Key findings:

• School bus driver employment has increased modestly in the last year but is still 9.5% lower than in 2019. 
• The recent increase appears to be driven by rising wages—school bus drivers have seen 4.2% real hourly wage growth in the past year, the quickest rate since the pandemic.
• However, the end of pandemic relief funds—in conjunction with the instability and attacks on public education by the Trump administration—threaten to reverse this recent progress.

The school bus driver shortage continues to play out across the country, making it more challenging for students to get to school and placing additional burdens on the K–12 public education system. As has been typical in recent years, the beginning of the school year brought forward a steady stream of reports documenting challenges schools are experiencing hiring bus drivers. Our latest analysis finds that school bus driver employment remains 9.5% below 2019 staffing levels.

But there are positive signs that school districts are taking steps to address the shortage. School bus driver employment overall has increased modestly in the last year, with growth in public K–12 schools likely being driven by increasing hourly wages for bus drivers.

It is important to note the available data likely do not fully capture the impact of the ending of pandemic relief funds or the instability for school districts created by the Trump administration. During the summer—a vital time for school district planning and hiring decisions—the Trump administration temporarily withheld $6.2 billion in funds from before- and after-school programs and teacher development. The Trump administration is also seeking to fully dismantle the Department of Education. Harsh anti-immigrant policies are also having harmful impacts on students and education staff. Under these circumstances, more time is needed to get a better sense of how policy changes during 2025 have impacted the K–12 education workforce.

Bus driver employment has grown modestly but remains far below pre-pandemic levels

The shortage of bus drivers is still acute and harmful to working families and their children. This fall, school districts in Missouri, Vermont, and Maine reduced bus routes and other bus services. These types of cuts can eliminate a student’s only way to attend school, including for students with disabilities who rely on buses to attend schools with enhanced special education services. Inconsistent bus schedules and routes can also contribute to absenteeism and missed school meals. Roughly half of all school children use a school bus to get to school, meaning a healthy public education system requires investment in these key support staff.

Figure A shows that there were 21,200 fewer (-9.5%) school bus drivers employed in August 2025 compared with August 2019. The private sector has experienced the largest decrease in employment, despite making up a small share of overall school bus driver employment. There are 12,800 fewer private school bus drivers than in 2019, a decrease of more than a quarter (-28.8%). State and local government school bus driver employment is down overall as well, but much less dramatically (-4.6%).

In the last year, school bus driver employment has grown modestly by around 2,300 jobs.1 This small increase (1.1%) is a step in the right direction, but the trend of the last few years remains mostly flat. Employment growth has been much stronger in the public sector than for privately employed bus drivers. State and local government school bus driver employment has increased by almost 9,900 since the fall of 2024, but private employment has fallen by 8,200 jobs over the same period.

To account for small sample sizes in the Current Population Survey (CPS), our employment analysis uses a 12-month rolling average of data, which means figures reported for August 2025 include data from September 2024. August 2025 data is currently the most recent CPS data available due to the ongoing government shutdown.

Figure A

Rising wages may be driving recent increase in school bus driver employment

The recent increase in school bus driver employment appears to be driven by rising wages for these workers. Recruitment for school bus drivers can be difficult because it often requires a “split-shift” schedule coinciding with the beginning and ending of the school day. It is also a low-wage job, which contributes to school bus drivers experiencing poverty at greater rates than other employed workers. However, Figure B shows that hourly wages have grown steadily over the last year. In August 2025, the median hourly wage for school bus drivers was $22.45, 4.2% greater than last year when accounting for inflation.2

This level of wage growth has not been the norm over the past 15 years. For much of the 2010s, wages for these workers mostly stagnated. Austerity and budget cuts in the 2010s not only contributed to a steady decrease in school bus driver employment but also meant there were few resources available for school districts to invest in school bus driver wages. The apparent wage growth in 2020 was likely influenced by the large compositional changes in the labor market during the pandemic, when large numbers of workers—including bus drivers—dropped out of the labor force.  These dramatic changes in the labor force, in conjunction with the challenges of administering the CPS during the pandemic, mean we shouldn’t draw meaningful conclusions about wages for these workers during that period. More recently, the wage growth for school bus drivers in the last year stands out as a much-needed investment in this critical segment of the education workforce.

Figure B

Other education support occupations still face shortages

Bus drivers were not the only education support occupation that experienced large declines in employment during the pandemic. In 2022, we documented significant employment losses in K–12 education overall, including teaching assistants, school custodians, and teachers. Figure C shows the change in employment between August 2019 and August 2025 for all K–12 education and key occupational categories. Overall education employment slightly exceeds its 2019 levels (1.4%), but the recovery has been uneven across occupation groups. The number of paraprofessionals (teaching assistants and early childhood educators) has grown 16.5% since 2019. However, administrative staff are slightly below their 2019 employment level (-3.0%), while teachers (-4.3%) and food service workers (-4.3%) have experienced more marked declines. Custodian employment is 12.4% below its 2019 levels, an even larger decrease than what school bus drivers have experienced.

Figure C

Federal policy changes threaten recent progress, showing need for state and local action

The recovery in overall education employment has been fueled by the use of pandemic relief funds provided by Congress in 2020 and 2021. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) allocated $189.5 billion to public K–12 schools to address the impact of the pandemic and reopen safely and effectively. Even for occupations like school bus drivers which have not seen a full recovery, the progress made in the last year has been heavily supported by these federal dollars. These funds ran out at the end of the 2024–2025 school year, and it is too early to say whether the end of this support will reverse this progress.

The Trump administration’s actions are also creating instability for these workers. The Trump administration is gutting the Department of Education, and with it, the oversight of billions of dollars that go to low-income school districts, civil rights protections for students, and special education programs. More threats to public education are on the way, including the creation of a national school voucher program in the Republican-passed reconciliation bill. When fully implemented, this program is likely to expand the use of school vouchers, which will drain resources from public school systems.

A healthy K–12 public education system needs strong bus driver wage growth to continue to bring more workers into the occupation, but instability at the federal level could jeopardize those trends as school districts scramble to account for changes in funding. Bus drivers play a vital role in providing a safe, supportive, and effective K–12 education system. In the face of tremendous federal threats, state and local lawmakers must do everything they can to shore up resources for public schools.

Notes

1. Total bus driver employment includes federal, state and local government, and private-sector workers.

2. School bus drivers tend to work fewer hours than typical workers, but weekly wages are also growing steadily (4.4% growth year-over-year).

All children deserve to attend welcoming and well-funded schools where they can learn and grow, regardless of race, disability, or income. But funding for public schools, where nearly 90% of all U.S. students learn, is at a near crisis point. The Trump administration’s goals, which are taken right out of Project 2025, seem to be to defund public education to the point that it doesn’t work, then offer private school vouchers as a solution to a manufactured problem. In this post, we highlight five ways public education is on fire in the United States and the damage this will do to students’ abilities to learn and thrive. Instead of cutting funds, lawmakers should invest in public schools, one of the best tools we still have to build a prosperous, equitable country.

Alarm level 1: COVID-19 relief funding for public schools is winding down. In some cases, the administration is ending it prematurely

This academic year (2024–2025) marks the end of the financial support schools were receiving to address the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief III funds (ESSER III). The COVID-19 pandemic, and the changing learning environments that ensued, meant that schools needed funds to address the significant academic, social, emotional, physical, and mental health needs of their students. This funding was distributed in recent years with the last distribution, ESSER III, worth a total of $122 billion allocated to districts around the country. Many students, especially those living in poverty, have not recovered from pandemic-related learning loss. The end of this funding means that districts will now have fewer resources to help students get back on track. Rigorous research has demonstrated that this federal aid to public schools was highly successful, with measurable improvements to student outcomes in states and districts where more aid was spent. Taking the educational challenges imposed by the pandemic seriously would mean recognizing the high value this aid has provided.

However, in late March, the Trump administration canceled extensions that had been granted to states to spend remaining ESSER funds. Effectively, districts are losing out on the funding allocated to them in the form of COVID-19 relief funds. Canceled extensions represent almost $3 billion in lost funding that had already been committed to tutoring services, reading interventions, building improvements, and more. Clawing back these funds jeopardizes improved academic outcomes for many students and their ability to learn in healthy and safe environments. The administration’s refusal to reimburse school districts for funding that has already been spent could force them to cut teaching and other staff positions to make up the cost, ultimately harming students.

Alarm level 2: The administration is lawlessly dismantling the Department of Education and attacking inclusive schools

The winding down and clawing back of ESSER funding are simultaneously occurring at a time when President Trump signed executive orders to (1) dismantle the Department of Education and “return the funding to the states” and (2) regulate curriculum taught in the more than 13,000 public schools in the country.

One order directed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to shut down several functions of the Department of Education (ED) and send them back to the states. Prior to this order, the White House had directed the ED to lay off 1,300 employees, a directive that is currently in litigation. The other order resulted in a “Dear Colleague letter” from Secretary McMahon demanding that states certify that they will not engage in “illegal DEI practices” as a condition of receiving the federal funds (This order is also currently in litigation.). As it stands, much of the Department of Education funding goes directly to state and local school systems. The ED provides targeted funding to public schools for special education through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and supports high-poverty districts through Title I grants. These grants make up for shortfalls in funding that high-poverty districts experience when they get funding from local sources.

To be clear, closing the Department of Education, and reappropriating major funding programs requires an act of Congress, and it is local school districts who have control over what is taught in schools—not federal regulators. Thus, while these executive orders have the potential to inflict a lot of damage, it’s unclear whether these orders can proceed without running afoul of federal laws. If these orders result in delays in funding distributions or outright cuts, students could experience declines in academic achievement, exacerbating existing racial and income disparities and limiting students’ long-term opportunities. If President Trump acts outside of his authority to slash the agencies’ work, the guardrails will essentially be pulled off this funding, which is extremely effective at redistributing funds based on district need. President Trump says he’ll return money to states for them to distribute it, potentially creating a situation where states have to compete for funds. This would create a patchwork in public funding for public schools, one in which some districts risk falling even further behind.

