educators, while eight states do so for English learner teachers.

An annual state-funded $10,000 incentive in Hawaii improved special education teacher shortages. The bonuses, which , reduced by 35% the number of teaching positions that were vacant or filled by an unlicensed teacher.

“Interestingly, it did little to improve retention among current special educators,” the report said. “Instead, the reduction in vacancies was driven almost entirely by general-education teachers — who were presumably dual-certified — transitioning into special education roles.”

The nonprofit said the policy was also successful because of its simplicity. All Hawaii special education teachers were automatically eligible, and there was no application process. 

Professional development

High-quality professional learning can improve retention for special education and English learner teachers, the report said. Currently, 40 states provide professional development for both fields. Oregon, Hawaii, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia are the only states that don’t offer professional learning for either position.

The report highlights Rhode Island, which recently adopted guidelines that require professional learning specifically for teachers of multilingual learners.

Peske said each of the above policy areas is equally important for lawmakers to consider. “If a state really wants to build a strong teacher workforce for students with disabilities and English learners, we would advise them to use these fixed [policy] levers together,” she said.

 In my home state of , 30% of teachers overall and 37% of nonwhite teachers leave public education within five years, and the numbers are . ����’s a big reason why teacher shortages remain such a persistent challenge, particularly in and STEM classrooms and in .

These trends are not new, but the over the last 10 years makes addressing them more urgent than ever. The administration’s recent actions have only made that work harder.

Even in this fractured political environment, though, there’s continued bipartisan support for career pathway programs that can address these issues by helping young people develop skills that lead to good-paying jobs. Classrooms are filled with talented young people with the potential to become great teachers who understand, through firsthand experience, their communities’ needs. Instead of making them wait until after college to choose teaching as a career, the path to the profession should start in high school.

Efforts to connect high school and educator preparation already exist, through organizations like and the . But school, district and state leaders should seize the opportunity to expand these models much more widely. Here are the first three steps that could make it happen.

First, states should use federal policy and strategic funding to address low starting pay and the high cost of training, which are both barriers for aspiring teachers. For example, Delaware has found innovative ways to boost starting salaries for both and , in which they spend a year in classrooms observing and learning from veterans. Districts in Delaware have combined state and local funding to increase stipends for teacher residents from $20,000 to over $40,000 in some districts by using to shift unused budget allocations into funding for these programs.

Additionally, the state recently introduced new , which help districts or charter schools establish their own teacher pathways. It also teaching as an apprenticeship to help lower the upfront costs of certification by placing aspiring teachers in paid positions in schools while they’re completing their training.

Second, districts should look to career and technical (CTE) programs as pathways into teaching. CTE leaders, teacher recruitment teams and district career counselors must work together, meeting regularly to identify high school students with potential to become strong teachers and encouraging them to take advantage of education pathways programs. They should also monitor the progress of pathways participants, troubleshoot any issues and brainstorm ways to make programming more relevant and meaningful. These can include offering hands-on learning opportunities, such as tutoring and job-shadowing educators at neighboring schools, that allow students to earn college credit. This, in turn, would help colleges recruit high-achieving students into their education programs to take the next step toward teacher certification.

Third, schools must recruit passionate educators to support aspiring teachers of all backgrounds. Students need teachers who reflect their identities and experiences. It’s not news that the U.S. has a teacher diversity problem — nationally, only of educators at public schools are people of color. But districts and states can work toward staffing high school teacher pathway courses with educators who can build culturally affirming environments that inspire the next generation of teachers. 

Through its year-long high school CTE course for students interested in teaching, has shown that this strategy works. The program, which includes high school students in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Michigan, provides a culturally affirming curriculum and pairs students with passionate educators as mentors. Students who completed the program showed an in teaching — and, specifically, in teaching Black students.

Schools can nurture the next generation of education changemakers — teachers who will reflect the diversity of their future students — even before they graduate.

If education leaders and policymakers are serious about solving the teacher recruitment, retention and diversity challenges that have bedeviled schools for generations, they must move beyond isolated initiatives and build a cohesive, systemic approach that starts in high school. By fully integrating teacher pathway programs into high schools, they can ignite a passion for teaching among students, create seamless transitions into the profession and ensure more classrooms are led by educators who reflect and understand the communities they serve. The pieces of the puzzle already exist — education leaders just need the collective will to see the big picture and put them together.

Nearly 500 of Michigan’s 705 school districts . That’s up from 262 districts at the beginning of the 2012 school year.

When New Jersey students head back to classrooms this week, many will return to schools with too few teachers.

The state has for years faced , with particularly troubling vacancies in subjects like math, science, special education, and instruction for English language learners. And those vacancies persist despite legislators’ efforts to and steer more students toward careers in education.

Sean Spiller, president of the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, said schools are seeing the impact of the shortages.

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“We’re seeing class sizes increase. We’re seeing courses not being offered, and we’re seeing that the educators who are still remaining in the profession are being overburdened in terms of how to pick up some of the work because of unfilled classrooms. ����’s a big concern,” Spiller said.

The exact degree of the shortages remains unknown despite recent efforts to quantify New Jersey’s educator workforce, but the number of would-be teachers has fallen precipitously over the last decade.

New Jersey’s teacher workforce has remained stable over the last decade at roughly 118,000 educators, according to drafted by Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.

Researchers examined 11 years worth of data and found that for every teacher that left the profession in the 2022-2023 school year, the state issued just 1.1 provisional teaching certificates, compared to 2.9 certifications in the 2013-2014 school year. Less than a quarter of those pursuing education degrees in the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school years eventually became teachers, and only 43% earned a degree in education, the study says.

The study warns that a ratio approaching one departure for one new teacher could quickly lead to more severe shortages because at least 10% of teachers leave the profession within their first three years.

Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Newark) is a former education chair who has remained active in the space following her ascent through the ranks of leadership (she’s the Senate’s majority leader). Ruiz said the state should do away with its residency requirement for teachers, at least while the shortages remain dire.

“No one under any circumstance is saying ‘not New Jersey first,’” she said. “We always want to be New Jersey first, but when there isn’t enough New Jersey, as policymakers, administrators, and government entities, we should be responsible enough to say we need human capital in these spaces. Our students deserve better.”

Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth), the current education chairman, agreed lifting the residency restriction would help bridge schools’ staffing gaps.

The Senate in May approved a bill that would for three years in a unanimous vote, but the measure has not advanced in the Assembly, where it has the backing of Assemblywoman Pam Lampitt, the lower chamber’s education chairwoman. A similar bill in the last legislative session.

Gopal said he was considering legilsation to boost teacher compensation but said the legislation is still in very early stages.

A separate bill that would rework the state’s funding formula is expected to be introduced in mid-September, but Gopal cautioned that bill would likely see significant changes as it moves through committees to floor votes.

A reworked formula should include provisions to extend school budget timelines to prevent last-minute staff cuts and allow districts to better plan their budgets, Ruiz said.

Rolling back a Christie-era policy that doubled the state’s student teaching requirement from a semester to a full school year could also boost the state’s educator workforce, Spiller said.

“We had the best schools in the nation before. We have the best schools now. Why did we double the length of time? That is something that we could bring back in line to what it was before and not cost any money,” he said.

Policymakers said the state must also address teacher departures to stabilize the workforce. The Heldrich Center’s report found that while departures remained roughly level save for spikes during the pandemic, the share of teachers who left of their own accord — and not for budgetary reasons — has spiked over the 11-year period.

Gopal pointed to the increased politicization as schools, noting workforce trends had reversed somewhat after Republican attacks over school gender policy and library collections ebbed.

Gov. Chris Christie’s administration, which spurred school cuts amid the Great Recession and warred with teachers unions over health benefits and pensions, also slimmed the teaching candidate pool, Spiller said.

“From the vitriol that we heard before to the fundamental changes to the systems that we see financially now, that has led to less people engaging in the process to become a teacher, and certainly less people choosing to continue moving forward to become an actual teacher,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

But new federal data has given researchers some cause for optimism, suggesting efforts to make teaching more financially viable with strategies such as paying student teachers have helped to move the needle. 

From 2018 through 2022, enrollment in teacher preparation programs grew 12% nationally, or by about 46,231 more candidates, according to a from Pennsylvania State’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis.

Nine states lead the pack with notably higher bumps in teacher prep programs in recent years: Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina and, with the highest average growth, Maryland. 

The modest upswing, seen both in enrollment and completion rates, during some of the most strained years in American education, has surprised experts.

“It was encouraging to see … at the height of the pandemic, it certainly was not what we were expecting,” said Jacqueline King, research and policy consultant with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. 

Only 11 states saw continued enrollment declines in the prep programs during the last three years, among them Montana and Minnesota. 

“I think that all the work that we’ve been doing around grow your own, apprenticeships and residencies… to open up more affordable pathways into teaching are starting to bear some fruit, which is amazing and fantastic,” King added.

Contributing factors also include federal pandemic relief funds and new laws in states such as and that pay student teachers. In Maryland, for instance, some during their year long teaching residency. 

“It’s real,” said King. “It’s enough money that you’re not thinking, how am I gonna do student teaching and have a part time job?” 

Still, researchers caution, the growth is not nearly at the pace required to match hiring demand. Teacher shortages are , and in key areas like special education and math. 

Enrollment in teacher preparation programs in just one decade — about fewer teachers are prepared annually. Compounding social, political and economic strains fueled the decline, including a major recession and education reform efforts that negatively impacted public perception of teaching and America’s schools. 

By 2021, only five areas had bucked the overall trend, with more enrollees than a decade prior: Arizona, Mississippi, Texas, Washington and Washington, D.C. Texas’s growth can be attributed to rapid expansion of a particular alternative program, Teachers of Tomorrow, . 

“Over the last seven years, we’re kind of treading water in terms of the number of teachers,” said Ed Fuller, education professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of the most recent analysis. “We don’t need to be where we were in 2010 because we don’t have as many students, but we need to be a lot closer to that than we are now.”

About in K-12 public schools nationwide in 2022 than before the pandemic. The steepest drops are in the younger grades, partially a result of declining birth rates.

On the whole, districts did not pump the brakes on hiring teachers because of the alarming 2% drop in student enrollment. Flush with expiring pandemic relief funds, schools added 15,000 teaching positions last school year. 

Even as full-time school staffing reached an all time high, a quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student than they did in 2016. 

The demand for teachers is far from met, with about 55,000 teaching jobs open nationwide. Since 2008, the decline of teachers in training has impacted schools in every corner of the country. 

Even places like Pennsylvania, whose supply of teachers historically was so abundant that many newly-credentialed teachers were sent out of state, are of a shrinking teacher workforce. Its surplus has gradually disappeared over six years. 

“People weren’t paying attention,” said Fuller, who recommended that public figures talk up the professions’ value and that the legislature take on teacher scholarships to tailor recruitment for local needs. Scholarships could be earmarked for teachers of color, math educators, or those serving high-poverty schools, for example. 

But if districts and states, tasked with building diverse, robust teaching pools, are focused solely on producing new candidates, King cautioned efforts would be in vain, akin to using a hose to fill a leaky bucket with water. 

By the end of the 2021-22 school year, 10% of teachers left the profession nationally, 4% more than before the pandemic, according to . Experts point to job dissatisfaction, political polarization and exhaustion. 

In Florida, one of the nine states that saw a higher enrollment bump than most, more than 5,000 teaching positions are vacant, the . The job has gotten harder, too — remaining educators teach more students per classroom than they did before the pandemic. While the enrollment data suggest a move in the right direction, it will take years for today’s teachers in training to enter its workforce.

“We’ve really got to think more about the job of a teacher and how we make it more sustainable — financially, from the perspective of work-life balance, and giving people opportunities for growth,” King said. “We need to look at teaching and why it’s such a difficult job to sell.”

On a per-student basis, staffing levels hit an all-time high.  

These numbers are in full-time equivalents (FTEs), which are adjusted based on the number of hours worked by part-time staff. The FTE numbers are a better measure of total staff time available, but the raw headcount numbers come out faster, and those suggest schools may be in for another new high in 2023-24. 

The outlook beyond that looks murkier. As districts spend down the last of their federal ESSER dollars, they may have to lay off staff or close under-enrolled buildings. To identify which communities are most at risk, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ����Ӱ��’s art and technology director, to update our data on how student-to-teacher ratios are changing across the country. Click on the map below to see the results in your community. 

After screening out very small districts and those without sufficient data (marked in black), we examined staffing and enrollment trends for 9,500 districts, comprising 92% of all students nationwide. We then compared the teacher and student counts from 2022-23 — the most recent available — with the same figures for 2016-17. 

About one-quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student last year than they did six years earlier. Those are shaded in orange or yellow. Districts in Nevada, Alaska, Louisiana and especially Florida are predominantly orange on the map, meaning they have higher student-to-teacher ratios than they did before the pandemic.

But many more districts are shaded blue or gray, meaning they serve fewer — or a lot fewer — students per teacher than they did six years earlier. Overall, nearly three-quarters of districts fell into one of these categories.

Nearly one-third of districts added teachers while serving fewer students. For example, Philadelphia lost nearly 16,000 students but employed 200 more teachers, effectively dropping its student-to-teacher ratio from about 17:1 to under 15:1. 

About one-quarter of districts followed the path of Capistrano Unified School District in California. Even with some hiring spurts, it shrunk its teacher count somewhat over time, but not as fast as it lost students. In numeric terms, Capistrano suffered a 22% decline in student enrollment but cut its teaching staff by just 7%.  