Alarm level 3: Lawmakers are pushing a mounting wave of voucher programs, an increasingly large cost to state-funded education

While many school districts struggle to maintain basic education funding, school privatization efforts are continuing throughout the country, and states like Arizona, Florida, and Ohio are notorious for the budget-breaking cost of universal voucher programs.

Figure A shows the current cost of voucher programs as a share of K–12 education funding in states where over 5% of the budget is currently going to school voucher programs. In the current school year (fiscal year 2025), voucher costs make up anywhere from 5% for states with early voucher programs to upwards of 25% of the entire public education budget for states with mature programs.

Figure A

Because statewide private school voucher programs are funded with state dollars, voucher spending is shown as a proportion of state education funding rather than state and local funding. On average, about 46% of funding for K–12 schools comes from state revenue sources. In states with voucher programs, private schools divert state dollars that could otherwise be available to public schools. For now, local funding for public schools is protected from diversion to voucher programs, although some states with voucher programs are also threatening this source of public school funding by cutting or eliminating property taxes.

Vouchers degrade the quality of education for students who use them

Time and time again research has shown that vouchers harm academic outcomes. Causal studies across three states and Washington, D.C., demonstrate negative effects on test scores for students who use a voucher to switch from public to private school. These test score declines can persist over two years or more and are comparable or worse than declines due to COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, students who leave private schools and return to public schools have experienced increased academic achievement. While some may argue that test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that private school students fare better academically than their public school peers, this is more a reflection of the parents’ socioeconomic status and education level than the impact of private schooling on students. Research also suggests vouchers do not reliably improve high school graduation and college attendance rates. Because of these reasons, lawmakers looking to improve student outcomes should not pursue vouchers.

School vouchers have costs for students who remain in public school

In addition to the direct costs that the state incurs for school vouchers, school districts experience an additional cost when they lose students to private school: the cost of providing the same level of education for fewer students in public education. This cost is entirely borne by the students who remain in public education, even though they affirmatively did not make the choice to take up vouchers. When students leave public schools with a voucher, the school districts must still pay the same amount for costs that can’t immediately adjust to declines in enrollment, such as cooling/heating and utilities. These required payments for a district’s fixed costs mean that districts will have even less to spend on the costs that can adjust due to changes in enrollment. What this means is that public school students who remain in public school will have less funding allocated to them for adjustable costs like teaching, curriculum development, and pupil support services due to other students taking up voucher programs. (To calculate this cost for your district, see EPI’s fiscal externality calculator).

Alarm level 4: National voucher proposals threaten public schools throughout the country

Beyond state voucher programs, Congress is considering national voucher proposals. This would enlarge the scope of vouchers beyond Republican-controlled states. The Educational Choice for Children Act, or ECCA, (H.R. 817, S.292) is a proposal to create a national voucher program. The program would divert over $10 billion per year in tax dollars to private schools and families who homeschool. The bill would do this by establishing a new dollar-for-dollar tax credit for individuals and corporations that make charitable contributions to organizations that give scholarships— or vouchers—for students to attend private schools. Donors who give corporate stocks would receive more back in tax cuts than the after-tax value of the stocks if they had sold them. 

Beyond vouchers harming student educational outcomes, the program itself would be extremely expensive. The bill proposes that Congress allocate $10 billion in tax credits for the voucher programs. But that doesn’t even account for the cost of voucher programs to public schools. The sponsors of the bill estimate that ECCA would provide vouchers for 2 million students. Given that at least two-thirds of students who take up vouchers previously attended private school, we can estimate that 666,667 voucher recipients will come from public school, which is about 1.4% of total public school students. Using our fiscal externality calculator, we estimate that students who remain in public schools would lose an average of $151 per pupil, and public school systems would lose a total of $6.225 billion dollars due to a national voucher scheme.

Alarm level 5: Tax cuts reduce available revenue for public schools

Many states are following a recent trend of reducing revenue available for schools through sweeping tax cuts. Corporate and personal income tax revenue represents about half of state tax revenue, which, in turn, funds about half of K–12 education budgets. From 2021 through 2024, 28 states passed personal or corporate income tax cuts, which will result in hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue by 2028, and more states are considering or have passed income tax cuts in 2025. At the same time, some states are cutting and attempting to eliminate property taxes, which account for over a third of revenue for K–12 education on average. States that want to invest in opportunity and long-term economic prosperity and to help their students continue recovering from pandemic-related learning loss should reverse this harmful trend.

Conclusion: What would happen if we boosted public school funding instead?

Given the real and damaging threats to public school funding, we conclude by asking what students actually need to succeed. Growing evidence over the last decade shows that public schooling in the United States simply needs more resources to deliver even better student achievement—not some radical disruption in how it is delivered and by what institutions.

For example, research has shown that school finance reforms between 1972 and 2010 led to a 10% increase in school spending for 12 years, which increased high school graduation rates, wages and family incomes in adulthood for children from districts with the spending increase. Others have similarly found that a $1,000 increase in per-pupil spending for low-income districts would reduce the test score gap between low- and high-income school districts within a state by nearly 40% of the baseline gap.

Increasing funding, rather than withholding federal aid or using public dollars to pay for private schooling, is the path forward for public schools. Public schools have fallen short in many communities because of lawmakers’ choices to underfund them. But the only education system that can fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all children, regardless of race, disability, or income, is a fully funded system of public schools. Lawmakers interested in building prosperous communities should invest in public schools rather than defunding and privatizing them.

Public schools, especially schools that serve students of color, are facing severe staffing shortages that threaten students’ ability to learn. Even with the staffing improvements made possible by COVID-related fiscal relief, CPS per-pupil spending levels are not sufficient to meet recognized educational adequacy benchmarks. CPS’s 2025 budget should target maintaining recent spending levels to support the recruitment and retention of qualified staff, particularly in low-income neighborhoods and schools that serve students of color.

Maintaining school staffing with COVID relief funds was essential to student learning during the pandemic

There were three tranches of ESSER funds. Two were distributed in 2020, but the largest by far was ESSER III, with a total of $122 billion allocated to districts around the country as part of the American Rescue Plan in 2021. School districts were given tremendous latitude in exactly how they wanted to spend that money, but ESSER’s central intent was to improve student learning outcomes. Among its key purposes was a mandate to “address the significant academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs of their students” and to “address the disruptions to teaching and learning resulting from the pandemic.” ESSER III funds must be spent by the end of January 2025, and CPS has already spent 88% of the $1.86 billion it received. This relief, along with additional COVID funding from the American Rescue Plan and the governor’s Emergency Relief fund, amounted to $3,428 per student in 2021, allowing for a 23% increase in per-pupil spending for elementary and secondary education in CPS.

One of the most pressing challenges facing schools over the past few years has been staff shortages. Schools nationwide shed more than 700,000 staff—almost 10% of their entire workforce—during the first two months of the COVID pandemic, as schools shut down and public revenues declined. It took more than three years for numbers to recover, but significant shortfalls still remain. Further, the stresses on student achievement imposed by the pandemic almost surely require higher per-pupil resources in coming years than pre-pandemic standards.

One of the key reasons for persistent staffing shortages in schools has been that pay for educators has failed to keep up with other jobs. Teacher wages are 26.4% below the incomes of similarly educated workers in other industries, and wages of bus drivers and food service workers are substantially below the median worker’s wage. Schools that service majority students of color are more likely to face staff shortages than schools in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Staff shortages in schools are most harmful to students from low-income families. EPI has shown that schools with a higher share of low-income students need more staffing—including more counselors, teachers, nurses, and classroom aides—to provide an adequate education compared with schools in high-income areas.

ESSER funds were well-suited to help school districts address staffing shortages. The key purpose of ESSER was to support student learning, and hiring new staff and retaining current staff are integral to that purpose.

Chicago Public Schools should maintain needed investments in staffing

Given that 76% of CPS students come from low-income families, CPS’s decision to spend nearly half of its ESSER funds on staffing was the right choice. Importantly, this spending did not just maintain existing staff levels. While just 37% of school districts nationally used ESSER funds to create new staffing positions, CPS has added more than 5,000 staff over the past four years. Chicago students were well-served by having more staff, including hundreds of tutors and instructional coaches.

Between 2019–2024, CPS increased staffing in every category. They more than doubled the number of social workers, from 308 to 691. They doubled nurses, from 322 to 661. They created a new position—advocates for students experiencing housing insecurity—and hired 50 of them. They created 306 new case manager positions to coordinate work with students who needed additional help. They also added 575 new custodians, 169 counselors, and more than quintupled the number of instructional coaches, going from 47 to 259.

The wisdom of CPS’s investments in these personnel has been borne out by academic research showing how strongly Chicago students have recovered from the pandemic. According to analysis of large urban school districts nationwide by the Council of Great City Schools, Chicago students were ranked first in reading and 13th in math. While most school districts nationwide are still below their pre-pandemic levels in reading, Chicago is doing better than it was in 2019. The results were even better for Black and Hispanic students. This is a remarkable achievement that shows the importance of increased staffing supports for students. Other research looking at districts across the country shows that federal pandemic relief for education was highly effective for aiding student achievement during the post-pandemic period.

Even with extra relief funding, Chicago Public Schools spending is not adequate

The temporary surge of ESSER funds provided a welcome boost to educational spending in Chicago, but per-pupil spending is still below funding levels required to provide an adequate education. In addition to providing basic funding for instruction, strong school systems try to compensate for factors beyond a state’s control that nevertheless impact a student’s education, such as student poverty or labor costs, by diverting funding into areas that need it the most. Under this principal of school finance, for a given outcome goal such as the average score on a standardized test, funding should be allocated based on student population need and the surrounding labor market and community, with more money going to higher poverty districts and less money going to wealthier districts. New data on school finance adequacy compares actual per-pupil spending with estimated per-pupil spending levels needed for the district to achieve the common benchmark of national average test scores. In 2021, the most recent year we have data from the National Center for Education Statistics, CPS was able to raise their per-pupil spending by 23% from $14,788 to $18,216 with COVID relief spending, of which the ESSER program funded the majority. Yet, this still falls short of adequacy benchmarks estimated by researchers ($21,000 per pupil in Chicago). This adequacy measure provides key context for calls to continue spending at least at levels made possible by federal relief.

ESSER funds allowed Chicago Public Schools to not just weather the pandemic but also strengthen the school system and improve outcomes for children. The end of ESSER funds should not lead CPS to change directions. CPS students, especially those in low-income parts of the city, need adequate staffing to have the best chance at a good education. CPS should continue its focus on recruiting and retaining qualified educators.

No book in the second half of the 20th century did more, unintentionally perhaps, to undermine support for public education, and thus diminish educational opportunities for so many children, especially Black and Hispanic children, to this day. The book and its aftermath put the onus solely on teacher performance when it came to student achievement, disregarding so many critically important socioeconomic factors—at the top of the list, residential segregation.

How did it do that?

The book described an experiment conducted in Ms. Jacobson’s school in 1965. The authors gave pupils an IQ test and then randomly divided the test takers into two groups. They falsely told teachers that results showed that students in one of the groups were poised to dramatically raise their performance in the following year, while the others would not likely demonstrate similar improvement.

At the end of that year, they tested students again and found that the first and second graders in the group that was predicted to improve did so on average, while those in the other group did not. The book, as well as academic articles that Dr. Rosenthal and Ms. Jacobson published, claimed that the experiment showed that teacher expectations had a powerful influence on student achievement, especially of young children. Pupils whose teachers were told were more likely to improve then apparently worked harder to meet their teachers’ faith in them.1

Some psychologists were skeptical, believing that the experimental design was not sufficiently rigorous to support such a revolutionary conclusion. Even the reported results were ambiguous. Teacher expectations had no similar impact on children in grades three through six. Similar experiments elsewhere did not confirm the results even for first and second graders.2

Nonetheless, the book was very influential.

In the decades after Pygmalion, other studies examined teacher expectations. They showed that teachers have greater expectations of higher achieving students but couldn’t determine whether the teacher attitudes helped to cause better pupil performance. Perhaps teachers only developed those expectations after seeing that students were higher achieving.3 Only an experimental study, like Pygmalion, could establish causality, but contemporary ethical standards would often prohibit such experiments, requiring, as they must, lying to teachers about their students’ data.

Minority children in the South San Francisco school where Rosenthal and Jacobson experimented were Mexican-origin, not African American. Yet ignoring how scanty the evidence was, education policymakers concluded from their research that the Black-white gap in test scores at all grade levels resulted from teachers of Black children not expecting their pupils to do well. And that, they reasoned, should be an easy problem to solve—holding teachers accountable for results would force them to abandon the racial stereotypes that were keeping children behind.

The accountability movement grew in intensity during the Bill Clinton administration, while in Texas, Governor George W. Bush implemented a mandatory standardized testing program whose publicized results, he thought, would force teachers to improve by shaming them for the lower scores of their poorer Black and Hispanic pupils.

In 2000, Bush was elected president; his campaign promised to demolish teachers’ “soft bigotry of low expectations.” During his first year in office, he led a bipartisan congressional majority to adopt the “No Child Left Behind Act” that required every state to conduct annual standardized testing in reading and math for pupils in the third through eighth grades. 

Shortly after the bill was signed, I met with the congressional staffer who had been primarily responsible for writing the legislation. She predicted that within two years, the publication of test scores would so embarrass teachers that they would work harder, with the result that racial differences in academic achievement would evaporate entirely.

Nothing of that sort has happened. Although test performance of both Black and white students has improved somewhat, the gap is not much different than it was two decades ago. But the public reputation of our teaching force has continued to deteriorate, as a conclusion spread that failure to equalize test results could be remedied by gimmicks like naming a school’s classrooms for the Ivy League colleges that teachers expected their students to attend.4 

Enthusiasm for charter schools escalated from a belief that operators could choose teachers with higher expectations, yet charter schools have not done any better (and in many cases worse) in closing the gap, once the sector’s ability to select students less likely to fail (and expel students who do) is taken into account.5

In 2008, I taught an education policy course for master’s degree candidates, many of whom had taught for two years in the Teach for America (TFA) program. It placed recent college graduates without teacher credentials in schools for lower-income Black and Hispanic students. Funded heavily by private philanthropies, TFA embraced the low-expectations theory of below-average performance. Prior to their teaching assignments, TFA corps members were required to attend a summer institute whose curriculum featured a unit entitled “The Power of My Own Expectations” and required them to embrace the “mindset” of “I am totally responsible for the academic achievement of my students.”

None of my master’s degree students claimed that in their two years of teaching, their high expectations actually produced unusually high achievement. But most were so immunized against evidence and experience that they enrolled in a graduate program with the intention of creating new charter schools infused with high expectations. Only a few wondered what had gone wrong with their theory, besides having goals that still weren’t high enough.

Certainly, there are teachers with low expectations and harmful racial stereotypes, and it would be beneficial if those who can’t be trained to improve were removed from the profession. But I’ve visited many schools serving disadvantaged students. Most teachers I observed, white and Black, were dedicated, hard-working, engaged with their students, and frustrated about the social and economic challenges with which children daily came to school. I don’t claim that my observations were representative; I was more likely to be invited to visit schools that took great pride in their efforts, despite conditions they struggled to overcome.

No matter how high their expectations, teachers can’t do much about:

• their pupils’ higher rates of lead poisoning that impact cognitive ability;
• more frequent asthma—the result of living with more pollution, near industrial facilities, in less-well maintained buildings with more vermin in the environment—that may bring them to school drowsy from being awake at night, wheezing;
• neighborhoods without supermarkets that sell fresh and healthy food;
• stress intensified by being stopped and frisked by police without cause, and a discriminatory criminal justice system that disproportionately imprisons their fathers and brothers for trivial offenses;
• frequent moves due to rising rents, or landlords’ failure to keep units in habitable condition;6
• absenteeism from a need to stay home to care for younger siblings while parents race from one low-wage job to another;
• poor health from living in neighborhoods with fewer primary care physicians or dentists;
• lower parental education levels that result in less academic support at home, combined with less adequate access to technology, a problem exacerbated since the pandemic;7
• and many other socioeconomic impediments to learning.8

Not every Black child suffers from these deprivations that affect their ability to take full advantage of the education that schools offer. But many do. Concentrating disadvantaged pupils in poorly resourced schools in poorly resourced and segregated neighborhoods overwhelms instructional and support staffs.

Such realities contributed to my conclusion that residential segregation, not low teacher expectations, was the most serious problem faced by U.S. education. It is what led to my recent books, The Color of Law, and its sequel (co-authored by my daughter, Leah Rothstein), Just Action; How to challenge segregation enacted under the Color of Law.

Robert Rosenthal’s Pygmalion theory set the stage for a national willingness to deny educational disparities’ true causes: the unconstitutional and unlawful public policies that imposed racial segregation upon our nation.

Endnotes

1. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. 1968. Pygmalion in the Classroom: teacher expectation and pupils’ intellectual development. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). For a technical summary by the authors, see. Rosenthal and Jacobson, “Pygmalion in the Classroom.” The Urban Review 3, September, 1968: 16-20.

2. See “Pygmalion in the Classroom.” The Urban Review 3, September, 1968, footnote on p. 19.

3. For example, see Thomas L. Good, Natasha Sterzinger, and Alyson Lavigne. 2018. “Expectation Effects: Pygmalion and the initial 20 years of research.” Educational Research and Evaluation 24 (3-5): 99-123.

4. See, for example, Richard Rothstein. 2010. “An overemphasis on teachers.” Commentary, Economic Policy Institute, October 18.  https://www.epi.org/publication/an_overemphasis_on_teachers/

5. Martin Carnoy, et al. 2005. The Charter School Dust-Up. (Washington, D.C.: The Economic Policy Institute), https://www.epi.org/publication/book_charter_school/

6. For example, see “Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds.” NPR, January 25. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1225957874/housing-unaffordable-for-record-half-all-u-s-renters-study-finds

7. In early 2020, I wrote that the pandemic would widen the achievement gap. The consequences turned out to be worse than I could have imagined. Teacher expectations had nothing to do with it. Richard Rothstein. 2020. “The Coronavirus Will Explode Achievement Gaps in Education.” Shelterforce.org, April 13. https://shelterforce.org/2020/04/13/the-coronavirus-will-explode-achievement-gaps-in-education/

8. Richard Rothstein. 2004. Class and Schools. Using social, economic, and educational reform to close the black–white achievement gap. (Washington, D.C.: The Economic Policy Institute), https://www.epi.org/publication/books_class_and_schools/

Introduction 

For more than a decade, academics and education policy experts have raised concerns about a widespread shortage of teachers in the United States.1 The first wave of warnings came in response to the drastic cuts in state and local spending on education following the Great Recession. But teacher shortages remained a significant challenge for the nation’s public education system long after the immediate effects of the Great Recession wore off. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic ignited a new round of concerns.

In this report, we use data from a wide range of sources to document the size and scope of the teacher shortage. The data show that the teacher shortage is both widespread and acute across several dimensions, from subject matter specialties to school poverty status. We also review data that point to the two most important drivers of the shortage:

• the declining compensation in the teaching profession relative to other occupations that employ college graduates
• and the increasingly stressful work environment teachers face, a long-standing reality that has been greatly exacerbated by COVID-19.