Another group of districts have growing enrollments, but their teacher counts are rising even faster. Take the Katy Independent School District, near Houston, as an example. It added 4,299 students last year, a gain of 4.9%. But at the same time, it hired 366 teachers, a 6% gain. Over the entire period, its student body has grown 22% while its teacher count grew 29%. 

The district-level numbers in the map focused on classroom teachers, who make up a little under half of all school district employees. But staffing levels have increased for many types of roles. The table below shows the one-year and six-year changes in total staffing counts and student enrollments, sorted by role from biggest to smallest.

Over the last year, the only category of workers that grew more slowly than student enrollment was school administrative support staff. Zooming out further, librarians and media support staff are down from their pre-pandemic levels, as is a large category called “all other support staff” that includes plant and equipment maintenance employees, bus drivers, security and food service workers. But otherwise, staffing levels are up. The numbers of paraprofessionals; student support staff (including attendance officers and providers of health, speech pathology, audiology or social services); district administrative support staff; guidance counselors; instructional coordinators; and district administrators have all increased by double digits.

In other words, the national trend is for schools to have more staff, in many different roles, than they did before the pandemic. To be sure, all these additional staffers may have contributed to the student achievement gains last year. But as a purely budgetary matter, time will tell if schools are able to retain all those workers, or if they’ll need to make painful adjustments in the year to come.

Bassett, chief executive officer of the , said high-impact tutoring is needed for students — particularly in high poverty areas that are often understaffed and under-resourced.

“It helps raise scholar skills, it helps raise scholar confidence and it sets scholars up for success. That’s not just me saying that — it’s research proven,” Bassett told ����Ӱ��.

NJTC currently serves more than 40 schools across 17 of the state’s 21 counties, comprising about 1,300 students from urban districts in Essex and Camden to rural districts in Hunterdon and Sussex.

Through the work of NJTC tutors, the number of K-8 students performing at grade level in math improved from 16 to 40 percent and in literacy from 23 to 40 percent.

As the New Jersey Department of Education allotted about to 240 school districts, the tutoring company aims to grow to nearly 80 schools. 

“There is a deep sense of urgency at this moment, and our mission these last few months has been to create a solid and consistent institution on which teachers and school leaders can rely,” Basset said in a statement.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

New Jersey’s spring 2022 showed test score declines — particularly in math and English language arts. With this in mind, how would you describe the educational needs in New Jersey schools?

The pandemic caused some gaps in learning — absolutely, there’s no denying that. However, gaps existed prior to the pandemic, particularly for our scholars who come from high poverty backgrounds and high-need schools that are often understaffed and under-resourced. These are the scholars we work with and focus on. They definitely need help beyond what a classroom teacher with 25 to 35 scholars at a time are willing to do. Because of this, I’m not anticipating there’s going to be a miracle occurring when the new 2023 student learning assessment data is released. (Note: This interview was conducted prior to the release of the 2023 student learning assessments. Updated test scores can be checked out .)

Which school districts or areas in New Jersey have you noticed students need particular attention and support?

We’ve worked in 17 out of New Jersey’s 21 counties. We’ve been in urban areas, rural areas and suburban areas. As somebody who taught in a rural area, I would definitely stress that our rural schools need just as much help as our urban schools. In many cases, they need the same kinds of help and for the same reasons. So I would not want to overlook our rural schools or suburban schools that are struggling. 

Is there a particular subject you have found needs more support in the state? 

Math and literacy are both critical needs, but I would say based on the data that I have seen, our scholars need more help in math than they do in literacy. But, they still nonetheless need help in literacy.

I understand the New Jersey Tutoring Corps targets K-8 students. Are there particular grade levels you have noticed need more attention and support?

There’s this book, and it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek book, called “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” that references the social-emotional skills young kids need, like getting along with people, collaborating, resilience, curiosity — all of those things. But on top of social-emotional skills, your foundational academic skills are also set in kindergarten, first and second grade. 

For literacy you’re learning phonics and for mathematics you’re learning number sense. What does the number one mean? What does it mean to add something to it? We want to help scholars as young as we can because that’s where all of your learning is grounded. So those three grades are very important to us.

What about third through eighth grade?

Third, fourth, fifth and sixth grade students are also important because they were the ones greatly impacted by the pandemic. They’re generally behind and need to get those foundational skills in a way that’s not insulting. For example, if you’re teaching phonics to a fifth grader you have to approach it in a way that’s different from teaching phonics to a kindergartner. We need leveled libraries in New Jersey with reading material that is grade-level appropriate.

With seventh and eighth grade, you’re getting ready for high school. This is sort of your last chance to get those skills down so you can move onto high school and be successful. That’s the goal we want for every scholar we work with. Helping them be successful in life by getting those math and literacy, but also, social-emotional skills.

Are there any stories that come to mind when you think of the significance high-impact tutoring has had at the schools you work with?

We’ve had our Boys and Girls Club partners tell us that when they do their surveys at the end of the year, tutoring is always their students’ favorite thing to do. Not swimming or computer gaming or coding — they like tutoring. And why? Because of that personal relationship, that personal attention. 

We had a reporter visit the Trenton Boys and Girls Club, and she was speaking with a couple of math scholars in fifth and sixth grade. She asked them “Why do you like this?” because earlier in the day she noticed tutors going to pick up scholars and the scholars that they weren’t picking up were saying “Wait, wait, isn’t it my turn yet? I want to come now. I want to go to tutoring.” 

One of the scholars told her “I didn’t get math until I worked with Miss Hawk” — Miss Hawk being one of their tutors. He continued saying “I would look at numbers and I didn’t understand what they were. I was being asked to do things that I didn’t understand. And now I get it. Math is just putting things together and taking things apart. It’s that simple.” That was his explanation of math. And now when he goes back to school, he gets it. That’s why this matters.

New Jersey gave about $41 million in grant funds to implement high-impact tutoring. How will this initiative help mitigate pandemic learning loss across the state?

When high-impact tutoring is done correctly, the research tells us that it works. It helps raise scholar skills, it helps raise scholar confidence and it sets scholars up for success. That’s not just me saying that, it’s research proven. I always describe our tutoring program as research-based and evidence rich. We’re based in research and we have a ton of evidence that what we are doing works.

We make it a point to listen to what teachers are instructing to get to know the scholars — both in terms of their academic and social-emotional skills. That way the same tutor can work with the same scholars throughout the learning cycle. That consistency is important so scholars see the same adult faces.

How does the need for high-impact tutors speak to the broader conversation of teacher shortages in New Jersey and across the country?

Look at what’s happening nationwide in education — people aren’t going into teaching anymore. This is a very real, very serious and very impactful situation. We have to figure out how to change it. Raising teacher pay is one way, but I think it’s raising respect for the profession and really treating educators as professionals. That will make a big difference in terms of bringing more people into the profession.

At the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, we are interested in being a retainer and pipeline into the teaching profession. We use pre-service educators as tutors. Meaning they have to have 60 school credit hours or more. In many cases, this is the first experience pre-service educators we work with have sitting one-on-one or in small groups with scholars and seeing what a difference they can make. 

I can’t tell you how many of our tutors have said to me “I didn’t think I wanted to be a teacher but working for the New Jersey Tutoring Corps validated that I do want to be a teacher and why I want to be a teacher.” The experience working with very small groups on very targeted pieces of academic content really makes a difference. 

We have also had one tutor who shared that after her experience she realized she did not want to be a teacher. And to me, that’s just as important as finding out that you do want to be a teacher. To be able to help people figure that out early on is very important. 

A number of our tutors have been hired by the districts they’re working with. So high-impact tutoring has proven to be a pipeline that helps address the need for teachers in New Jersey.

At the same time, an analysis by ����Ӱ�� of Minnesota’s teacher licensing records found that during the 2022-23 academic year, more than 1,500 licensed special educators — comprising 16% of teachers credentialed to work with students with disabilities — chose to work in regular classrooms. 

And more than a fourth of teachers working with students with disabilities — 27%, or nearly 3,000 — lacked any special education credential. Licensed to teach language arts, social studies, music, health and other general education subjects, in many cases their schools have a state waiver to place them with students with disabilities.

The one-two punch leaves thousands of the state’s most vulnerable children — among those hit hardest by the pandemic losses — without qualified teachers at a crucial juncture. Many received little or none of the specialized instruction they are legally entitled to during COVID’s school disruptions. They have not bounced back to their dismal pre-pandemic achievement rates of at grade level.

“Kids with disabilities are never the top priority,” says Wendy Tucker, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Learner Equity, which researches and promotes quality in special education. “They just keep getting pushed down the list.” 

Even in normal times, federal civil rights laws require school systems to make up services children with disabilities don’t receive for whatever reason. But as is the case in many places, the reality in Minnesota is that districts are closing specialized programs or moving kids into makeshift settings. 

To push districts to prioritize a particularly vulnerable subset of children, U.S. civil rights laws don’t allow school systems to use a shortage of qualified educators to justify denying students with learning differences the services they need to succeed. Disability advocates have long complained that the practice of assigning available but unqualified educators to special education classrooms is illegal because it is a key barrier to students making academic progress. 

����’s easy to understand why administrators are exhausted meeting the bare-bones goal of having students safe and supervised, Tucker acknowledges, but for kids it’s the start of a very slippery slope: “����’s a vicious cycle. Low expectations are met, because the supports weren’t there, because there were low expectations.”

Minnesota licensing officials refused to comment on ����Ӱ��’s findings about the number of special education teachers choosing not to work in the area or the high rate of jobs being filled by educators lacking special education credentials. When asked about the number of special education teachers who leave their jobs for general education classrooms, Yelena Bailey, executive director of the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board, said in an email that the board does not have that information: “We do not have attrition rate data due to limitations of our data system. We hope to hire someone in the coming months who can help put this together manually.”

In a , the board has calculated annual attrition rates for teachers overall since 2017, when a new licensing system went into effect. The data shows that nearly a third of all new teachers hired since then leave within five years — better than the national average — and includes, where known, their reasons for quitting. 

The report does not include information on special educators who leave. Nor does the licensing board tally actual vacancies overall, instead reporting the percentage of districts that say they have hard-to-fill openings by subject area. In lieu of the number of people schools would have to hire to be fully staffed, it uses the number of educators in all fields with waivers to work outside their licensure area and those with entry-level credentials who are working toward permanent licensure as a proxy. 

When broken down by area of expertise, special education of specialties taught by teachers without appropriate, permanent licenses. Last year, there were 2,000. 

A lack of hard numbers outside of the assignment data examined by ����Ӱ�� makes it impossible to know how many of Minnesota’s 153,000 pre-K-12 children receiving special ed services aren’t being taught by a qualified educator. Minnesota education advocates have pressed — unsuccessfully so far — for laws requiring better data collection.

But news stories and anecdotal accounts from family advocates suggest that the number is at crisis levels. At the start of the year, the state’s largest system, the Anoka-Hennepin School District, announced it was at least temporarily closing an entire specialized school for some of its most profoundly disabled students. Last year, it had 53 special educators working in general education classrooms, according to licensing records.

Minneapolis Public Schools last year canceled some in-person instruction, moving many disabled pupils back online for summer services — despite the fact that the extra instruction was needed to make up for ineffective distance learning. Last year, it had 54 teachers licensed to teach in special education that weren’t. The district started this year with disproportionately clustered in its most impoverished schools.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook with parents saying, ‘My kid doesn’t have a teacher, or they have a long-term sub or their school is trying to pull something together using the available people in the building,’ ” says Maren Christenson, executive director of the Multicultural Autism Action Network, a nonprofit serving Somali and Oromo families in Minnesota. 

“We were in a crisis before the pandemic,” she says. “����’s really disingenuous of school districts to say they are taken by surprise. We’ve known this was coming for a long time.”

‘����’s not just a pipeline issue’

Inattention to the high rate at which special education teachers quit for easier teaching jobs, say disability advocates, combined with a stop-gap approach to filling the resulting vacancies, make a reckoning about the quality of special education long overdue. Research shows that given proper instruction, most children with disabilities can achieve at grade level. Yet particularly in the wake of the pandemic’s school closures, when many special ed students were deprived entirely of services, it’s not clear they’ll have the chance.

According to a small but showing what could keep special educators on the job, a handful of key factors propel many into general education. that 20% of new Washington state teachers who earned both a special education and a regular classroom credential chose not to take a job teaching students with disabilities at all. Other research has found that special educators are than other teachers to leave teaching altogether and 72% more likely to leave a job for one in another school.

Whether the departures are from special ed or from teaching altogether, advocacy groups say the turnover perpetuates the problem, as increased shortages translate to higher caseloads for those who remain, in turn making the job less sustainable. With more jobs to fill, administrators also are more likely to tap teachers who are willing to take them but who lack appropriate licenses.

Dan Goldhaber, vice president of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, has studied the special educator workforce. The high number of special educators working outside the field documented by ����Ӱ��’s analysis echoes his own research, he says. 

“These are not new issues,” says Goldhaber, noting that the ongoing lack of special educators differs from shortfalls in other areas such as science, math, engineering and technology. “In special education, it’s not just a pipeline issue, it’s an attrition issue.”

Minneapolis teacher Tameika Williams made it through one of the pipeline-priming programs officials are counting on to ease the shortage only to find the work impossible, she said. She belongs to the Minnesota chapter of Educators for Excellence, whose leaders have heard enough stories like hers to form a task force on working conditions in special ed. 

A Black woman who grew up without any teachers who looked like her or a sense of belonging in school, Williams said she never envisioned herself as an educator. She was employed by a community organization that supported families when the principal of one of the schools she worked in remarked that Williams had an affinity for connecting with youth with disabilities. A program at a local university would help her get a graduate degree and teaching credential for free. 

As she was earning a master’s, Williams started teaching special ed in Minneapolis Public Schools, working entirely with students of color. She says she logged twice as many hours as she was supposed to. 

After four years, however, Williams was done. When she told her principal she was quitting, he proposed she stay as the teacher in charge of a career-training program that gives students an early jump on becoming educators themselves through early college courses. Her classes now include both students with and without disabilities, but she does not have to deal with the daunting workload she had as a special educator.

The administrator she reported to before she changed jobs, Williams said, had criticized her for insisting on teaching history, saying none of her students were college bound. Williams persisted, though. Understanding the multi-generational impact of inadequate education on students of color and children with disabilities — material she was not exposed to until college — was what, Williams said, finally convinced her to get a teaching credential.  

She still harbors ambivalence about the fact that some of her current students with IEPs are considering becoming special education teachers. On the one hand, more educators living with disabilities themselves would boost children receiving special education, now often not educated to be college- or career-ready. On the other, she’s not confident that they, too, won’t be pressured to dumb down the curriculum.  

“I’m not gonna lie, I have some conflicting values still around encouraging young Black kids to become teachers,” she says. “I have the rooted belief that all kids are capable.”

Stories like Williams’s are common everywhere, say teachers. The Illinois chapter of the educator advocacy organization Teach Plus has collected information from members who say special education requires radical change to be a sustainable job. 

After seven years in a special education classroom in Chicago Public Schools, Bridget Rood said she was of knowing that she wasn’t preparing the students in her program, which existed to help them make the transition to adulthood, well for life after school.  

“I was depressed, I was dysregulated,” she says. “I didn’t feel fulfilled at all. I don’t think I had one student in those seven years who [went on to job training or more education].”

A Teach Plus fellowship gave Rood both a break and, as she a colleagues conducted , a sense of how pervasive feelings like hers were. Sixty-two percent of special educators they surveyed ranked an acceptable workload as the first- or second-most important thing to them. In addition to teaching, the special educators Teach Plus consulted said they strained to find time to do paperwork, talk to families, create behavior intervention plans and their own curriculum on the fly while also managing support staff. 

After her fellowship, Rood went to work for a more affluent district on Chicago’s north side, Niles Township High School District 219. More resources means she does not have to scrounge to find curriculum or other instructional resources. She is still responsible for paperwork, but a departmental secretary takes care of a huge number of repetitive, time-consuming tasks, such as making sure the right people are scheduled to attend the meetings where students’ plans are discussed, completing the boilerplate sections of those plans and collecting data for progress reports.

“It is literal night and day,” she says. “����’s also made me realize — without tooting my own horn — that I am good at what I do and I do make a difference.”

‘This person has a harder job’

Again, this comes as little surprise to national researchers. Because of the paperwork involved in each student’s legally required Individualized Education Program, or IEP, special educators must work more hours than other teachers — almost always for the same pay. Recently, administrators in Hawaii, Detroit and Atlanta have had dramatic success filling vacancies with new hires and licensed special educators already on the payroll but not in classrooms serving disabled kids by offering annual incentives of $10,000, $15,000 and $3,000, respectively.

Only one Minnesota district, St. Paul Public Schools, has tried the approach. Its offer of a $10,000 hiring bonus filled its 70 openings for the 2023-24 school year in a few weeks. 

Historically, school systems are reluctant to consider paying some teachers more than others based on anything but education and experience, says Chad Aldeman, a 74 contributor and researcher who tracks the education labor market. 

“Historically, unions have opposed offering special incentives for teachers who work in shortage areas or hard-to-staff schools,” he says. “We as a country have treated teachers universally and not said, ‘This person has a harder job.’”

Yet while there is evidence that large financial incentives can be an effective way of filling special education vacancies, new on Hawaii’s foray into differentiated pay found that it may not significantly impact their retention.   

Teach Plus’s report also flags teacher training and early career mentorship as factors that educators say would keep them from floundering as they learn the job. Colleges of education vary in how much classroom exposure would-be special education teachers get, with hands-on preparation ranging from a few weeks student teaching under a general education teacher to year-long residencies with a skilled special educator. 

In terms of mentorship, the Illinois survey found that support for some new teachers consisted of brief check-ins — sometimes consisting of phone calls during the evening commute — with veteran colleagues. In Minneapolis, Williams said she spent her first year on a team with no one more experienced than her. 

Many states that have confronted special educator shortages chiefly by trying to increase the supply of new teachers. Minnesota advocates have applauded slowly but steadily growing scholarships for teacher candidates who agree to get their special education certification. But they are critical of how officials have expended their energy, complaining that the needs of kids with disabilities have taken a back seat to politics. 

In 2016, in the wake of a decade of lawsuits, legal reforms, and an audit pronouncing the licensing system irretrievably broken, state lawmakers passed a wholesale overhaul, creating a new agency — the current board — to oversee it. One of its mandates was to make it more straightforward for teachers of color and nontraditional candidates to enter the classroom. To that end, lawmakers created a system where, depending on their education and experience, potential teachers could start work on a temporary credential and go on to earn a permanent one. 

The new system, which went into effect in 2017, was successful, allowing 2,000 special educators to start work. But last year, based on lobbying from the state’s traditional colleges of education and the teachers union that also represents their faculty — who have played a major role on the appointed licensure board — lawmakers agreed to begin reversing the changes. Next year, board leaders say they plan to seek further contractions.

The irony, say advocates, is that the special educator pipeline is narrowing dramatically even as scant attention is being paid to what equips a new special educator to do a very hard job well, and what might keep them in it. 

“What we need to do is really work backward and figure out what creates a high-quality special ed teacher,” says Josh Crosson, executive director of EdAllies, an advocacy group that has been pushing for teacher licensing reforms in Minnesota for more than a decade. “What schools are they [working in]? Are there trends within those schools? What preparation programs are those schools recruiting from? ? Mentorship models? Residency models? 

“We don’t have any of that data. We’re really just guessing.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence, the Center for Learner Equity and ����Ӱ��. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joyce Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence and ����Ӱ��. The Mind Trust provides financial support to Teach Plus and ����Ӱ��. The Nellie Mae Education Foundation provides financial support for Educators for Excellence and ����Ӱ��.

Shaheen fled Iraq in 1998 during Saddam Hussein’s regime, made a harrowing escape to Jordan and eventually settled in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Shaheen is now a substitute teacher for the Lincoln public schools, but not without the financial burden of enrolling in courses to meet English language requirements and taking student loans because her Iraqi degree wasn’t recognized.

“It was almost impossible for me to start from the beginning, which is very difficult for someone learning a new language,” Shaheen told ����Ӱ��.

A new program launched by for internationally trained immigrants and refugees who want to become teachers in the U.S. aims to ease the challenges Shaheen faced. 

According to the , more than one in three educators, or 34 percent, are unemployed or not using their degree.

Yet, thousands of teacher vacancies across the country persist — with more than , according to Kansas State University’s College of Education.

“Even as we experience the Great Resignation, which heavily impacted the education sector, there’s still individuals who want to be part of this workforce,” said Mikaela Santos, senior program manager of World Education Services.

“The cultural perspectives and new ideas immigrants and refugees bring to the table becomes wasted talent because of the many regulatory and systemic barriers in the American education system,” she added. 

To combat this problem, three organizations were awarded a $100,000 grant in July 2023 to create pathways for foreign trained teachers to become educators in the U.S.

In the next year, the in Lincoln, Nebraska; the in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and in Chicago, Illinois will place more than 150 teachers trained in their home countries at schools in their communities.

Here is a snapshot of each organization’s effort to help internationally trained teachers and address racial disparities in the classroom.

Asian Community and Cultural Center

Nearly 50% of Nebraska’s school districts had unfilled teacher positions during the 2022-23 school year — with 66% saying there were either unqualified or no applicants, according to the .

Lee Kreimer, the CareerLadder director at the Asian Community and Cultural Center, said the organization is looking to place at least 35 foreign trained teachers into Nebraska’s Lincoln public schools and South Sioux City public schools.

The need for diverse teachers is especially great in rural areas like South Sioux City that have had a high influx of Latino families immigrating partly because of the that has historically relied on foreign-born workers, Kreimer said.

The reported a growing 47.8% Latino population in South Sioux City with more than 63.6% Latino students .

“We see this as a great opportunity to tackle multiple challenges at one time and it’s truly a win-win way to help everybody,” Kreimer told ����Ӱ��.

The organization recently set up programs at schools in both districts for immigrants and refugees to be mentored as they finish up their U.S. teaching licenses.

“Investing in schools by providing teachers that look like their students helps them succeed,” Kreimer said. “And from a racial equity standpoint, children seeing teachers that look like them and have experiences like them helps with retention, staying out of trouble and getting better grades.”

Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity

In Oklahoma, there were nearly 180,000 unfilled teacher positions in 2022 — more than twice the average a decade ago, according to the .

The Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity estimates nearly 650 internationally trained teachers in Tulsa have education degrees but don’t work in the field.

Chief resilience officer Krystal Reyes said the city wants to hire at least 65 teachers trained in their home countries — largely from Latino, Afghan and Ukrainian backgrounds to reflect the families immigrating to Tulsa.

“Because we have a diverse student body, we need our teachers to reflect that,” Reyes told ����Ӱ��. “So we know that our immigrant community can help us meet that language and cultural need.”

Programs include expanding job training with ESL courses and creating free courses for those seeking alternative certification.

“We need to do more as a government to make sure that there’s full participation, representation and economic opportunities from all our communities,” Reyes said. “There may be a money barrier or an English barrier, but they’re still trained educators that could be filling a great need in our schools.”

Richard J. Daley College

In Illinois, 73% of districts report teacher shortages — with 30% saying positions remain unfilled or filled with someone less qualified, according to the .

Janine Janosky, president of Richard J. Daley College, said the school aims to connect at least 50 foreign trained teachers to schools across Chicago.

“We’re seeing many immigrants and refugees coming with professional experiences already from their home country,” Janosky told ����Ӱ��, adding how more than 10% have teaching licenses.

Trish Aumann, vice president of academic and student affairs at the college, said the need to hire diverse teachers is especially great because of the influx of immigrant families — particularly Ukrainian refugees.

“We need multicultural and multilingual individuals in positions in our schools,” Aumann told ����Ӱ��. “So it’s that bigger picture of supporting K-12 schools that will in turn help immigrants and refugees with their economic mobility.”

Janosky said the college is creating a pilot program for internationally trained teachers to fill vacancies in Chicago’s schools.

“Within the middle part of the United States, there’s very few of us doing this work,” Janosky said. “That gives us a huge responsibility, but also a huge opportunity, to make a big difference for Chicago, Illinois, and the entire country.”

To understand the current state of the teacher labor market, you have to be able to hold two competing narratives in your head. 

On one hand, teacher turnover hit across the U.S., morale is and schools are facing shortages as they seek to hire more educators.  

At the same time, the latest data suggests that public schools employ more teachers than they did before the pandemic. Thanks in part to strong state budgets and an infusion of federal funds, districts had about 20,000 more teachers in 2021-22 than they did five years earlier (a gain of 0.7%).

Meanwhile, those same schools were serving 1.9 million fewer students (a decrease of 4%). Those declines are widespread, with and more than two-thirds of districts enrolling fewer students than they did five years before. 

A comparison of enrollment and staffing trends makes clear that public schools collectively reduced their student-to-teacher ratios over the course of the pandemic. In fact, American public schools are on the cusp of hitting all-time lows in the number of students per teacher.

As those figures mask tremendous variation across the country, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ����Ӱ��’s art and technology director, to help visualize how these changes are playing out in individual communities nationwide.

After screening out very small districts and those without sufficient data (marked in black), we examined staffing and enrollment trends for 9,800 districts, comparing federal data from 2021-22 — the most recent available — with 2016-17. Click on the map below for an interactive version.

Interactive Map

School Staffing vs. Enrollment

Districts shaded orange had more students per teacher than they did five years earlier. There were 2,737 districts in one of these two categories (28% of the sample). Districts in Alabama, Louisiana and Florida, for example, are predominantly orange, meaning they have higher student-to-teacher ratios than they did before the pandemic. 

But many more districts are shaded blue or gray, meaning they serve fewer students per teacher than they did five years earlier. Overall, 72% of districts in the sample fell into one of these categories.

There are three ways a district can reduce its student-to-teacher ratio. The sections below give examples of districts in each of these three categories and quantify how many districts fell into each one. 

Option 1

More teachers, fewer students

The clearest divergence occurs when a district has more teachers serving fewer students. New York City is the largest example in this category. According to the latest federal data, enrollment in the nation’s largest district fell by about 125,000 students (12.7%) from 2016-17 to 2021-22. Meanwhile, it employed 3.7% more teachers. The two trends were already diverging, but, when the pandemic hit and enrollment fell sharply, teacher staffing levels continued to rise. 

New York City is an outlier in many ways, but it was one of 3,119 districts, or about one-third of the total in the sample, that had more teachers serving fewer students. This group also includes districts such as Elgin, Illinois; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Eugene, Oregon.

Option 2

Fewer teachers, even fewer students 

Another way to reduce student-teacher ratios is to downsize staff more slowly than enrollment falls. This group is exemplified by Texas’s Brownsville Independent School District, which serves about 38,000 students near the Gulf of Mexico. It has reduced its teacher count by 12% over the five-year period starting in 2016-17, but student enrollment has fallen over the same time period by 18%. 