Our key finding is that the current shortage is generally not the result of an insufficient number of potentially qualified teachers.2 The shortage is, instead, a shortfall in the number of qualified teachers willing to work at current wages and under current working conditions. The combination of substandard teacher compensation and highly stressful working conditions has, in recent decades, made teaching a much less attractive profession than alternatives available to workers with college degrees.3

Low pay and high stress are, and have been for many years, the major barriers to meeting the national demand for teachers. A shortage of this nature––driven by poor pay and stressful working conditions––will not be ameliorated simply by increasing the potential number of qualified teachers.

Teacher shortages are widespread and long-standing

Researchers using data from a variety of sources have documented a long-standing and widespread shortage of teachers—overall, by subject area, by racial and ethnic composition of schools’ students, by poverty status, by geography, and by other dimensions.4 In this report, we focus on: the large and growing share of unfilled teaching vacancies; the rising share of teachers leaving their jobs each year; and the declining interest in the teaching profession, which is reflected in falling enrollment in and completion of teacher preparation programs. We show that all these trends long predate the COVID-19 pandemic but have grown more acute since 2020.5

A central challenge for research on teacher shortages is how to define and measure the demand for teachers, the supply of teachers, and any gap between the two. To measure demand, researchers have generally taken school administrators’ determination of the number and kinds of teachers they would like to hire each year. To measure supply, many researchers use the total number of people of working age who are, or who easily could become, qualified to teach. This group includes adults who have postsecondary degrees in education or who have completed less traditional teacher preparation programs.

To estimate the demand for teachers, we follow most existing research and use school administrators’ assessment of the number of teaching positions needed to fulfill their educational goals as a reasonable and practical estimate of the “demand” for teachers. However, we emphasize that school administrators make staffing decisions based on current budgets and their best estimates of likely future budgets. The demand for teachers, therefore, depends on both educational considerations and the financial constraints facing public school administrators.

With respect to teacher supply, we argue that the supply of teachers is not well captured by simply summing the number of adults who already are, or who could quickly become, qualified to teach in public K–12 schools. As some researchers have emphasized, at any given point in time “supply” defined in this way is likely to be large relative to the number of unfilled vacancies.6 We argue that this approach ignores crucial features of the current teacher shortage, including long-standing problems with pay and stress that discourage qualified teachers from filling existing vacancies.

Vacancies

We begin with the data on vacancies for teaching positions. Each of the data sources we draw on below has strengths and weaknesses, but together they paint a consistent picture of schools working harder and harder—and increasingly failing—to fill openings for their available teaching positions.

Teacher Shortage Areas data

Each year since the 1990–1991 school year, the Department of Education has asked state governments to report on teacher shortages by subject area in their states. The Department of Education compiles the responses and issues an annual report on “Teacher Shortage Areas” (TSA), which allows us to identify the shortages in a wide range of subject areas, over more than two decades, separately for each state.7

In the year before the COVID-19 pandemic began, education researchers Pennington McVey and Trinidad (2019) produced a comprehensive analysis of the TSA data covering school years 1998–1999 through 2017–2018. Their analysis illustrates two important features of the national teacher shortage.

First, state reports of shortages were substantially higher at the end of the period they studied than they were at the beginning, with most of the increase taking place between the school years 2003–2004 and 2008–2009, and holding roughly steady at elevated levels thereafter. In nine of the 10 subject areas that Pennington McVey and Trinidad identified as most likely to be experiencing a shortage, fewer than 30% of states reported shortages in those areas at the beginning of the period studied (1998–1999). But by the 2017–2018 school year, between 25% and 90% of states were reporting shortages in these particularly shortage-prone subject areas (Pennington McVey and Trinidad 2019, Figure 5). The increase in reported shortages was evident even for the 14 subject areas identified as least likely to experience shortages. In the first three school years studied (1998–1999 to 2000–2001), fewer than 10% of states reported shortages in any of these 14 relatively low-shortage subject areas. By 2017–2018, between 10% and 35% of states reported teacher shortages in nine of these same 14 subject areas (Pennington McVey and Trinidad 2019, Figure 8).8

The second important feature captured in the TSA data is that while shortages are widespread, they are particularly acute in some subject areas. The top 10 subject areas experiencing teacher shortages in the Pennington McVey and Trinidad analysis were: special education, mathematics, science, foreign language, English language arts, English as a second language, “career tech,” arts, social science, and librarian.

State teacher workforce reports

One limitation of the TSA data is that the survey reports whether a state is experiencing a shortage in a particular subject area, but does not provide information on the size of the shortage. As Pennington McVey and Trinidad note, in the TSA data a report of a shortage could indicate “one or 1,000” vacancies.9 An analysis by the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) (n.d.), however, provides one estimate of the scale of teacher shortages using data covering the 2015–2016 and the 2016–2017 school years, close to the end of the period studied in the Pennington McVey and Trinidad analysis.

LPI reviewed teacher workforce reports prepared by 40 states. These states reported either the number of unfilled teaching vacancies or the total number of teachers “not fully certified for the teaching assignments,” or both. Summing those numbers and extrapolating them to include the states that did not report data, LPI estimates that public schools nationally were operating 108,000 teachers below what was needed to fully staff vacancies with teachers certified for their assignments.10 LPI also warns “that these data also most likely underrepresent the extent and impact of shortages because districts often address shortages by canceling courses, increasing class sizes, or starting the school year with substitute teachers.”

Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data

The LPI analysis provides a careful estimate of the number of teacher vacancies at a specific point in time prior to the 2020 pandemic. With some limitations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) allows us to look at the size of vacancies over the entire period from 2000 through the present. The JOLTS tracks monthly job openings (vacancies), new hires, quits, layoffs, and firings on a consistent basis across the entire economy and by specific industries, including the state and local government education sector. JOLTS does not publish separate estimates for public school teachers. Teachers, however, are about 44% of the workforce in state and local public education,11 so the trends visible in the JOLTS data give some insight into the experience of public K–12 teachers.12

Consistent with the idea that schools have found it increasingly difficult to attract enough teachers, the JOLTS data show a long, steady increase in vacancies between roughly the end of the Great Recession and 2019 (Figure A). Between 2001 and 2012, for example, monthly vacancies in the sector averaged 1.1% of total employment. By 2015–2019, the average vacancy rate had increased by 60% to a monthly average of 1.7%.

Figure A

The JOLTS vacancy data also report a further, sharp increase in monthly vacancy rates during the pandemic—despite an initial collapse at the onset of the pandemic. From 2020 to the present, the vacancy rate has averaged 2.7%, well above the 1.7% rate for 2015–2019 and more than two-and-a-half times the 1.1% rate for 2001–2012.

Meanwhile, monthly quit rates in the JOLTS data for state and local public education also rose steadily after the end of the Great Recession, suggesting that a growing share of workers in the sector were leaving their jobs each month even before the pandemic. Between 2001 and 2012, the quit rate averaged 0.6% per month. From 2015 through 2019 that rate rose to 0.8%, and after an initial dip in quits at the beginning of the pandemic the monthly quit rate rose to an average of 0.9% in 2021 and 2022.

Despite rising vacancy and quit rates after the Great Recession, new hires in the sector remained flat, holding close to the 1.4% average level for the entire pre-pandemic period 2001–2019 (Figure B). This lack of responsiveness of hires to rising vacancies suggests that the shortages reported in other survey data reflect an unwillingness of potential teachers to accept jobs given the compensation and working conditions on offer. The simultaneous rise in the quit rate (Figure A) also reinforces the idea that teaching jobs are becoming less desirable.13

Figure B

The pandemic caused major disruptions to the long-term hiring patterns in state and local government education. Shortly after March 2020, layoffs spiked (not shown) and new hires dropped sharply (Figure B). Substantial federal aid early in the pandemic allowed local and state public education to reverse course and rehire a large share—but not all—of those initially laid off.14 Even though new hires have been above historical averages since the start of 2021, hiring has remained consistently below vacancies since January 2018.

School Pulse Panel data

While the TSA and JOLTS data document that education vacancies have been rising for at least a decade, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) School Pulse Panel (SPP) provides independent evidence that COVID-19 has aggravated the shortage. The SPP, a new survey implemented in response to the pandemic, has been sampling school and district staff monthly at about 2,400 public elementary, middle, and high schools during the 2021–2022 school year.15 Recently released results covering January 2022 found that 10% of all public schools reported that 10% or more of teaching positions were vacant; an additional 13% of schools reported that 5%–10% of teaching positions were vacant; and only 56% of schools reported they were operating without teaching vacancies (Figure C). Half of schools (51%) said that vacancies were caused by resignations; 21% said vacancies were the result of retirement. Almost one-third (30%) stated that vacancies were the result of creating new staff positions (IES 2022a).

Figure C

The SPP data also show that vacancy rates were higher on average in schools with higher shares of students of color. One in every eight schools (13%) with 75% or more students of color had teacher vacancies in excess of 10% of total teaching staff, versus 7% in schools where students of color made up less than 25% of students. Teacher vacancy rates have also been consistently higher in schools in high-poverty areas. Fifteen percent of schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, for example, had teacher vacancies of 10% or higher, compared with 8% in low-poverty neighborhoods.

The most recent data from the SPP, covering August 2022, found that the educator shortage has continued into the current school year, with “53% of public schools…reporting feeling understaffed entering the 2022–2023 school year” (IES 2022b).

The SPP data also reinforce the earlier findings of the TSA survey that shortages are most acute in some specialties, particularly special education (45% of schools reporting vacant teaching positions), mathematics (16%), English or language arts (13%), English learner education (13%), and physical sciences (10%) (Figure D). But the SPP data also show almost one-third (31%) of schools reporting vacancies for “general elementary” teachers and one-fifth (20%) of schools reporting vacancies for substitute teachers, a problem that became particularly acute during the pandemic.

Figure D

American School District Panel data

A separate survey of over 350 school district leaders conducted between October and December of 2021 by RAND and partner organizations also found widespread evidence of teacher shortages after the pandemic (Figure E). Two-thirds (67%) of district leaders in traditional public school districts agreed that the pandemic has caused shortages of teachers and 95% agreed that the pandemic has caused shortages of substitutes (Schwartz and Diliberti 2022, Figure 1). In the case of substitute teachers, 93% of district leaders reported shortages were “moderate” (16%) or “considerable” (77%); for special education, 60% of district leaders reported shortages, with 19% moderate and 41% considerable; and for mathematics, 48% of district leaders reported shortages, with 16% moderate and 32% considerable. These shortages, however, were not confined to area specialties, with 54% responding that they had moderate or considerable shortages for “high school” teachers, 43% for “middle school” teachers, and 38% for “elementary school” teachers16 (Schwartz and Diliberti 2022, Figure 2).

Figure E

A summer 2022 nationally representative survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center of 255 principals and 280 district leaders had similar findings. Seventy-two percent of the school administrators said that there were not enough applicants to fill the teaching positions they had open for the 2022–2023 school year (Lieberman 2022).

Decline in interest in the teaching profession

At the same time that we have observed high and rising levels of vacancies, interest in entering the teaching profession has been on the decline. In addition to declining interest in majoring in education among incoming college freshmen across the U.S., there has been a decrease in the number of education degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, as well as a falling number of people completing nontraditional teacher preparation programs. These findings are consistent with the idea that teaching is becoming less attractive relative to other professions employing a high share of college graduates.

Falling interest in education as a field of study

For the past five decades, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Higher Education Research Institute has surveyed incoming college freshmen nationwide to learn more about their backgrounds, beliefs, and expectations. In addition to questions regarding the respondents’ political views, levels of empathy, tolerance, and openness, and the distance of their chosen college from home, the survey also asks: “What is your probable field of study?” Respondents can choose from “arts and humanities,” “business,” “education,” “engineering,” “health professions,” “mathematics or computer science,” “physical and life sciences,” “social sciences,” and “other and undecided.”

Figure F

Figure F illustrates the sharp decline since the early 2000s in the share of incoming college freshman intending to major in education. The percentage of students intending to study education remained steady at about 10% for much of the 1990s but fell to 4.3% by 2018. In 2000, interest in education (11.0%), health professions (9.8%), and social sciences (11.1%) was nearly level. By 2018, however, interest in education had fallen by more than half, even as interest in health professions grew by one-third to 13.1% and social sciences remained steady at 11.1%. The falling student interest in education majors is consistent with results of the 2022 Phi Delta Kappan survey, which found that only 37% of parents with children in public schools would like to have their child “take up teaching in the public schools as a career”—down from 75% in 1969 (Walker 2022).

Falling number of education degrees conferred

The falling interest in education majors is reflected in the data for education degrees conferred, which have declined steadily since the early 2010s. Figure G presents data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in education and selected other majors. The absolute number of education degrees conferred was substantially lower in 2018 than it was in 1970, and lower in 2018 than at any point in the entire period in the last five decades. More importantly, the relative standing of education dropped substantially over the period: In 1970, education degrees were more popular than degrees in business, health professions, and social sciences and history. By 2018, education was, by a substantial margin, the least popular choice of major among these same categories. 

Figure G

Nontraditional teacher prep programs don’t make up the difference

Meanwhile, nontraditional teacher preparation programs have not made up for the steep decline in bachelor’s degrees in education. The U.S. Department of Education tracks enrollment and completion in nontraditional teacher preparation programs as part of its Title II State Report Card. The Title II Report provides data on the total number of teacher preparation programs, the number of individuals enrolled, and the number of program completers by program type.

Figure H

Figure H illustrates the overall decline in the number of teacher preparation program completers, as well as the respective declines in completers in traditional and alternative programs. Although the number of traditional program completers remained steady between the 2008–2009 and 2010–2011 academic years, since the 2008–2009 academic year the number of traditional program completers has fallen by 34%. Over the same period, the number of alternative program completers fell by 18%, indicating that alternative program completers have not been able to make up for the decline in traditional program completers. While the Title II data show a large, steady increase in enrollment in nontraditional teacher preparation programs after 2014, the large and growing gap between initial enrollment and successful completion casts doubt on the ability of nontraditional programs, as currently structured, to contribute to the total supply of potentially qualified teachers.

Large shares of teacher prep graduates decide not to teach

The decline in interest in teaching is even worse than the preceding data on teacher preparation programs suggest because a large portion of those who complete traditional and nontraditional teacher preparation programs ultimately decide not to enter teaching or to leave the profession soon after entering. As Dee and Goldhaber (2017) note, “the number of education graduates produced annually far exceeds the number of teachers new to the labor market who are hired” (pp. 7–8). Pennington McVey and Trinidad (2019) estimate that “about half of teachers who have degrees in teaching do not teach” (p. 10).

Analysts skeptical of the existence of teacher shortages sometimes argue that the large number of potential teachers who are not teaching is evidence that there is not a teacher shortage.17 Alternatively, the declining interest in education majors, the fall in the number of education degrees conferred, and the large share of adults who invest in a teaching career and then decide not to pursue it all signal a long-term decline in the attractiveness of the teaching profession.

The teacher shortage is bigger than unfilled or underfilled vacancies

All the evidence of shortages that we have reported so far relied explicitly on school administrators’ assessments of the number of teachers needed based on their professional judgement and their understanding of the budget constraints they face. If schools were less financially constrained, the teacher shortage could be even larger than what the existing data already suggest.

A quick calculation can give a rough sense of how large the teacher shortage would be if school administrators were able to make staffing decisions based on educational goals, rather than strictly on financial constraints. A recent analysis by Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber (2022) used a national education cost model to estimate “the funding levels required to achieve the goal of national average math and reading scores” in all U.S. public schools, a goal that they identified as “modest but reasonable [and] common” (p. 2). Their comprehensive review of current spending levels and student outcomes (student results on standardized tests) concluded that achieving this benchmark of “universal adequacy” would require an increase of $132 billion in total local, state, and federal spending, which would represent an increase of 13% in total 2019 state and local spending.

If the 13% increase were spent in the same proportion as current spending, this would require a 13% increase in the number of teachers. Using the NCES estimate for 2019 of 3.2 million public K–12 teachers in the United States,18 the Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber (2022) “universal adequacy” target would have required 416,000 more teachers, even before the pandemic. Even if increases in teaching staff were only half as large as the overall percentage increase, the number of new teachers required over and above 2019 staffing levels would be more than 200,000.19

Main drivers of the teacher shortage

As we have emphasized, the United States does not have a shortage of individuals qualified (or potentially qualified) to teach in K–12 public schools. The teacher shortage we are experiencing is, instead, a shortage of qualified teachers who are also willing to work for current levels of compensation and under the working conditions currently on offer. Researchers have identified many factors that make teaching an increasingly less attractive profession.20 We focus here on two of those factors that are particularly important: the low pay relative to other professions requiring similar levels of formal education and the increasingly stressful working conditions.

Poor compensation

Almost all public K–12 teachers have at least a four-year college degree (96%); a large share also have advanced (56%) degrees.21 Teachers, however, consistently earn substantially less—in salary and benefits—than other workers with a similar level of formal education. Most importantly for our analysis, the gap between teacher pay and the pay of other college graduates has grown in recent decades. Financially, teaching is substantially less attractive now than it was before the teaching shortage emerged.

Current Population Survey data

Since the mid-2000s, our colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute have used data from the nationally representative Current Population Survey (CPS) to track the pay of teachers relative to other college graduates. Figure I summarizes their most recent findings (Allegretto 2022). In 2021, teachers made on average 23.5% less per week of work than other college graduates in the workforce, after controlling for workers’ education, age, state of residence, and a range of additional characteristics that may affect earnings. The teacher pay gap measured in this way has increased almost continuously since the mid-1990s, when it stood at about 5% overall.

Figure I

One potential objection to this analysis is that nonwage benefits (such as health insurance and retirement benefits) more than compensate for lower teacher salaries. However, even after accounting for the more generous benefits paid to teachers, teachers remained 14.1% behind their nonteaching counterparts.22 Moreover, the growth in benefits over the period was not enough to prevent the teacher compensation gap—including both salary and benefits—from rising in recent decades. Allegretto (2022) calculated that the total teacher compensation gap increased by 11.5 percentage points between 1993 and 2021.

A second potential objection is that teachers only work part of the year, while most workers with college degrees work year-round. To address this concern, the analysis in Figure I compares weekly, rather than annual, earnings of teachers and nonteachers.

To understand the role of pay in the teacher shortage, the most important feature of the data summarized in Figure F is that the relative earnings of teachers—measured on a consistent basis in each year—steadily declined over the last three decades. This finding implies that the earnings of teachers today relative to their college-educated counterparts are substantially lower than the earnings of teachers in the 1990s relative to their own college-educated counterparts in the same decade. This decline in the financial standing of teachers relative to other college graduates coincides with a sustained rise in unfilled teaching vacancies, an increase in the rate of teachers quitting their jobs, and a long-term decline in interest in the teaching profession.

American Community Survey data

A separate, recent analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS), another nationally representative survey of U.S. households, arrived at similar conclusions: “Although teachers are among the nation’s most educated workers, they earn far less on average than most other highly educated workers and their earnings have declined since 2010” (Cheeseman Newburger and Beckhusen 2022). According to the Census Bureau, the inflation-adjusted median annual earnings of all full-time, full-year workers—60% of whom have less than a four-year college degree—grew 2.6% between 2010 and 2019 (Figure J). Over the same period, median earnings for elementary and middle school teachers fell 8.4%, for high school teachers fell 4.4%, and for special education teachers, where shortages have been particularly acute, fell 3.9%.

Figure J

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data

International data compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggest that teacher pay in the United States is poor when compared with other rich countries. For 2019 (or the most recent year available), the OECD calculates the annual earnings of teachers in each country relative to the annual earnings of full-time, full-year workers with the equivalent of a college degree or more in the same country.