Among other districts, St. Louis; Jackson, Mississippi; and Corpus Christi, Texas, exhibit similar patterns. Slightly more than 2,300 districts (one-fourth of total in the sample) decreased their teacher counts less quickly than student enrollment fell. These districts have been making adjustments, but they may have to come into closer alignment in the years to come. 

Option 3

More students, but even more teachers 

The last category is districts where enrollment is growing but teacher counts are rising even faster. The Katy Independent School District, near Houston, is representative of this group. Its staffing and enrollment lines were growing in parallel until the pandemic hit. Since then, student enrollment growth has slowed while staffing growth did not. All told, the district is now serving 17% more students than it did five years before but employs 22% more teachers. 

About 1,600 districts (one-sixth of the sample) are following a similar trajectory. These are typically faster-growing communities, and they include districts such as Irvine, California; Hays, Texas; and Ankeny, Iowa.

Caveats, questions and what might come next 

This analysis is capturing change over time, and it’s not meant to pass judgment on any particular district’s staffing levels at any given point in time. ����’s possible that a district was understaffed in 2016-17 and remained so in 2021-22. 

Some readers may naturally cheer the increased staffing levels as one potential solution to getting kids back on track after the pandemic. But research on class size reductions suggests their success on a variety of factors. And they can be expensive. of a law passed last year mandating low class sizes in New York City pegged the additional staffing costs at $1.6 billion a year.

This analysis is limited to teachers because they are the staffers for whom districts have the most complete data, and teaching positions have been more stable than other types of staffing within schools. Although the data in this piece ends in 2021-22, the trends have continued since then — student enrollments are to continue to fall nationally, while public schools have only added to their over the last year. 

That said, the district-level totals certainly may be masking staffing challenges at particular schools, and they are likely hiding specific shortage areas such as math, science or special education. 

Still, this analysis gives a sense of how communities’ teacher staffing levels have changed due to the pandemic. It may also help identify districts that are most in danger of layoffs in the coming years, if they were using one-time federal relief dollars to avoid making layoff decisions or to bring in additional educators to help students get back on track. 

Ultimately, a district’s funding is at least partially tied to how many students it serves, and the reductions in per-student staffing levels over the last few years may be unsustainable at current levels.

Montana is struggling to keep new teachers in the classroom.

More than half of newly licensed teachers in Montana leave the state or the profession within the first three years on the job and 86% of education graduates decide to leave the state or don’t pursue teaching.

“​​That’s a stunning number,” said Sen. Dan Salomon, R-Ronan, Chairperson of the Education Interim Committee, during the committee’s meeting Tuesday.

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Data on teacher retention in the state was presented to the committee by national nonprofit the and in an update from the .

Montana is looking at more than going into the upcoming school year – a problem stemming in part from financial constraints on teachers, lack of mentorship and less education graduates going into the field. Proposed solutions included more compensation and increased access to teacher education.

In order to fill the gap, the number of Emergency Authorization of Employments rose more than 90% and doubled in two years, according to OPI. Accreditation and Licensure Director of OPI Crystal Andrews said she believed 32 school districts in the state have applied for at least one emergency authorization.

Andrews said qualifications for authorizations can vary, but gave examples of how in practice it can look like paraprofessionals or student teachers getting their own classrooms, or a music teacher from the local church coming to teach in school.

She said the most authorizations have been for elementary school classrooms, math, English, health and physical education teachers, as well as school counselors.

Andrews also discussed the teacher pipeline issue. With 383 education graduates from the Montana University System, there aren’t enough educators to meet the vacancies. And on top of that, a vast majority of them don’t go to work in Montana schools. The Learning Policy Institute said enrollment in education programs in Montana has gone down 45% in the last nine years.

Andrews said she would be interested in working with the universities to get data on where these students go and why they leave.

One reason the Learning Policy Institute cited was financial. Montana is dead last in starting teacher salaries, which average $36,480.

“They talk about and there’s no place to live, and all the things that go with that and you throw in a student loan,” said Salomon. “They can’t afford to be the teacher.”

One quarter of teachers in the state reported having a second job during the school year, according to data from the Learning Policy Institute. An estimated 40% have student loan payments and across the state teachers spend on average $500 of their own money on classroom supplies without reimbursement.

Increased compensation for teachers along with higher quality preparation for the classroom were among recommendations from the institute to increase retention.

Learning Policy Institute Chief of Policy and Program Tara Kini said that research has supported competitive compensation being a big factor in recruitment, and noted that the data from 2021 in the presentation might not reflect progress made since the TEACH Act was implemented, which provided $2.5 million to increase teacher pay.

“It may be worth considering how this program could be expanded to reach even more educators than the 500 early-career teachers that it currently serves,” Kini said.

Gov. Greg Gianforte promoted the TEACH Act at an event at Lockwood High School in Billings, touting a 40% increase in funds to the program in the last legislative session. According to a press release Tuesday, funds from the program helped Lockwood fill their 18 vacancies.

Kini mentioned alternative compensation strategies like providing housing, childcare incentives or student loan forgiveness. She said districts in other states have passed initiatives to build subsidized rental housing for teachers and used federal funds for housing for teachers.

A recent survey of Montana teachers found a school being close to where the teacher lives was the top factor in their decision to accept their current job, senior researcher with the Learning Policy Institute Susan Patrick said during the presentation.

Montana’s Grow Your Own program, designed to prepare high school students for careers in education in their local schools, didn’t receive funding in the last legislative session, Patrick noted. She said states have turned to apprenticeship programs like Grow Your Own to help with the pipeline issues.

Having a supportive administration at a school is another big factor for teacher retention. Patrick said Idaho developed a new principals academy as well as a network for principals for support, especially for schools that were identified as needing improvement in the state.

Rep. Linda Reksten, R-Polson, who formerly served as superintendent in Butte and in Polson, asked if there was training in universities for principals in the state.

“My observation is, unless you have really strong district leadership, it isn’t happening,” she said.

The Legislature’s Office of Research and Policy Analysis outlined a in Montana’s “toolbox” for addressing teacher retention, including a teacher residency program passed last session that uses federal dollars to place students in a year-long, practice-based learning experience, focusing on placements in rural schools.

“As we grow that program, we’ll continue to work and find opportunities for schools to bring Montanans in to teach Montana’s kids – especially in those rural areas where there’s such a critical shortage,” bill sponsor Rep. Brad Barker, R-Red Lodge, said at the event in Billings according to the release.

Another program provides loan assistance for the first three years of a teacher’s career, with payments of $3,000, $4,000, and $5,000. The program helped more than 100 teachers in fiscal year 2023, according to the analysis.

Teachers also have the opportunity to receive stipends for earning a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification, which can take years to complete, with a payout between $500 and $2,500 depending on the district. There was an $180,000 appropriation for the bill, which has been utilized by about 200 teachers.

“Through collaborative efforts and creative solutions, and a commitment to valuing and supporting our teachers, we can build a brighter future for Montana students and educators alike,” said Andrews. “Let us work together to transform the landscape of education ensuring that our teachers are not only recruited, but also valued and inspired to stay for the benefit of our children.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Daily Montanan maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Darrell Ehrlick for questions: info@dailymontanan.com. Follow Daily Montanan on and .

As pressing as it is to get qualified teachers in classrooms immediately to address shortages, effective policy must also focus on recruiting a well-prepared and diverse pool of candidates, along with retaining effective educators. 

Unfortunately, among high school and college students is at the lowest level it’s been in decades. Nationally, enrollment in preparation programs never quite rebounded after the Great Recession. National , collected by the U.S. Department of Education under Title II of the Higher Education Act since 1999-2000, show that enrollment dropped by about 100,000 candidates between 2012-13 and 2014-15 — a 15% decline. Forty states experienced declines in enrollment during this two-year period. From 2015-16 to 2020-21, total enrollment has remained fairly steady at just under 600,000 nationally, with a dip of about 45,000 candidates in 2018-19 that quickly rebounded in the following year.

But enrollment figures don’t tell the whole story, and, importantly, the number of people completing teacher preparation programs nationwide declined by 20% — about 40,000 — between 2012-13 and 2018-19, with modest increases of about 15,000 between 2018-19 and 2020-21.

While the national picture on enrollment and completion is still concerning, national trends hide considerable differences across states. Our recently published on the state of the

teacher workforce includes recent data on candidate enrollment and completion in teacher preparation programs by state. The Title II data from the most recent five years (2016-17 through 2020-21) show that 27 states have seen ongoing enrollment declines of 5% or more, seven states had relatively flat enrollment numbers and 17 states plus the District of Columbia saw increases of 5% or more. 

To understand this variation in enrollments and completions across states and the range of policies in place, it helps to look at some specific examples; these differences among states may shed important light on policy approaches that may expand the teacher pipeline. 

Washington state posted 17% increases in enrollment and 22% increases in completion over the past five years. Washington has invested in to address teacher recruitment and retention, such as increasing preparing to teach in high-need subject or geographic areas and investing in programs. 

California saw a 2% increase in enrollment and a 27% increase in completion rates over the past five years. The rise in the supply of fully prepared new entrants (and associated decline in hires with emergency-style permits) has coincided with substantial state investments to address teacher shortages, including in a grow-your-own program to support paraprofessionals and other school staff to become teachers, $515 million for who commit to teach in high-need schools and more than $600 million for . These efforts are contributing to a supply of new teachers that is : More than half of California’s newly prepared teachers are people of color. 

By contrast, Louisiana experienced a 25% decline in enrollment and a 23% drop in completion over the past five years, prompting the legislature in 2021 to create charged with studying the issue and providing a road map for recovery.

In Texas, enrollments have increased by 22% over the past five years, Importantly, this , which decreased by 9% — leaving the state with a declining number of fully prepared new teachers. Recognizing this, in 2021, the state began investing in high-retention pathways into teaching through the residency program and grow-your-own initiatives. These research-based approaches align with growing evidence showing that effective preparation, especially , is critical to ensure that beginning teachers are instructionally effective and remain in the classroom. 

The experience in Texas is not unique. across multiple states that candidates from traditional student-teaching programs and residencies are more likely to complete their training and stay in the profession than those from alternative routes that do not provide full preparation before new teachers enter the classroom. 

The wide-ranging differences in state rates of preparation program enrollment and completion also make it clear that addressing shortages is not a futile ambition. Not only is it possible, but it is happening in places with policies that foster long-term investments in affordable and effective pathways. And, with an ongoing focus on , the nation may finally be on the path to ending shortages for good. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to the Learning Policy Institute and ����Ӱ��.

Their has left teachers and warning the teenagers in their lives to steer clear of education as a career path. Fewer prospective educators are .

Keeping teachers from leaving and prospective educators interested means rethinking the role for the 21st century.

During the pandemic, the challenges teachers have confronted for decades magnified. Schools to ensure students could access meals and grappled with a . Districts struggled to close the and provide access to internet and technology devices so students could continue learning. Teachers as they learned new technology-based platforms, pivoted their lesson plans and tried to reach every student.

While these challenges took on a different, more urgent face throughout the pandemic, they weren’t new, and they won’t disperse with the so-called return to normal. The roles of schools and teachers have grown over time. From teaching and learning to nutrition to mental health to digital access and more, schools are essential to communities and a catch-all when it comes to child development and wellness. While we believe it is essential for schools to play this role, the solution cannot be simply to add more and more responsibilities to teachers’ shoulders until they can no longer carry the weight.

The shows that a strong majority of teachers, 87%, agree that they have too many responsibilities to be effective educators. Their role has expanded infinitely and is no longer sustainable. Today, teachers are not only expected to tackle learning gaps, but  — as well as — and to play a central role in delivering on the myriad promises of the public K-12 education system.

This overexpansion of teachers’ roles and responsibilities has put the future of the profession at risk. ����’s time to reevaluate the role of educator.

What will it take for schools to be able to develop and implement an approach that meets the needs of the whole child without sacrificing the well-being of the teacher?

First and foremost, it means easing some of these growing pressures and responsibilities and increasing the amount of time in the day dedicated to teachers’ core responsibilities. When respondents were asked in our survey what they needed to help students overcome pandemic induced-learning setbacks, for example, the most desired resource was more support staff, and the most sought-after professional learning support was how to effectively collaborate with those staff members. Schools must be more strategic as they divvy up responsibilities among the adults in the building so each person can do fewer things, but do each of them better, and in collaboration with others. While this sometimes means hiring more staff, it often involves deploying them differently. Organizations like Education Resource Strategies have shared for how to do this.

Next, teachers must be paid the compensation they deserve. Educators continue to earn and are paid based on an inflexible salary schedule, unique to their profession, that ignores working conditions and their impact on student achievement. Too many teachers find they need to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, regardless of their credentials or certifications, adding to an already unsustainable workload. Teachers should be paid more, and their compensation must reflect their quality and their workload.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the importance of supporting the mental health of not just students, but educators. A great first step is saying it out loud: Teachers in our school are struggling, and we must make supporting them a visible part of our vision and culture. This explicit recognition allows educators to feel more comfortable expressing their challenges and seeking help. Additionally, providing mentorship and peer-to-peer growth opportunities and involving teachers in school and district decision making are concrete ways to not only bolster their well-being, but also bolster their effectiveness.

With these changes, teachers will be able to more effectively focus on their primary responsibility: educating the nation’s students. Achieving this will not only address the burden of teachers’ workloads, but show prospective educators that teaching is a sustainable and fulfilling career and, ultimately, support students’ academic achievement and lifelong careers.