Figure K presents the OECD data on pay for primary school teachers. The relative pay for teachers in the United States is at the bottom—tied with Hungary—of the set of countries for which the OECD has data. In the United States, the annual earnings of public primary school teachers are 61% of the earnings of full-time, full-year workers with a college degree or more. By comparison, the ratio is 80% or higher in other rich countries, including Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Ireland, Slovenia, Israel, Australia, Finland, and Germany. Similar data for lower secondary and upper secondary school teachers (not shown here) show a similar pattern (OECD 2021).23

Figure K

The low level of relative teacher pay in the United States is particularly problematic given that OECD data also indicate that, on average, U.S. teachers work more hours per year than teachers in all other OECD countries. Figure L presents the corresponding annual hours data for primary school teachers; annual hours data for lower and upper secondary school teachers follow the same pattern.

Figure L

Stress

Teaching is stressful. Sources of teacher stress include long hours during the school year, large class sizes, juggling second jobs to supplement pay, evaluation processes that depend heavily on standardized testing results, discrimination against teachers of color, lack of control over the curriculum, and an increasingly politicized environment. 24 From the onset of the pandemic, teachers have also had to cope with a host of new stressors, including elevated health risks, complicated child care arrangements, and challenges involved in switching between in-person, remote, and hybrid learning.

These old and new sources of stress are a major driver of the rising level of unfilled teaching vacancies and the diminished interest in teaching. A recent survey conducted by the RAND Corporation of teachers who left teaching before and during the COVID-19 pandemic found that “stress was the most commonly reported reason for leaving the profession among both those teachers who left before and those teachers who left during the pandemic” (Diliberti, Schwartz, and Grant 2021, p. 10). Stress is particularly acute for teachers of color and contributes to their higher attrition rates.25

Pre-pandemic stress

Data from a variety of sources show that, even before the pandemic, teacher stress was as high as or higher than stress for workers in other professions, including occupations known for challenging working conditions.

A 2013 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey found that 46% of K–12 teachers experienced “stress during a lot of the day” immediately before they were interviewed by Gallup (Gallup 2014). This rate was as high as or higher than rates for nurses (46%), physicians (45%), managers or executives (43%), service workers (43%), and business owners (42%) who were asked the same question (Figure M).

Figure M

A 2017 study by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) interviewed 4,000 educators, including 830 randomly sampled AFT members, and found similarly high levels of stress. Almost one-fourth (23%) said work is “always stressful” and another 38% said work is “often stressful” (AFT and BAT 2017, Chart 1). The AFT also reported that one-fifth (21%) of respondents stated that their mental health was “not good” for 11 or more days in the preceding 30 days, double the 10% rate for working adults responding to a similar question in a 2014 National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) -sponsored survey (AFT and BAT 2017, Chart 7).

The NCES’s 2017–2018 school year National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) reported that more than one-fourth (27.8%) of public school teachers said that they “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement that “the stress and disappointments involved in teaching at this school aren’t really worth it” (NCES 2020b).

Pandemic-related stress

Unsurprisingly, measures of teacher stress have increased substantially since the pandemic. A January 2022 RAND Corporation survey of over 2,300 teachers found that 73% reported “frequent job-related stress,” just over twice the 35% rate in the nonteaching working population at the same point in time; 59% of teachers were experiencing burnout, compared with 44% of other working adults; and 28% had symptoms of depression, versus 17% for other workers (See Figure N, drawn from Steiner et al. 2022, p. 5).

Figure N

Steiner and Woo (2021, Figure 1) reported large differences in 2021 between a sample of teachers surveyed in RAND’s American Life Panel and all U.S. adults surveyed in the Understanding America Study conducted by the University of Southern California Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research. More than three-fourths (78%) of teachers reported experiencing “frequent job-related stress” compared with 40% of adults in general. More than one-fourth (27%) of teachers had symptoms of depression, compared with 10% of all adults.

Diliberti and Schwartz (2022) found that almost nine out of 10 (87%) of school district leaders responding to RAND’s American School District Panel in November 2021 expressed “concern” about the mental health of teachers, with 56% indicating that mental health was a “major concern” (p. 2).

In a recent analysis, RAND researchers Diliberti, Schwartz, and Grant (2021) concluded that “stress seems to be at the heart of teachers leaving the profession early, both before and during the pandemic” (p. 10). They surveyed 958 teachers who had left public school teaching shortly before or after the outbreak of COVID-19. The survey found that “four in ten voluntary early leavers—including both those who left before and during the pandemic—selected ‘the stress and disappointments of teaching weren’t worth it’ as a reason for leaving” (p. 6). Table 1 reproduces the complete set of reasons for leaving teaching from the same survey.26

Table 1

The high levels of stress teachers endure are concurrent with declining earnings relative to other college-educated workers. The teacher shortage itself amplifies stress levels by increasing the workloads of those teachers who remain. Together, rising stress and declining relative earnings have made it harder and harder for public schools to fill vacancies with qualified teachers.

Conclusion

At least since the onset of the Great Recession, public K–12 schools have struggled to hire and retain the teachers they need to educate the next generation. Data on vacancies from a range of sources all point to a growing shortage of teachers. The shortage cuts across geographic regions and subject areas, but it is particularly acute in some states and in some teaching specialties. In almost every case, shortages are worst in schools with high shares of low-income students or students of color, thereby exacerbating broader inequalities along lines of class and race.

The shortage does not stem from a lack of qualified teachers. Even with recent declines in the share of individuals completing teacher preparation courses, the number of qualified (or potentially qualified) teachers substantially exceeds the number of teaching vacancies. The shortage is, instead, the result of a lack of qualified teachers willing to work in what has long been a highly stressful job for compensation that is well below what is available to college-educated workers in other professions.

Acknowledgments

We thank Madilynn O’Hara for research assistance.

Notes

1. For comprehensive discussions, see Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas 2016, 2019 and García and Weiss 2019a–e.

2. Though it may be the case that there is an absolute shortage of qualified teachers in some subject areas.

3. See also García and Weiss 2019a–e and Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas 2016, 2019.

4. See references below, but especially García and Weiss 2019a–e.

5. For another recent analysis of the teacher shortage, see NEA 2022.

6. See, for example, Cowan et al. 2016 and Dee and Goldhaber 2017.

7. See Pennington McVey and Trinidad’s 2019 review of the TSA methodology (pp. 19–21) for a discussion of limitations of the data. States are encouraged, but not required to submit data. The Department of Education does not provide states with a standard reporting template and, as a result, descriptions of shortage areas can vary across states. Perhaps most importantly in the current context, states do not provide information on the size of the shortages reported.

8. To be clear, Pennington McVey and Trinidad are less concerned about the state of the labor market for teachers than our interpretation of their results suggests here. They believe that “contrary to popular talking points, there is no generic shortage of teachers…[there is not a] lack of certified teachers overall, but a chronic and perpetual misalignment of teacher supply and demand…there are unique teacher shortages in specific subject areas, school types, and geographies” (p. 5, emphasis in original). However, the authors do not comment on the implications for teacher shortages of the substantial rise they document after 2003–2004 in the share of states reporting shortages across nearly all of the subject areas covered in their Figures 5, 6, 7, and 8.

9. See Pennington McVey and Trinidad’s 2019 methodological discussion for additional limitations of the data (pp. 1–22). States are encouraged, but not required, to submit data. The Department of Education does not provide states with a standard reporting template and, as a result, descriptions of shortage areas can vary across states.

10. As the authors note, they report the “minimum number of teachers not fully certified for their teaching assignments’ because state data often underestimate total shortages. For example, some states report uncertified teachers only in core academic areas rather than in all subjects, and other states report tallies from surveys that represent a subset of districts in the state.” 

11. Authors’ calculations based on the Current Population Survey, 2014–2019.

12. Public K–12 schools are also experiencing shortages of staff in nonteaching occupations, such as cafeteria workers, cleaners, bus drivers, and others (Cooper and Martinez Hickey 2022).

13. An alternative explanation is that state and local education workers are quitting at a faster rate, but switching jobs within the sector. The rising rate of vacancies and other information presented here on reported shortages, falling teacher compensation, and rising teacher stress suggest that this is a less likely explanation.

14. See Gould 2022.

15. For more information on the survey, see IES and NCES 2021.

16. For other recent accounts of teacher shortages, see also Carver-Thomas 2022 and NEA 2022. For additional analysis of the pre-pandemic teacher shortage, see Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas 2016, 2019 and García and Weiss 2019a–e.

17. See, for example, Cowan et al. 2016 and Dee and Goldhaber 2017.

18. See National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 2021.

19. As Gould (2022) notes, as of September 2022 state and local government employment was still 3.2% below pre-pandemic employment levels.

20. See Carver-Thomas 2022, DiNapoli 2022, García and Weiss 2019a–e, Kemper Patrick and Carver-Thomas 2022, and Kini 2022.

21. Authors’ calculations using Current Population Survey data for 2021.

22. In 2021, the teacher salary gap was 23.5%, while the teacher benefit advantage was 9.3% (Allegretto 2022).

23. A similar pattern of high annual hours for U.S. teachers also holds across lower and upper secondary education levels.

24. For reviews of these and related issues, see Kyriacou 2001, McCarthy, Lambert, and Ullrich 2012, McCarthy et al. 2016, Ryan et al. 2017, García and Weiss 2019a–e, among many others.

25. See García and Weiss 2019a–e, Cormier et al. 2021, Steiner et al. 2022.

26. See Diliberti, Schwartz, and Grant 2021, p. 6, and Table B.8. For further evidence on the impact of stress on teacher turnover, see the recent survey of National Education Association members conducted by GBAO Strategies 2022: “More than half (55%) of [3,621] members [surveyed] say they are more likely to leave or retire from education sooner than planned because of the pandemic, almost double the number saying the same in July 2020. Black and Hispanic educators are more likely to say they are more likely to retire or leave early, which could leave the teaching profession less diverse” (p. 2).