Also contributing to this essay: Omar Araiza, fifth grade teacher, Los Angeles; Cory L. Cain, dean of instruction, Chicago; Richard de Meij, K-12 world languages teacher, Hartford, Connecticut; Arthur Everett, high school social studies teacher, Brooklyn; Pamela Femrite, former special education teacher, Minneapolis; Leona S. Fowler, assistant principal, Queens; Daniel Gannon, high school history teacher, Westchester, New York; Shirley Jones-Luke, high school English teacher, Boston; Jennifer López, fifth grade teacher, Sylmar, California; Mark Morrison, fourth grade teacher, Stratford, Connecticut; Dee Nix, impact director, Chicago; Carlotta Pope, 11th grade English teacher, Brooklyn; Susan Providence, third grade teacher, St. Paul; Dr. Winnie Williams-Hall, elementary special education teacher, Chicago.

Disclosure: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, CityFund, Joyce Foundation, Nellie Mae Education Foundation and The Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to Educators for Excellence and ����Ӱ��.

Faced with alarming teacher shortages, Virginia last month agreed to partner with a for-profit online teacher credentialing company, hoping to get more teachers into classrooms faster and without the higher tuition costs of traditional colleges and universities.

While some of the Virginia school board members had qualms about the process, they agreed to give it a try due to the nagging high teacher vacancy rate. The board unanimously approved a three-year pilot program and partnered with one of the bigger companies in the fast-track credentialing business, iteach.

Such companies pledge they will get a candidate teacher-ready in about a year. The iteach program includes online courses, after which candidates are placed in classrooms, with some supervision and the agreement of the school districts.

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According to state statistics, Virginia had more than 3,500 full-time teacher vacancies for the 2022-2023 school year, which is about a 4.5% rate, though vacancies in some specialties are higher. The situation was worse than the year before, the statistics showed.

Daniel Gecker, a then-member of the state board of education who voted for the online certification plan, said he agreed only because the program is a three-year pilot and an “opportunity to gather data.”

“We are in the middle of a fairly significant teacher shortage,” Gecker said in an interview. “Having the online-trained teachers is better than having the untrained subs we’ve been having.”

He said that before the COVID-19 pandemic, it probably would have been possible to make up the teacher gap with better retention. “Post-pandemic, the gulf is just too wide; we can’t fill it with better retention and people coming out of school.”

Virginia is just the latest state to turn to for-profit teacher certification companies in an urgent effort to recruit and train more teachers. The states hope the new paths to certification will help ease the shortages, but critics argue those who take the programs are not as well trained as traditionally credentialed teachers and will do a disservice to young students.

States have other options to address the teacher shortage, including lowering standards to try to bring in more recruits.

Education Week that about a dozen states had relaxed credentialing standards for teachers or were considering doing so. California lawmakers to allow aspiring teachers to eliminate two different exams as long as they had taken courses to address basic skills and the subject matter they intend to teach. Oklahoma enacted last year to remove the requirement for a general education exam.

Some states are pressing “temporary” teachers into service. Arizona last year to take full-time positions to address the teacher shortage in that state. In addition, passed last year allows Arizona teacher candidates working toward a college degree to teach at the same time.

Iteach is working in 11 states, according to its website: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. The Mississippi Teacher Licensure Commission, a panel created to evaluate such programs for that state, unanimously recommended iteach as a certification provider at the commission’s meeting July 7. That recommendation now goes to the state board of education.

Another large company, Teachers of Tomorrow, is working in nine states, though its credentials may be in jeopardy in Texas, where the company has been placed on probation after state regulators found the company misled potential teachers in its advertising, and hadn’t shown that its training was based in research.

Iteach has been accredited by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, which credentials traditional educator training colleges. Andrew Rozell, president of certification at iteach, said it is the only for-profit program of its kind so credentialed.

The for-profit companies are separate and different from online university programs, such as Western Governors University or the Southern New Hampshire University, which also have teacher education courses but are not focused on quick credentialing. The for-profit credentialing firms tout their ability to get people into classrooms within a year or 18 months, depending on when they begin.

Serious need

Nationwide, teacher shortages are just as bad as in Virginia, particularly in very rural or low-income inner-city school districts. A working paper from Brown University “conservatively” estimated that as of August 2022, there were 36,000 teacher vacancies across the United States.

And the paper noted that those vacancies are not distributed equally. “The vacancy rate per 10,000 students is more than 159 times as high in Mississippi as it is in Missouri,” the authors wrote. The paper of 0.43 teachers per 10,000 students in Missouri and 68.59 teachers per 10,000 in Mississippi.

By taking the step to help fill the vacancies, the Virginia state education board was following Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Directive No. 3 to address the teacher shortage, in part by reducing “red tape associated with teacher licensure, while assuring high standards.”

Iteach fills that criteria, according to Youngkin spokesperson Macaulay Porter, in an email to Stateline. “Governor Youngkin fully supports high-quality alternative pathways to becoming a teacher. The State Board of Education rigorously reviewed iteach data to ensure that iteach will provide school divisions with another effective and efficient option for recruiting and preparing new teachers,” Porter wrote.

The iteach method counts on reducing barriers to time and cost, according to Rozell, “without reducing rigor.” It is designed to take about a year to get candidates ready for initial teaching, if they pass state exams.

Then, the newly trained teachers are granted temporary licenses and teach under intermittent observation by iteach professionals who drop into classes, sometimes unannounced. All this occurs with the knowledge of school administrators, who can provide their own support.

Critics question fast-track credentialing

But critics contend that iteach and the other programs that turn out teachers quickly are not subject to the same requirements and depth of instruction as teachers who go the traditional path of four undergraduate years, sometimes at least a year getting a master’s degree, and many months of student teaching under nearly constant supervision by a trained teacher.

Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group, said in a phone interview that for-profit online teaching programs are a “blunt instrument” to address teacher shortages. The programs, she said, don’t take into account whether the teachers are qualified for the subjects they will be teaching or whether they will be satisfied with their jobs and stay in the profession or leave after a year or two.

“If you have a fast-track program and your model is entirely online, it begs the question of how they are assuring aspiring teachers get a place to practice … content knowledge and clinical practice,” she said. School districts should tailor recruiting and educating new teachers to the vacancies and needs, she said, which are most often “specialized teachers” such as special education or multi-language learners.

Iteach advertises that its cost for a complete program is $4,399, plus a $99 enrollment fee. Teachers of Tomorrow’s program costs about $5,000.

By contrast, annual average tuition at a four-year institution in education can range from $9,193 at an in-state school to $26,543 at an out-of-state school, according to the website College Tuition Compare, an independent college evaluation site. Elite institutions are higher. Graduate tuition ranges from $10,806 annually to $19,796, the site found.

Iteach’s Rozell said many of the students in his company’s programs are already working in classrooms, as paraprofessionals, aides for special needs kids or in other non-teaching capacities, and already have some idea of classroom management and other skills needed to be a teacher.

But Peske said the “grow your own” movement, which takes paraprofessionals or other employees and turns them into teachers, while a good idea, still requires “thoughtful clinical experience to prepare them. The notion that you would rely on candidates themselves to already be in the classrooms or already working with students, that concerns me,” she said.

“Someone could have been a paraprofessional working as an aide to a student with disabilities, but may never have had the experience [learning] about neuro-differences in those students or who may never had had a mentor.”

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s largest teachers union, in a called for more rigor in teacher training, not less, criticizing state efforts to lower the qualifications needed to be a teacher.

“[T]here are more alternative and nontraditional ways to become a teacher in the U.S. than ever before, and unfortunately many of them are low quality,” the report said.

The teachers union stressed methods that are reflected in traditional training, saying aspiring teachers should get “extensive” classroom experiences “alongside a skilled practitioner over a significant period,” and “a strong foundation in subject-area content.”

“We cannot put a bandage on the teacher and school staff shortage by cutting corners and lowering the bar for entry,” the report said.

The biggest knock on the swift accreditation companies came in Texas, where Texas Teachers of Tomorrow, also known as A+ Texas Teachers, has been put on probation. The Texas Education Agency that the company failed to address numerous deficiencies, including the number of content hours required for teacher candidates, and whether they are evaluated regarding whether their existing skills are “appropriate for the certification sought.” The audit came after complaints from school districts and teacher candidates who utilized the firm, The Dallas Morning News .

Attempts to reach Texas Teachers of Tomorrow were unsuccessful.

A University of Texas at Austin College of Education 2021 of teacher preparation nationally found that in every tested subject, “students do better if they have university-certified teachers,” and that for low-income students, “having a university-certified teacher can offset half or more of the disadvantages that comes from living in poverty.”

In addition, the study showed that university-certified teachers had a 73% retention rate over nine years, while only 59% of “alternatively certified” teachers remained teaching.

But Rozell said that study was skewed because of the problems with Teachers of Tomorrow. He said an internal survey of his company’s students showed that after the first year in the classroom, 93% said “they were excited to be back next year,” and that they planned to be a teacher for at least five years.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

That is one common path, but it’s far from the only one. In fact, teachers follow a wide variety of routes into the classroom. Understanding that complexity is important for state and district policymakers looking to solve their hiring challenges. 

Let’s walk through some data, starting with the age of new teachers. According to the 2020-21 , 45% of first-year educators were under 25. These fit the stereotype, but 18% of beginning teachers were in their 30s, 11% in their 40s and 4% were just starting out in their 50s.

Teachers also come through a wide variety of training programs. According to the same national data, 30% of new teachers follow non-traditional paths. But these vary widely across the country, from 0 in some states to up to 56% in Florida and 59% in Texas. 

Furthermore, the distinction between “traditional” and “alternative” teacher preparation is murky. In traditional programs, a candidate completes a program of study, including student-teaching experience, before becoming a full-time teacher, whereas alternative programs allow people to serve as teachers while they complete classes on nights and weekends. However, some colleges and universities run both types of programs. And, as a big found, a traditional program in one state might require the same number of credit hours as an alternative program in another state.

Some examples might help drive home the point. When people imagine a traditional teacher preparation program, they might think of former “normal” schools — public universities like Illinois State. As of the , it ranked No. 7 nationally in terms of the number of graduates from teacher preparation programs. But right above Illinois State was the “alternative” nonprofit Relay School of Education’s New York program, and right below that was a “traditional” program at the for-profit University of Phoenix. 

The two biggest preparation programs in the country were A+ Texas Teachers, a for-profit “alternative” program the state is now , and Grand Canyon University, a “traditional” for-profit, mostly online program. 

A vision of the stereotypical teacher pathway may also distort perceptions of the labor market and potential solutions when shortages pop up. Historically, as a country, we’ve produced than there were available jobs. If they’re dedicated to education, those would-be teachers might work as substitutes or teaching assistants as they seek full-time positions. 

Another source of new teachers comes from reentrants — people who once taught, left and look to return to the classroom. , about one-sixth to one-third of teachers hired nationally are reentrants. 

Consider the case of Texas. The state is atypical in a lot of ways, but the Texas Education Agency has an excellent  comparing new teacher certifications versus new hires and detailing the paths those new educators took. 

I created the pie graph below to help visualize the data that shows where Texas districts are finding their new teachers. The traditional pathway, where someone completes a teaching degree at a college or university and then immediately becomes a teacher, was actually the fourth most common source path for new hires in Texas last year. Slightly more came through through alternative certification programs, which the state calls interns.

Another large category were teachers hired without any state certification at all. In recent years, Texas an increasing number of schools and districts the flexibility to fill an increasing number of teaching roles without going through any Texas state certification process. 

But the biggest group of new teacher hires was people who had previously taught in Texas schools and are returning to the classroom. Almost one-third of all new hires came from these reentrants. 

These trends vary across the state. Large urban areas and rural areas hired a lot of interns — alternatively certified teachers — but the cities especially found a lot of re-entrants. Charter school networks like Uplift, IDEA Public Schools and KIPP found most of their hires outside of state certification requirements.

What about teacher quality? 

����’s true that educators who come through emergency licensure programs tend to be less effective overall than those who are fully certified. But it’s also true that earning a certification is that a teacher will be effective in the classroom. For example, the cited above, and , have found that teachers who go through traditional preparation programs perform no better than those who come through alternative routes.

In one recent example, out of New Jersey found that pandemic-era exceptions that allowed people to become teachers outside the state’s normal certification requirements attracted more racially diverse candidates who were no less effective than those who followed the traditional path. And in the supposedly “Wild West” of Texas, researchers could find essentially among the different preparation programs in terms of boosting student outcomes.

In other words, these are policy choices that carry trade-offs. 

The teacher labor market is constantly in flux. Right now, it’s than ever before, but it has not and never will be in perfect balance. Teacher preparation completion numbers are still where they were 10 to 15 years ago, though they show signs of rebounding. The challenge for states and districts is to work within those constraints to to work in their schools.

The Brazosport Independent School District is always in need of more teachers — and for a long time, it wasn’t able to find enough.

Located about 60 miles south of Houston, the 11,500-student district doesn’t have a big college of education nearby to churn out new teachers. ����’s hard to compete with larger districts in the region for talent or convince educators to move to the small town of Clute, where Brazosport ISD is based. Over time, classroom sizes grew as vacancies stayed open.

That’s why the district created its own pipeline. Last August, it launched a unique “teacher apprenticeship” program that allows aspiring teachers to earn a bachelor’s degree and teacher certification — at no cost. In return, the teachers have to work in the district for at least three years. The plan includes a paid residency program in which apprentices are paired with a teacher mentor and work with them in a classroom for a full school year.

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“When the first bell rings for Brazosport ISD next [school] year for these folks, they’re going to be considered a rookie, but they’re not a rookie. We say it’s not Day 1. It’s actually Day 181 for our teacher residents,” said Becky Hampton, a senior education specialist working with the district.

Public education advocates are following the program with high hopes, believing it could become a blueprint for other Texas districts as they look for ways to stem the state’s critical teacher shortage.

Kristi Kirschner, chief human resource officer at Brazosport ISD, said the program started with 67 apprentices ranging from high school students with less than 30 college hours to participants with bachelor’s degrees.

Twenty-five teachers graduated from the program in time for the upcoming school year. Without these homegrown teachers, the district would have had to hire close to 60 teachers — now it needs to find just 35 more.

“����’s something we smile about often,” Hampton said.

About 42% of those participating in the program this past school year were already district employees like warehouse workers or teacher aides. Apprentices are paid anywhere between $19,000 to $30,000 a year — depending on how far along they are in the program — and have their college tuition and fees paid for as a result of a partnership with Brazosport College and Inspire Texas, a teacher certification program. All of the participants are from the area.

The district loses nearly 130 teachers at the end of every school year and has a hard time staffing bilingual and special education teachers. But with this apprenticeship program, Kirschner said the district can train new teachers to fill roles that have been historically hard to staff.

There are across the state, but most are partnerships between districts and universities in which students work in a classroom only during their last semester or year of college. What makes the Brazosport ISD program unique is that high school students can start the process of becoming teachers while still in school and, in some cases, it can be much more affordable than earning a four-year college degree.

Texas’ teacher shortage crisis

Teacher preparation has been in the spotlight since last year as Texas looks for better ways to recruit and retain educators.

Texas has year after year, and it got worse after the pandemic. Health and safety were top concerns for teachers, and their salaries largely stagnated while basic necessities got more expensive. More kids are in each school classroom as a result; in some cases, children are spending days without a teacher.

A task force formed last year by Gov. to study the root causes of the state’s teacher shortage that the state fund programs like the one Brazosport ISD is running.

“Research shows that teacher residency models increase teacher retention, effectively place teachers in hard-to-staff areas, and positively impact student outcomes,” the task force report said.

According to the National Center for Teacher Residencies, 86% of teachers who go through such programs are still teaching in the same school after three years of employment.

These residency programs help teachers stay in the profession longer because participants are usually paired with a mentor to guide them and, in most cases, they gain a deeper understanding of what challenges teachers face and how to overcome them, according to the Learning Policy Institute. The schools that employ them also have a chance to prepare them directly, the institute said.

“Residencies are a promising long-term solution to meeting district hiring needs, allowing districts to play a direct role in training their future workforce,” a Learning Policy Institute report says.

A failed legislative effort

During the Texas Legislature’s regular session this year, lawmakers tried passing a teacher preparation bill that would’ve given school districts funds to establish programs like Brazosport ISD’s. Most notably, , authored by Rep. , D-Houston, would have partially funded residency programs and offered teachers a slew of other incentives like free pre-K for their own children. , authored by Sen. , R-Conroe, would have also funded similar programs.

But after political fallouts between the Texas House and Senate. SB 9 failed after House Democrats stuffed their version of the bill with some of their priorities, like better pay for bus drivers and increases to school funding. HB 11 never made it out of a Senate committee.

“����’s unfortunate that many of the best approaches to address record teacher vacancies, including paid residency pathways, got stuck in the red zone at the end of the regular legislative session,” said Jonathan Feinstein, state director for Texas at The Education Trust.

“These strategic investments have support in both chambers and are urgently needed to prepare and keep highly qualified teachers in our classrooms.”

To pay for its apprenticeship program, Brazosport ISD freed up money in its budget, got financial help from the nearby community college and applied for grants to make up the rest. But finding the resources to establish such a program might not be as easy for other school districts across the state that are looking to fix their own teaching shortage woes.

With Abbott expected to announce a special session on education soon, educators and school administrators are hopeful that lawmakers will not only raise teacher wages but also provide funding to establish similar residency programs.

Dutton said he plans to file a bill similar to HB 11 and will name it after Tamoria Jones, a staffer in his office who recently died and had a fiery passion for education.

Creighton also plans to include language from his earlier teacher preparation bill into whatever public education package the Senate ends up proposing.

Kirschner said lawmakers should incentivize districts to start their own residency programs.

“We can’t solve the [state’s teacher shortage] here in Brazosport ISD,” she said. “But we do think that we have a really great solution that a lot of school districts are wanting to understand and going ‘how can they do this?’ ”

Dreams and second chances

For some participants of Brazosport ISD’s program, the apprenticeship has provided them with a chance to pursue a long-held dream.

Jennifer Martinez said going back to college wasn’t in her plans until she heard about Brazosport ISD’s program. She had been a teaching assistant at the district for the last five years but never thought she’d one day be leading the classroom.

Martinez teared up when talking about the opportunity the district gave her. She’ll be a full-time teacher in two years — and have more financial flexibility because of it.

She knows being a teacher in Texas might mean being underpaid — and in some cases, underappreciated — but that didn’t stop her from pursuing a place in the profession. For her, knowing she can have an impact on kids makes up for everything else.

“The kids love being there with you and make you feel like you’re worth a million bucks,” Martinez said.

Cody Scarborough, another aspiring teacher, has just finished his yearlong residency and will lead his own classroom in the upcoming school year. He said he would not have become a teacher if it weren’t for the free tuition and support that Brazosport ISD’s program offered. Scarborough said he’s been able to learn about different methods of teaching from his mentor and fellow cohort members.

“In Texas, apprenticeship programs are growing and people are seeing what’s happening at other school districts and trying to learn and grow,” Scarborough said. “This is the future.”

Alexis Burse, an apprentice who still has a year left, was a stay-at-home mom who could not afford to go back to college for a teaching degree. She said the program gave her a second chance at becoming a teacher.

“I feel like I’m almost to the point where I feel secure, where I can just kind of just breathe and know I will always have a good career,” she said. “Teachers are going nowhere.”

Disclosure: Brazosport College and Education Trust have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Facing historic lows in West Virginia kids’ reading and math abilities, state lawmakers passed a landmark bill earlier this year that would require and fund teachers’ assistants in many lower-level classrooms.

But with the new school year approaching, the program implementation faces hurdles on a deadline included in the bill. County school systems are now tasked with filling the classroom assistant positions or backfilling the jobs being vacated, including special education aides, for the new positions.

Lawmakers worry about the upcoming vacancies that could be caused by counties implementing the bill, known as the .

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“Come August and September, when these schools are opening, I’m very concerned about what we’re going to see,” said Del. Joe Statler, R-Monongalia, vice chair of the House Education Committee. “The trouble is in the implementation.”

In Berkeley County, Superintendent Ronald E. Stephens IV still has open aide positions to fill along with new vacancies left by existing employees transferring into the new aide positions.

“While we remain optimistic about implementing the code across our second and third grades in future years, we do have concerns that many classrooms, including prekindergarten and special education, may continue experiencing staff shortages including 79 other unfilled service positions,” he said.

The landmark education , a priority for the governor, House and Senate during the 2023 Legislative session, required teachers’ assistants in lower-level classrooms based on the number of students. The bill also outlined reading instruction and added a number of support and intervention strategies to monitor student progress through the end of third grade. Reading proficiency by the end of third grade is a “crucial marker” in a child’s educational development, .

West Virginia recorded its ever in 2022; education officials cited the pandemic’s education disruptions as a reason for the drop in scores.

“We’re excited about the Third Grade Success Act and being able to implement this legislation,” West Virginia Department of Education Superintendent Michele Blatt said. She added that the department is monitoring any issues that arise in its rollout.

“This legislation was a labor of love for many,” she added.

Statler expressed concern that the legislation gave the WVDE and counties a tight deadline to implement the first phase of the plan, which this year required assistants in classrooms with more than 12 kids in just first grade classrooms along with other other literacy-focused requirements.

Del. Chris Toney, R-Raleigh, estimated there would be 300 classroom aides hired for first grade classrooms around the state. The bill is expected to annually cost once positions are filled through third grade, which is supposed to happen over the next few years.

The state has faced a teacher shortage, and last year, 1,544 certified teachers were teaching out of their content area, according to the WVDE. The classroom assistants are not required to have a teaching degree but must receive reading and numeracy training, according to the legislation. Lawmakers about filling the positions, which they believed would be more than 2,000 jobs, ahead of passing the bill.

“I do have concerns about them finding people to fill these positions,” said Del. Elliot Pritt, R-Fayette. “The education system is already chronically understaffed.”

Leaders with the WVDE told West Virginia Watch that at this time, they could not provide a total number of assistants needed or share how many of those positions had been filled. They cited, in part, that enrollment totals, which determine the number of aides needed, won’t be set until October.

The WVDE missed a July 1 deadline, required in the bill, to provide a report about parts of the new literacy and numeracy program. Spokespersons for the House and Senate told West Virginia Watch those reports were received July 20. WVDE officials communicated with Legislative staff members ahead of the delay.

“Although the plan for July 1st was not met by WVDE, the speaker’s office, as well as others in the Legislature, stayed in contact with the leaders of WVDE to enforce those policies and inquire about the delay,” Toney said. He has worked for Raleigh County Schools for 16 years, including as a classroom aide.

“We are hopeful that the right changes will take place to ensure that these policies will reflect the concerns of parents, educators and students,” he added.

New aide positions could drain special education staff

WVDE Deputy Superintendent Sonya White said that many of the newly-created positions are often being filled by people already working within schools.

“There’s a lot of shuffling right now,” she said. “Some counties are struggling to fill the positions.”

Stephens has filled 50 of the 62 new aide positions in Berkeley County. He said that the majority of staff filling the positions came from other classrooms in the district, the schools’ transfer list of discontinued positions. Some were former aide substitutes, he said.

Kanawha County Schools spokesperson Briana Warner shared the similar concerns as Stephens about people leaving special education classrooms for the new aide positions. The Kanawha County school system, which is the state’s largest, needs 80 aides this upcoming year in its first grade classrooms. They have five to 10 vacancies at this time, she said.

“ … We’re anticipating needing additional special education and other classroom aides due to movement to first grade positions,” Warner said. “We have begun recruiting additional special education aides to fill any of the vacancies that may be created as we create additional first grade aide positions this year.”

Warner added that the county school department went out and interviewed current special education aides in June so that they “could put together some basic ads and attempt to get ahead of any loss.”

“From the beginning, my biggest concerns have centered around special education aides. We do not need to take from one department to give to another,” Toney said. “We need to make sure all of our students and staff, no matter what their specific needs are, will have more opportunities for safety and success in their schools.”

Not all students in the state with an IEP have a developmental disability . Students living in poverty are to be identified for special education.

“We knew there was a possibility we were going to drain the special education positions,” Statler added.

Despite the current hurdles, lawmakers remain optimistic that this bill will improve the state’s education system and student outcomes. State lawmakers referenced academic gains in Mississippi while crafting the legislation; Mississippi being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022 with some of the West Virginia has been adopting.

The state is also offering literacy training to principles and teachers this summer. Blatt said that more than 1,000 school personnel from around the state have participated in those training opportunities.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

Dan Goldhaber and a team of researchers at the University of Washington wanted to find out. They scraped public job postings from school district websites across the state of Washington, and compared the number of openings against the number of people working in those roles in the prior year. By adding this denominator, they were able to determine which teaching positions were comparatively easier or harder to staff. Their latest focuses on what happened over the course of 2022.

They find that while there are a lot of elementary teachers overall, there are proportionally few openings for those jobs. 

In contrast, there were many more special education, STEM and English learner teaching positions, and these were much harder to fill. Proportionally speaking, there were about 3 to 5 times as many open teaching jobs with a focus on special education, STEM and English Language Learners. There were large disparities across schools in terms of how many people they wanted to hire.

The first graph below shows the number of job openings per 100 full-time employees, sorted by subject area and school type. The lines are scaled based on how many people were working in those roles in the prior year. Schools are sorted into quartiles based on how many underrepresented minority students they serve.

Goldhaber’s team also looked at how long the jobs stayed open. The graph below shows the percentage of jobs that remained unfilled at various points in time.

Again, there were large differences across subject areas. About 60% of elementary teaching jobs were removed within four weeks of posting. As the authors write, “elementary education-credentialed job candidates are relatively plentiful, making elementary positions relatively easy to fill.” In comparison, it took longer to fill the open teaching jobs for special ed, STEM and English learners — if they got filled at all.

While these findings may not be new, the data are. And they have lessons for future teaching candidates and for policymakers seeking solutions.

For prospective teachers, the lesson is clear: If they want to find a job, they will have a much easier time if they earn their license in a shortage area.

This confirms prior work. When Melissa Steel King, Leslie Kan and I looked at older data for Illinois in 2016, that the state produced 12.4 social studies teachers for every new hire. In contrast, the ratio was just 1.5 to 1 in special education. In , Kieran Killeen, Susanna Loeb and Imeh Williams found an average of 38 applications for each social studies job opening, compared with an average of 12 for special education, science and math. Goldhaber has found in Washington for hiring differences by subject area, especially during times with competitive labor markets.

From the employer’s side, show that the subject areas with the worst shortages a decade ago are largely still the worst today. What’s changed is that the labor market has tightened and made all hiring tougher. Private schools are suffering the same labor market challenges as public schools, which implies the problem is related more to broader economic factors rather than to anything unique to schools or the public sector.