References

Allegretto, Sylvia. 2022. The Teacher Pay Penalty Has Hit a New High: Trends in Teacher Wages and Compensation through 2021. Economic Policy Institute, August 2022.

American Federation of Teachers and Bad Ass Teachers (AFT and BAT). 2017. 2017 Educators Quality of Work Life Survey.

Baker, Bruce D., Matthew Di Carlo, and Mark Weber. 2022. Ensuring Adequate Education Funding for All: A New Federal Foundation Aid Formula. Albert Shanker Institute, September 2022.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2022. Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). Public data series accessed through the JOLTS databases. Accessed August 2022.

Carver-Thomas, Desiree. 2022. “Teacher Shortages Take Center Stage.” LPI Blog, Learning Policy Institute website, February 9, 2022.

Cheeseman Newburger, Jennifer, and Julia Beckhusen. 2022. Teachers Are Among Most Educated, Yet Their Pay Lags. U.S. Census Bureau, July 2022.

Cooper, David, and Sebastian Martinez Hickey. 2022. Raising Pay in Public K–12 Schools Is Critical to Solving Staffing Shortages: Federal Relief Funds Can Provide a Down Payment on Long-Needed Investments in the Education Workforce. Economic Policy Institute, February 2022.

Cormier, Christopher J., Venus Wong, John H. McGrew, Lisa A. Ruble, and Frank C. Worrell. 2021. “Stress, Burnout, and Mental Health Among Teachers of Color.”Learning Professional 42, no. 1: 54–57.

Cowan, James, Dan Goldhaber, Kyle Hayes, and Roddy Theobald. 2016. Missing Elements in the Discussion of Teacher Shortages. American Institutes for Research.

Dee, Thomas S., and Dan Goldhaber. 2017. Understanding and Addressing Teacher Shortages in the United States. Brookings Institution: The Hamilton Project, April 2017.

Department of Education. 2021. “National Teacher Preparation Data.” 2021 Title II Reports, October 2021. Accessed September 2022.

Diliberti, Melissa Kay, and Heather L. Schwartz. 2022. District Leaders’ Concerns About Mental Health and Political Polarization in Schools: Selected Findings from the Fourth American School District Panel Survey. RAND Corporation.

Diliberti, Melissa Kay, Heather L. Schwartz, and David Grant. 2021. Stress Topped the Reasons Why Public School Teachers Quit, Even Before COVID-19. RAND Corporation.

DiNapoli Jr., Michael A. 2022. “The Federal Role in Tackling Teacher Shortages.” LPI Blog, Learning Policy Institute website, February 28, 2022.

Gallup. 2014. State of America’s Schools: The Path to Winning Again in Education.

García, Emma, and Elaine Weiss. 2019a. The Teacher Shortage Is Real, Large and Growing, and Worse Than We Thought: The First Report in “The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market” Series. Economic Policy Institute, March 2019.

García, Emma, and Elaine Weiss. 2019b. U.S. Schools Struggle to Hire and Retain Teachers: The Second Report in “The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market” Series. Economic Policy Institute, April 2019.

García, Emma, and Elaine Weiss. 2019c. Low Relative Pay and High Incidence of Moonlighting Play a Role in the Teacher Shortage, Particularly in High-Poverty Schools: The Third Report in “The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market” Series. Economic Policy Institute, May 2019.

García, Emma, and Elaine Weiss. 2019d. Challenging Working Environments (“School Climates”), Especially in High-Poverty Schools, Play a Role in the Teacher Shortage: The Fourth Report in “The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market” Series. Economic Policy Institute, May 2019.

García, Emma, and Elaine Weiss. 2019e. The Role of Early Career Supports, Continuous Professional Development, and Learning Communities in the Teacher Shortage: The Fifth Report in “The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market” Series. Economic Policy Institute, July 2019.

GBAO Strategies. 2022. Memorandum, Subject: Poll Results: Stress and Burnout Pose Threat of Educator Shortages. January 31, 2022.

Gould, Elise. 2022. “What to Watch on Jobs Day: Signs of Life in Stalled Public-Sector Employment?” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), October 6, 2022.

Institute of Education Sciences (IES). 2022a. School Staffing Shortages: Results from the January School Pulse Panel (SPP).

Institute of Education Sciences (IES). 2022b. 2022 School Pulse Panel (SPP).

Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2021. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/spp/ School Pulse Panel (SPP) (web page). Accessed October 2022.

Kemper Patrick, Susan, and Desiree Carver-Thomas. 2022. “Teacher Salaries: A Key Factor in Recruitment and Retention.” LPI Blog, Learning Policy Institute website, April 14, 2022.

Kini, Tara. 2022. “Tackling Teacher Shortages: What Can States and Districts Do?” LPI Blog, Learning Policy Institute website, January 11, 2022.

Kyriacou, Chris. 2001. “Teacher Stress: Directions for Future Research.” Educational Review 53, no. 1: 27–35.

Learning Policy Institute (LPI). n.d. “Uncertified Teachers and Teacher Vacancies by State.” Accessed September 12, 2022.

Lieberman, Mark. 2022. “The Outlook Is Bad for School Hiring This Fall.” Education Week, July 28, 2022.

McCarthy, Christopher J., Richard G. Lambert, Sally Lineback, Paul Fitchett, and Priscila G. Baddouh. 2016. “Assessing Teacher Appraisals and Stress in the Classroom: Review of the Classroom Appraisal of Resources and Demands.” Education Psychology Review 28: 577–603.

McCarthy, Christopher J., Richard G. Lambert, and Annette Ullrich. 2012. International Perspectives on Teacher Stress. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

National Education Association (NEA). 2022. Elevating the Education Professions: Solving Educator Shortages by Making Public Education an Attractive and Competitive Career Path. October 2022.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). n.d. “School Staffing Shortages: Results from the January School Pulse Survey,” School Pulse Panel (SPP). Accessed August 2022.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2019. “DES Table 322.10: Bachelor’s Degrees Conferred by Postsecondary Institutions, by Field of Study.” Digest of Education Statistics. Last modified November 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2020a. “Percentage distribution of teachers, by level of agreement with the statement ‘The stress and disappointments involved in teaching at this school aren’t really worth it,’ school type, and selected school characteristics: 2017–18.” National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS). Accessed August 1, 2022.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2020b. “Spotlight on American Education Week, Part 2: Appreciating Public School Educators with the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS).” NCES Blog, National Center for Education Statistics website, November 20, 2020.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2021. “DES Table 208.20: Public and Private Elementary and Secondary Teachers, Enrollment, Pupil/Teacher Ratios, and New Teacher Hires: Selected Years, Fall 1955 Through Fall 2030.” Digest of Education Statistics. Last modified September 2021.

O’Leary, Brian. 2020. “Backgrounds and Beliefs of College Freshman.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 12, 2020.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2019. “Teachers’ Statutory Teaching and Total Working Time and Average Class Size in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, by Level of Education and Country: 2017 and 2018.” Education at a Glance 2019. Accessed September 2022.

Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2021. “Teachers’ and School Heads’ Actual Salaries Relative to Earnings of Tertiary-Educated Workers (2020).” Education at a Glance 2021: OECD Indicators. Accessed September 2022.

Pennington McVey, Kaitlin, and Justin Trinidad. 2019. Nuance in the Noise: The Complex Reality of Teacher Shortages. Bellwether Education Partners, January 2019.

Ryan, Shannon V., Nathaniel P. von der Embse, Laura L. Pendergast, Elina Saeki, Natasha Segool, and Shelby Schwing. 2017. “Leaving the Teaching Profession: The Role of Teacher Stress and Educational Accountability Policies on Turnover Intent.” Teaching and Teacher Education 66: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.03.016.

Schwartz, Heather, and Melissa Kay Diliberti. 2022. Flux in the Educator Labor Market: Acute Staff Shortages and Projected Superintendent Departures: Selected Findings from the Fourth American School District Panel Survey.  RAND Corporation.

Steiner, Elizabeth D., Sy Doan, Ashley Woo, Allyson D. Gittens, Rebecca Ann Lawrence, Lisa Berdie, Rebecca L. Wolfe, Lucas Greer, and Heather L. Schwartz. 2022. Restoring Teacher and Principal Well-Being Is an Essential Step for Rebuilding Schools: Findings from the State of the American Teacher and State of the American Principal Surveys. RAND Corporation.

Steiner, Elizabeth D., and Ashley Woo. 2021. Job-Related Stress Threatens the Teacher Supply: Key Findings from the 2021 State of the U.S. Teacher Survey. RAND Corporation.

Sutcher, Leib, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Desiree Carver-Thomas. 2016. A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S. Learning Policy Institute, September 2016.

Sutcher, L., Linda Darling-Hammond, and Desiree Carver-Thomas. 2019. “Understanding Teacher Shortages: An Analysis of Teacher Supply and Demand in the United States.” Education Policy Analysis Archives 27, no. 35: 1–36.

Walker, Tim. 2022. “NEA: Real Solutions, Not Band-Aids, Will Fix Educator Shortage.” National Education Association, October 4, 2022.

Key takeaways:

• Federal education funding and additional recovery funds targeted to education during recessions can help if they are sufficiently large and are sustained for long enough.
• During the Great Recession, federal funding and additional recovery funds targeted to public K–12 education through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided an initial and critical counterbalance to the defunding brought about by the recession, but these funds were phased out far too prematurely.
• Nationally, total real revenue per student lagged behind the pre-recession level, on average, for eight school years after the onset of the last economic downturn.
• The reductions in total revenue per student were not uniform across districts: High-poverty districts and their students experienced the biggest shortfalls—and a very sluggish recovery.