It’s become harder for principals to find teaching staff across all subject areas, but have erroneously translated this into a broad, generic story. The shortages are not equal and never have been. As even national survey data show, it’s about 2 to 3 times harder to fill foreign language, special education and STEM teaching positions than it is to find general elementary or social studies teachers.

To find out what the numbers look like in their communities, state leaders can take a look at their and see what is versus what is consistent. They could also look at their of teacher candidates by subject area to forecast future shortages. Cyclical shortages call for a fast, temporary response, while persistent shortage areas — like STEM and special ed — may call for a long-term, durable and statewide response.

The data on teacher shortages tell a nuanced story. The media, potential teaching candidates and policymakers all need to diagnose the problems accurately and then use the data to respond accordingly.

Either bill would be a major step forward in addressing the that threaten to widen opportunity gaps across the country. But something far greater than salary dissatisfaction or is at play. Rather, it’s the culmination of complex and unresolved challenges that have faced educators for decades. To truly attract and retain the brightest to the career long term — and ensure that the most at-risk students receive the education they deserve — all aspects of the profession must be improved to meet the standards of today’s overall workforce.

Qualified and eager talent does exist — they’re just shunning the traditional classroom in favor of other jobs or careers that are better adapted to the times. Online schools are a great example of this, as they’ve recently seen a massive uptick in teacher applications and are attracting far more candidates than they’re able to hire. Like all skilled professionals, holders of advanced degrees in education will seek out higher pay and a better work-life balance if schools cannot provide them with what they need. 

As executive director of a foundation working to build a more innovative education system for all learners, I know just how vital teachers are to a functioning society. But I also recognize that teaching at its core is a career. If teachers, who are some of the most educated members of the workforce, can make more money and feel less stressed in a different career, why wouldn’t they explore other options? In order to alleviate current shortages and ensure the next generation is prepared to face the challenges of the 21st century, public, private and philanthropic leaders must come together to finally prioritize making teaching a respected and competitive profession.

To start, educators need greater and more capable support systems. While the role of the teacher has expanded exponentially in recent years, its support network has not — as evidenced by of stress and burnout, especially . It needs to be easier for teachers to collaborate with colleagues in school as well as other professionals who can supplement classroom learning. This could consist of librarians leading makerspace programming for students to supplement their in-class experiences or development of online platforms that allow educators to share and collaborate on best practices. Examples include the work being done at and . 

Secondly, the profession requires increased flexibility. With the nature of work changing significantly over the past several years, the traditional school structure can no longer compete with other industries that are still remote or hybrid. Though the impact of in-classroom learning is undeniable, education leaders need to consider out-of-the-box ways to give teachers the flexibility that has come to be expected by the 21st century workforce. 

One way that schools have traditionally done this is through co- or team-teaching, something districts should certainly continue to invest in. Other innovative thinkers have begun envisioning new models that leverage the expertise of local stakeholders to give teachers greater work-life balance. One such idea from is a 3:2 school week, where students spend three days in the traditional classroom and two days learning from business leaders, entrepreneurs, government officials and others in the broader community. Not only does this approach help integrate work-based learning into the curriculum — — but it provides teachers with the critical downtime and significantly reduces pressure to be the be-all and end-all of students’ experiences.

Lastly, the overall return on investment of becoming a teacher must be elevated. Legislation to increase compensation will go a long way toward reflecting the significance of the job and making teaching competitive with other fields. However, this also requires reducing the cost of getting a teaching degree and making it easier for educators to continue learning throughout their careers. This could involve universities increasing scholarships toward teaching degrees or subsidizing the cost of completing accreditation programs, which is required to teach in most public schools. This also means continuing to invest in professional development to ensure new and veteran educators have the skills they need to succeed today and into the future — like , and ‘s expanding number of tailored professional learning services.

This Teacher Appreciation Week is the moment to focus on improving the profession to meet — and ideally exceed — the standards of today’s workforce. And in doing so, it is time to double down on increasing benefits for all who serve in the nation’s schools, including custodians, cafeteria workers and bus drivers. , schools depend on far more than just administrators and teachers to stay up and running, and this ought to be represented in how they provide for these vital workers. 

����’s time to make working in schools one of the country’s most desirable career paths. 

Flat starting salaries. Attempts to ban books. A lack of respect. An in the percentage of Americans who want their child to become a public school teacher. 

The teaching profession must be in a state of , right?  

If so, someone should tell young people. According to that came out late last year, the number of people enrolled in teacher preparation programs rose by 6% from 2019 to 2021. Teacher preparation program completions increased a similar amount. 

In raw numbers, public schools employ more teachers than ever. And, because K-12 student enrollment is down, public schools are hitting all-time lows in student-to-teacher ratios.

But before anyone breaks out the champagne, a bit of caution is in order. Schools would like to hire even more teachers than they already employ, and they’re struggling to fill those newly created vacancies. 

On the supply side, it’s important to balance both the short- and long-term trends. It is still true that teacher preparation enrollments and completions substantially from where they were 10 to 15 years ago. ����’s also possible that the rebound that’s starting to emerge in the data is a false start. Maybe the numbers will start to fall again; we’ll know better as we get more years of data. 

But three things offer hope that things are improving. 

One, it’s a broad-based recovery in terms of program types. Traditional teacher preparation programs are still the largest training ground for new educators, and they’re now serving 3% more candidates than they were at the depths of their lows. Enrollments at alternative teacher preparation programs not affiliated with a college and university are up 22%, and enrollments at alternative programs at institutions of higher ed are up another 20% over the last three years.

Two, the recovery is widespread geographically. Most states are seeing big increases in the number of teacher trainees. 

Over the last three years for which we have data, teacher preparation enrollments rose in 37 states and the District of Columbia. Kentucky, Delaware and Mississippi have seen the biggest growth, with increases in the number of new teacher candidates in their pipelines of 50% or more. In raw numbers, California has nearly 5,000 more than it did just a few years ago.  

(Note: Texas has seen enormous increases in its teacher preparation program enrollments. Those have been largely driven by its private, for-profit sector, and due to those , I’ve removed Texas from all the national data above. But Texas has seen double-digit gains over the last few years in its traditional programs, too.)

Now, enrollments are not the same thing as completions. Some people may drop out or decide they don’t want to become teachers. And, even if the supply of new teacher candidates is starting to improve, it still isn’t growing fast enough to match the rising demand. That’s particularly true in some rural communities and in chronic shortage areas like special education and STEM. 

In response, state leaders should be looking at their internal data to see how supply matches up with demand, and whether candidates are pursuing training for the most needed subject areas. Districts should continue to be creative about finding ways to expand their applicant pool and ensure they’re able to fill their unique labor needs.

Still, enrollments are a leading indicator. And that’s the third reason for optimism. With completions already on the rise, the increase in enrollments could foreshadow more growth in the number of newly licensed teachers who are about to hit the market. 

Regardless, media coverage and the general perception of the teaching profession are out of step with the actual data. It may be hard for people to accept these trends in light of the powerful doomsday narratives.  

But the data suggest that things are getting better, not worse. More young people want to become teachers, and the pipeline is growing, not shrinking.

Correction: Some statistics were amended to reflect a change in the federal data definition of enrollment in 2018-19.

If school leaders are to have any success in tackling the challenges coming out of the pandemic, including staffing shortages, learning gaps and students’ emotional well-being, they must first address the satisfaction problem. Given the of a teacher’s attitude on student happiness, rethinking the value proposition of the profession to bring more flexibility, sustainability and joy to the role might be a good place to start.

The job of the teacher hasn’t substantially changed in decades, despite significant shifts in the world in general and the world of work in particular. The vast majority of educators earn an undergraduate degree in teaching, pass a licensure exam and teach one grade or subject in a classroom for the entire school day. Those who want to work with students but crave flexible schedules, subject or grade-level variety, or simply an opportunity to branch out have few options. Too often, career advancement means leaving the classroom for administrative positions. Meanwhile, people who desire to work in schools but lack the necessary credentials can’t find a way in.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Numerous factors shape how educators are recruited, trained, deployed and retained as part of a modern teaching workforce. But current policies should serve as the floor, not the ceiling, of what is possible. As highlighted in TNTP’s , while there are short-term strategies, the deeper work is ahead — enhancing the value proposition for teachers, developing and expanding professional pathways, and reimagining the educator’s role.

Policy shifts like the one in Shelby County, Tennessee, that allows substitute teachers without a bachelor’s degree, might create a new stream of educator candidates. In Phoenix, the Parent Educator academy has trained 339 parents, and a similar partnership with the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota is preparing caregivers to serve as a child’s first teacher and providing a clear path into the profession, from paraprofessional — which often does not require a four-year college degree — to teacher. TNTP works with districts across the country to help create programs that offer parents and community members a way into the classroom, as paraprofessionals or licensed teachers. Going further, school systems should create and staff permanent positions with embedded training for substitute teachers or paraprofessionals who are willing and ready to prepare for educator roles.

����’s also critical to consider all available tools, including new and emerging technologies with the potential to create greater flexibility for teachers, students and parents while improving effectiveness. To be clear, innovations were taking place in pockets before the pandemic: for instance, Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis has been using adjustable schedules and individualized learning pathways since it opened its doors in 2017, and, through a strong partnership with Purdue University, has offered customized experiences that lead to internships. However, during the pandemic, schools engaged in a widespread experiment in using technology to deliver and receive learning. It was born of necessity, and it certainly wasn’t always successful, but there are lessons from that time worth exploring.

, a report commissioned by Edmentum, examined how virtual technology can expand access to high-quality teachers and learning specialists, while enabling staffing innovations like team teaching and non-teaching classroom support roles. In these models, teachers have adjustable schedules, more opportunities for support and training, and greater clarity around their jobs.

Building on what they learned during the pandemic, districts like Gadsden, New Mexico, leverage virtual teachers for hard-to-staff courses, while Friendship Charter Schools in Washington, D.C., is offering hard-to-staff and low-demand courses, such as Russian language, online. This enables the school to tap into a larger talent pool, including educators who can’t afford, or prefer not, to live in the D.C. area.

Too often, society talks about teaching as a calling. While it is said with reverence, that way of thinking ignores the reality of the post-pandemic economy and education landscape. It also hides the simple fact that teachers want what most other professionals seek in their careers: . And with , teachers who are not satisfied will continue to have options outside the classroom. 

The success of the country’s public education system depends on the satisfaction of educators and the students they teach. ����’s incumbent on education leaders and policymakers to get creative and use all the tools at their disposal to address the customer-satisfaction challenge of bringing more joy back to teaching and learning. 

As teacher shortages continue in Virginia, the state is attempting to stave off further educational impacts by granting more provisional licenses.

The commonwealth issued a total of 8,434 provisional licenses in 2021-22 compared to an average of 6,787 in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to from Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, which conducts analysis and provides oversight of state agencies on behalf of the General Assembly.

The Virginia Education Association, the state’s teachers union, has said the exodus of teachers, including highly qualified educators, is connected to low wages, increased workloads and politicized work environments.

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“For a long time in Virginia, teachers with short-term provisional licenses have played an important role, and this is a totally viable pathway, eventually becoming a fully licensed teacher,” said Chad Stewart, policy analyst for the Virginia Education Association. “But the way this licensure is working now — given the magnitude of provisionally licensed teachers that we have — doesn’t necessarily match how it was envisioned.”

Provisional licenses are short-term, nonrenewable licenses granted by the Virginia Department of Education for teachers who haven’t met all of the state requirements to teach but still have some qualifications.

For example, people who have a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university but didn’t take education courses would not meet the department’s requirements for a standard teaching license. However, they could seek a provisional license.

The department also grants licenses to “out-of-field” teachers who have not yet completed their coursework or certification in the content area they are teaching.

In Virginia, provisionally licensed teachers have addressed shortages left behind by teachers. The November JLARC report found school divisions statewide have become more reliant on provisionally licensed teachers, with approximately 7.7% of all teachers being provisionally licensed before the pandemic and 9.5% falling in that category in 2021-22.

“This represents an unusually large change to the proportion of teachers with a provisional license, which did not exceed 8.3 percent in any previous year examined,” the commission wrote.

Virginia’s teacher vacancy rate increased from 3% in 2021-22 to 3.8% as of Oct. 1, according to the Department of Education. The data includes both licensed and unlicensed teachers. Special education has had the highest vacancy rate at the start of the past two school years.

Although the Virginia Education Association has in the past found vacancy rates to be higher in high-poverty and rural school divisions, it says vacancy rates at nonrural schools are now on par with those in other school divisions.

The role of provisional licensing

Both the Virginia Association of Superintendents and Virginia Education Association support provisional licensing. Scott Brabrand, executive director for the superintendents association, said in an email to the Mercury that the option is “another tool for school districts to use as needed.”

However, a teacher who has not completed specific teaching coursework is more likely to be less effective than a fully licensed teacher, according to the November JLARC report.

“Full licensure is important because it requires coursework related to methods of teaching (pedagogy), which contributes to teacher effectiveness at all grade levels,” JLARC wrote.

Stewart said it’s vital for teachers to have experience with pedagogical thinking, or the ability to think while instructing, and knowledge of how to design and sequence lessons to best help students retain knowledge. Without training in classroom management skills and student preparation, there are concerns about how successful provisional teachers can be.

“We’re not saying it’s not a viable pathway and it shouldn’t be out there for some folks that are really interested in pivoting into the teaching profession,” Stewart said. “But what we’re seeing now with thousands of new people entering into these roles is very concerning because it seems to be plugging the gap for [the] teacher shortage crisis that has gotten so bad in this state, and this masks the magnitude of how bad it’s gotten.”

Curbing teacher shortages

As school leaders around the state struggle to find ways to address teacher shortages, Arlington Public Schools has turned to a 2019 law creating an alternative route for teacher licensing.

That carried by Del. Roxann Robinson, R-Chesterfield, required the Board of Education to grant special consideration to people seeking a provisional license who have completed a program offered by a program accredited by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation.

Del. Patrick Hope, D-Arlington, had backed a similar proposal aimed at helping Arlington Public Schools’ — the only Montessori program in Virginia’s public schools — address teacher shortages. Montessori schools are based on the educational theories of Maria Montessori and focus on more hands-on, student-directed learning than traditional classrooms usually offer.

At the time, Arlington’s program was having to turn away many experienced candidates because they lacked a Virginia teaching license and a Montessori credential.

“We were already feeling some of that pressure because the requirements to have a Montessori credential and a public school license in Virginia was already challenging,” said Monique O’Grady, a former school board member in Arlington.

The 2019 law required the State Board of Education to create a process that would let a school board or organization sponsored by a school board like the Montessori program ask the board to approve an alternate route for teachers to meet the requirements for a provisional or renewable license. That route could include “alternatives to the regulatory requirements for teacher preparation, including alternative professional assessments and coursework.”

Arlington proposed that candidates be eligible for a provisional teaching license if they hold at minimum a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university and a credential issued by an institution accredited by the Montessori Accreditation Council for Teacher Education while having successfully passed Virginia’s required Praxis tests in their specific area.

The board granted Arlington’s request on March 23.

“Montessori teaching is already under such demand that the pool is already small,” said O’Grady. “Any barrier that makes it harder for a teacher to come into Virginia to teach makes it harder for us to fill that position, and I think that’s really what we were fixing.”

Legislative and administrative efforts

Other bills passed during the 2022 and 2023 sessions have tried to give the state’s provisional licensing system more flexibility.

Last year, lawmakers allowed the Board of Education to temporarily extend certain teacher licenses by two years and to people with non-U.S. teaching licenses or certifications.

During the last session, lawmakers also gave the board authority to extend provisional licenses by up to two years based on a satisfactory performance evaluation and a superintendent recommendation.

But provisional licensing isn’t the only solution policymakers are eyeing to get teachers in the classroom.

Recent legislation carried by Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, and Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, looks to retired school employees to address the teacher shortage.

Under existing law, Coyner said retired instructional and administrative employees, specialized student support employees and bus drivers with at least 25 years of service cannot return to work until a year after their retirement without jeopardizing their pension benefits.

The new shortens that time period from one year to six months, allowing retired teachers to return to the classroom to fill vacancies more quickly.

Coyner said she pushed for reducing the break in service to one month but compromised at six months. Other proposals by , D-Bath, and Del. , R-Albermarle, would have reduced the return to work by three months. A different version of Deeds’ bill later passed.

Still, she said she is optimistic the legislation will help address shortages, since many retired school employees are seeking work.

“There are stories all over the commonwealth about children sitting in classrooms with long-term subs, who are very nice and are hardworking, but they don’t have the qualifications of a teacher and we should be doing everything we can to solve that,” Coyner said to the Mercury.

In hopes of getting retired employees into schools faster, the legislation also included language directing VRS to study whether retired school employees can return to work earlier than six months. The report is due to the House and Senate finance committee chairs by Nov. 1.

Meanwhile, proposals to improve teacher compensation and provide additional training and professional support to educators failed.

During a CNN town hall last month, Gov. Glenn Youngkin admitted that Virginia teachers are underpaid and touted lawmakers’ inclusion in the state budget of 10% raises for teachers over the next two years. Still, some education groups say the increases would leave Virginia teacher salaries below pre-pandemic pay levels due to inflation, as well as below the national teacher pay average. VEA said the House and Senate’s proposed 7% budget proposal would get teachers back to levels from 2019-20.

In 2022-23, the average teacher salary nationwide is $67,885 compared to Virginia’s $62,963, according to the VEA. The nationwide rate is expected to increase to $69,343 in the 2023-24 school year.

In September, Youngkin to “use all discretion within law to issue teaching and renewal licenses, including to teachers licensed in another state and retired teachers whose licenses may have lapsed.”

The Department of Education responded by launching the and campaigns, which aim to reduce barriers for qualified people to enter the profession, increase the number of candidates eligible to fill hard-to-staff positions and improve recruitment and retention strategies.

JLARC is also reviewing the teacher pipeline, with a report expected in the early fall.

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Up to 4,400 educators could be affected, including thousands who had been promised full licenses after three years as provisional teachers. But many now would be forced to go back to school and re-earn their credentials at a traditional college of education in the state once their temporary license expires.

Most devastating for the state’s highest-needs students: The proposed change could impact 2,000 special educators, a category of teachers in desperately short supply. A 74 analysis of newly available state data reveals that schools serving the children with the most profound and intense disabilities would lose the largest share of their teaching staff — many needing to replace two-thirds, or more. 

A number are located in rural areas that have long struggled to recruit educators with specialized skills. More than 84% of Minnesota school systems report enough of these teachers, particularly those specializing in autism spectrum disorder, emotional behavioral disorder and learning disabilities.

• In Minneapolis, a school for students with volatile behavior would lose six of its 10 teachers.
  
• A public charter school catering to autistic students would lose four of its six faculty members.
  
• Three rural multidistrict programs serving children whose needs are too specialized for their small, home districts would lose three-fourths of their teachers.

• A number of language-immersion schools and career-technical education programs could lose two-thirds of their teachers, while numerous schools where 90% or more of students are impoverished stand to lose 50% to 75%.

Who would fill those suddenly empty classrooms is unclear. 

The affected teachers earned their credentials under a reformed system that was intended to ensure that enrolling in traditional colleges of education is not the only way to become a Minnesota teacher. But the board created five years ago to oversee that system is dominated by in-state training programs and the statewide teacher union that represents their faculties, and has tried repeatedly to repeal most of the new ways to qualify for a teaching license.

The idea of once again requiring the vast majority of would-be teachers to enroll in colleges of education is rooted in the belief they will be better educators, says Yelena Bailey, executive director of the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board. “We have had really good experience with people who did [traditional] teacher prep,” Bailey told ����Ӱ��. “People who have demonstrated mastery of professional standards tend to do better and stay longer.” 

This claim, however, is not based on any localized analysis of the proposed reform or the state’s teacher training landscape. Minnesota requires schools to evaluate teachers but does not compile or analyze the resulting data. Nor has it examined the effectiveness of its teachers colleges or of educators with non-traditional backgrounds who were licensed after the system changed in 2018.    

The board has asked lawmakers for $800,000 to help the special education teachers pay to earn new credentials — a subsidy that works out to $400 a head. 

The bill would leave intact a brand-new rule allowing experienced teachers licensed in other states to work in Minnesota, as well as a handful of startup training programs outside of higher ed for people with a bachelor’s degree in a field other than education. 

Data Analysis

Top 50 Schools with the Highest Percentage of Tier 1 & 2 License-Holders

Data analysis by Beth Hawkins/����Ӱ��

In 2016, after a decade of pushback by the education college lobby and the union, the state’s Legislative Auditor recommended a wholesale reboot to Minnesota’s teacher credentialing system. In addition to being virtually impossible to navigate for anyone who did not graduate from a traditional training program, the auditors noted, the rules for who qualified for a license were arbitrary and contradictory.  

Educators hoping to move to the state with degrees or teaching experience elsewhere often were required to submit course syllabi, exam results or other old, hard-to-resurrect information to prove their preparation was “substantially equivalent” to what they would have learned in Minnesota. 

If they could not show that, they were told to take classes or work toward a new degree from one of the state’s colleges. Among other problems, this made it nearly impossible for a teacher trained at a Historically Black College or University or a Tribal College to get a license without starting over — an issue in a state with a nearly all-white teacher corps. 

For some native speakers of Somali, Hmong, Karen and other languages hoping to work in immersion schools, as well as plumbers, mechanics, IT specialists and other people hoping to teach in career prep programs, there weren’t — and, in many cases, still aren’t — Minnesota training programs for their particular license area. 

In a bipartisan compromise opposed only by the colleges of education and the union, in 2017 lawmakers created the new board and rules allowing people who had not earned a degree from an in-state college of education to demonstrate their teaching abilities with other credentials or classroom experience elsewhere.

Under a new, four-tiered system, people who completed a Minnesota educator preparation program could get permanent tier 3 and 4 licenses. Those using the new alternate criteria were limited to temporary tier 1 or 2 credentials.

Tier 1 licenses are good for one year and may be renewed three times — perhaps more if the teacher works in a high-needs area.  

Tier 2 was the chief category designed to provide alternatives to earning a degree at a Minnesota teachers college. Anyone with a tier 2 license — which requires significantly more experience than tier 1 — who gets good classroom evaluations for three years is eligible to apply for a full credential. By last year, the first in which most were eligible, 99 tier 2 licensees had moved up to permanent credentials.   

Opponents started pushing back even before the reform went into effect for the 2018-19 school year. Out of the gate, however, the tiered system proved popular — and effective at licensing educators to work in shortage areas. , 4,400 of the state’s 80,000 working teachers were on a tier 1 or 2 license, with another approximately 8,000 holding other, pre-existing, credentials that allow certain teachers to work outside their area of licensure. 

The first two times the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board asked lawmakers to sever the path from a short-term to a permanent license, dozens of teachers with Ph.D.s and years of experience in other states showed up to protest. Their main argument was that even in its infancy, the new system was quickly diversifying the ranks of the state’s educator workforce. One-fourth are people of color, compared with 6% of Minnesota teachers overall. 

This year, with union-backed Democrats in charge of all three branches of state government, a third version of a bill to change the new system is enjoying relatively smooth sailing. Its chances were helped by an amendment that would grandfather in some teachers currently moving from temporary to permanent status. ����’s unclear how many would qualify for that protection. 

Document courtesy ED Allies

A number of educators and school system leaders have complained that lawmakers this year limited the testimony they would hear in opposition to the bill. Among those who ended up submitting written statements instead were associations representing the state’s school boards, school administrators, rural districts and the Minnesota Administrators for Special Education.

The chair of the state House Education Policy Committee, Laurie Pryor, did not respond to requests for comment regarding complaints about restrictions on the number of testifiers.        

None of the debate has touched on the disproportionate impact rolling back the new law would have on special educators, who have been in short supply for decades. Right now, tens of thousands of children with disabilities are not getting legally mandated pandemic recovery services because there are not enough teachers with the credentials to serve them.  

Last summer, one of the largest employers of tier 1 and 2 educators, Minneapolis Public Schools, announced it was moving its academic recovery services for its most challenged students online — a possible violation of law — because it could not find enough educators to staff its programs. Almost two months into the 2022-23 school year, the 28,000-student district was still short about 130 special educators.

In March, Minneapolis’s tier 1 teachers started to get their annual notices that they are being excessed — removed from their jobs for potentially weeks or months, pending a district decision to rehire them. Because of the shortages, they typically have more alternatives than other teachers who lose their jobs, which translates to churn for the schools that lose them. 

“This exacerbates instability for schools,” says Paula Yadel Cole, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of Educators for Excellence. “They think, ‘If there’s another district that’s willing to hire me, that’s where I am going.' ” 

Understaffed special education classrooms pose problems that compound on one another, she adds. A shortage in an individual school puts pressure on the remaining special educators to serve larger caseloads. 

The solution often proposed — state-funded scholarships for these teachers to enroll in traditional colleges of education — still leaves root causes of the special educator crisis unaddressed. 

“There’s this denial, I think,” Cole says. “I am just worried we are not taking this teacher shortage seriously.”

For two decades, advocates and policy experts have decried a nationwide lack of flexibility in training, recruiting and compensating special ed teachers. Educators who want to work with students with disabilities often have to do extra coursework — which means more debt — to take a job that involves significant amounts of paperwork and, in the case of teachers who work with behaviorally challenged kids, responsibility for a segregated classroom.

To the barriers to persuading teachers to enter special education, add the hurdles to keeping them there. Research shows that some 20% of new special educators who also hold general-ed licenses don’t choose to work in special education. Among those who do, turnover is higher than in other specialties. that between the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years, special educators were 11% more likely to leave the classroom and 72% more likely to change schools than general education teachers. 

According to published two years ago by the Learning Disabilities Association of Minnesota, less than a fifth of those with the appropriate licenses are working in special education, while more than a fourth of inactive teachers hold special education licenses. Some 38% of teachers who fall into the long-existing categories “special permission” and “out of compliance” are working in special ed. 

Few Minnesota districts have experimented with paying special educators more in recognition of their extra training and higher workloads. However, St. Paul Public Schools recently announced that, in anticipation of 70 unfilled special education positions for 2023-24, it will pay a $10,000 bonus to qualified applicants — including teachers already in the district who are willing to change assignments. It will also give $2,000 to any current tier 2 special educator who earns a tier 3 credential by November 2023.

In February, a number of Educators for Excellence members — some at risk of losing their hard-to-fill jobs — asking lawmakers to wait to determine whether the licensing rules truly need to change until there is data on how well the teachers who have taken advantage of the new credentialing system are doing. 

“Sadly, this provision has been attacked every single year in the five years since it became effective” they said. “Why rush to dismantle the system before we’ve had an opportunity to see the full impact on student experience and achievement?” 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and the Joyce Foundation provide financial support to Educators for Excellence and ����Ӱ��.