As Congress debates the appropriate amount of investments needed to boost the economic recovery from the COVID-19-induced recession, we can learn a lot by carefully looking at the decisions made in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007–2009. One of the clearest lessons of that period is that spending by the federal government largely dictated the amount of economic suffering for those hit the hardest. When that spending falls short of what is needed, some groups never fully recover.

School finance deserves a place in this discussion. Federal support to education plays a critical role in filling recession-induced fiscal gaps that open at the state and local levels, and maintaining education funding during economic downturns contributes to a faster and fuller economic recovery. As we discuss in this post, if federal investments in public education had been larger, sustained as needed, and allocated in a way that channeled further assistance to districts serving larger shares of low-income students, they would have better assisted our students, schools, and communities in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

As shown in Figure A below, federal funding and the additional recovery funds targeted to education through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) enacted in February 2009 provided an initial and critical counterbalance to the defunding brought about by the recession. Figure A shows national trends in revenue per student, by source (federal, state, and local), from the onset of the Great Recession through 2017–2018.1 Per-student state revenue fell precipitously between 2007–2008 and 2012–2013—by just over $800 at the low point. While property taxes did not decrease, other local revenues fell by $160 by 2010–2011, only recovering to 2007–2008 levels in 2014–2015. At the recession’s peak, districts were receiving slightly over $600 more per student from the federal government than they were before the recession, with total federal funds accounting for 12.7% of total revenue in 2009–2010, compared with just 8.2% in 2007–2008.2 Critically and smartly, the federal investments upheld education funding. Without these funds, the collapse and ramifications would have been much larger.

Figure A

However, the clawback of federal revenues after 2010–2011, as the broader economic recovery was underway, meant that there was a steep decline in total revenue in tandem with the state revenue trend. The phasing out of ARRA funds, together with continued gaps in state and local revenues, left a total shortfall of nearly $1,000 per student in 2012–2013, a point when the economic recovery was purportedly in full swing.

Nationally, per-student total revenue did not return to pre–Great Recession levels until the 2015–2016 school year.3 In other words, despite the increase in federal resources available to public education in the aftermath of the Great Recession, total real revenue per student nationally lagged behind the pre-recession level, on average, for eight school years after the onset of the economic downturn. These protracted deficits in public school funding triggered a cascade of negative consequences for schools, children, and educators. Notably, the consequences were not experienced uniformly across districts, reflecting trends in unequal levels of funding prior to and in the aftermath of the recession.

Indeed, the national averages mask significant differences across districts by the socioeconomic circumstances of the students they serve. The available public school finance data suggest that high-poverty districts and their students experienced the biggest shortfalls—and a very sluggish recovery. As Figure B illustrates, districts with relatively small shares of poor students (defined here as the districts with poverty rates in the lowest two quartiles of the school-age children’s poverty rate) never saw revenues per student fall below their pre–Great Recession level, adjusted for inflation and state cost of living. By contrast, the one-fourth of districts with the largest share of students from poor families were below their pre-Great Recession level of per-student revenues through the 2015–2016 school year. The two highest-poverty districts did not recover to their own pre-recession per-student revenue levels until 2014–2015 and 2015–2016, respectively. In 2018, a decade after the Great Recession had first hit, they still lagged behind their wealthier counterpart districts in rising back to their own per-student, pre-recession funding levels.

Figure B

In short, millions of students across the country continued to suffer the aftereffects of the Great Recession for almost a full decade following the onset of the economic downturn. They received less effective instruction and fewer enrichment opportunities than they should have, because policymakers decided that they were not as high a priority as banks or corporations. These students were less likely to graduate than they would have been had policymakers’ priorities been better aligned. As a result, many may not reach their goals for higher education, jobs, and life, or be able to contribute as much to the economy and society going forward.

We cannot afford to make the same mistakes again—to consign yet another generation to substandard K–12 education because of an economic recession. Balancing depleted budgets on the backs of our children, especially those living in high-poverty areas, harms children and is more costly in the long run. Now that Congress is poised to act on the largest infrastructure package in nearly a century—one that is long overdue and desperately needed—policymakers must continue to demand more for our children and their education, and they must not hesitate to also advance the necessary investments for public education.

Notes

1. Note that the following discussion and data refer exclusively to school revenues, not expenditures, as that allows us to track the sources of revenue (federal, state, and local). For the purposes of this discussion, however, revenues, expenditures, and funding are treated as synonymous. School year 2017–2018 was the most recent one available at the time of completion of our research. We also note that the Great Recession started as the 2007–2008 school year was underway, so we are using the term pre-recession level flexibly and assuming school budgets do not immediately respond to the economic recession.

2. Keep in mind that, on average in the U.S., state and local governments provide about 47% and 45%, respectively, of public education funding while the federal government provides the remainder, about 8% (see Cornman et al. 2021 for the last released statistics). The increase in the weight is also influenced by the decreased totals (so it is a larger share of a decreased amount).

3. We acknowledge that only the first half of the school year 2007–2008 was pre-recession. December 2007 was the onset of the Great Recession, and 2008 is the first year of the Great Recession. We make the assumptions that school budgets are mostly preset before the school years and that they adjust less rapidly than other economic variables to the macroeconomic context.

References

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). 2021. “Real Personal Income, Per Capita Personal Income, and Regional Price Parities: State.” From Real Personal Income for States and Metropolitan Areas: 2018. Last accessed on April 18, 2021.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index (BLS-CPI). 2021. CPI-U-RS public data series for various years.

Cornman, S.Q., J.J. Phillips, M.R. Howell, and J. Young. 2021. Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary Education: FY 19 (NCES 2021-302). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), U.S. Department of Education. 2020. “Table 235.10. Revenues for Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, by Source of Funds: Selected Years, 1919–20 through 2017–18.” Digest of Education Statistics: 2020, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Table prepared in August 2020.

National Center for Education Statistics, Local Education Agency Finance Survey (NCES-LEAFS). 2021. 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 microdata from the Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33). NCES, U.S. Department of Education. Accessed March 2021.

Urban Institute. 2021. “Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates Program (SAIPE) School District Estimates,” 2007–2018. From the Urban Institute Education Data Portal (Version 0.12.0). Last accessed April 18, 2021; made available under the ODC Attribution License.

This fascinating research had, until now, gone largely unnoticed to us due to the perceived lack of relevance for guiding domestic education policy in the United States and many of our peer nations. (For those interested, see a recent summary of the research here.) But as we learned when we wrote our report, this research offers four lessons that can help frame the current crisis and plan for the rebuilding of our education system post-pandemic.

First, the research on education in emergencies is extremely clear on the negative consequences of these emergencies on children’s development and learning, not to mention the trauma and stress that some experience in the most serious events. Emergencies, especially the catastrophic ones that this work specializes in, lead to undeniably negative impacts on both educational processes and outcomes. Moreover, the most disadvantaged population subgroups often experience the worst—and longest lasting—consequences.

Second, providing some form of education to children throughout the emergency improves outcomes for children and, in some cases, to societies more broadly. These strategies, generally outlined and provided by international organizations, are characterized as flexible learning approaches, which reflect the reality that circumstances and needs vary widely. They all include some sort of continued provision of education to support both learning and the psychosocial well-being of students and educators. Some strategies aim at promoting cognitive, emotional, and social development through structured, meaningful, and creative activities in a school setting or in informal learning spaces that replace traditional schools when they are unavailable. So-called “contingency planning tools” help ensure that appropriate arrangements are made and offer a template for those in charge to assess the appropriate outreach and their effectiveness.

Third, emergencies strain existing resources just when they are needed most, compounding the underlying challenges. Research shows that access to resources—and an equitable and compensatory allocation of them—help reduce the damage that students experience during the crisis. But this requires ample and immediate funding. Without funding—and because such emergencies carry long-term consequences—students, teachers, and education systems experience both short and long-term losses that can be detrimental for their well-being and human capital.

This leads to a fourth and perhaps the most fundamental lesson relevant to recovering and rebuilding our children’s education. From now onwards, education systems must have contingency plans in place in order to contain the negative impacts of emergencies on learning. Therefore, we must build up resources to be ready to adequately address emergency needs and to compensate for the resources drained during the emergencies, as well as to afford the provision of flexible learning approaches to continue education.

If designed and implemented correctly, these contingency plans do not force the prioritization of education over other pressing needs during an emergency. Instead, they ensure that the resources needed to address other urgent needs—health care assistance, food assistance, aid for individuals, aid for businesses, and extra funding for medical research—do not compete, as they have this year, with those for schools and children.

Following the lessons—ensuring the availability of flexible learning approaches, attention to learning, development, and well-being, and access to resources—would accelerate our ability to help children make up for lost ground as schools resume their normal operations. Doing so has the potential to render these losses temporary rather than permanent, and thus to reduce the long-term problems and costs of the pandemic. And, of course, establishing and funding contingency plans—the last lesson—will better prepare us for the next time there is an urgent need to switch gears in the education system.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we now have a first-person understanding of what emergency education scenarios entail. The research on education in emergencies provides a clear path forward to begin to mitigate the harm done and avert such harm in the future. And while we couldn’t choose to avoid this pandemic, we can choose to counter its consequences and to be prepared for the next emergency by following the path forward that this body of work helped to lay out.

This is the third blog post in our “Learning During the Pandemic” series. We will be releasing more blog posts on various consequences of COVID-19 on students’ learning and development and on the actions needed to recover the lost ground and lift children up during and after the pandemic. See these and other companion reports and blogs here.

What, in education policy and practice, we call “social and emotional learning” (SEL) has long been known to be important for student development and academic success, but the pandemic has emphasized the need to elevate its importance. Indeed, as the pandemic unfolded, it was clear that SEL, or children’s “patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors,” are at least as critical as other traditional academic competencies. We saw that empathy, resilience, and the ability to cope with anxiety, turned out to have major impacts on children’s daily lives, and must be emphasized along with algebra, history, social sciences, or foreign languages.

There is a threefold explanation—that contains the good, bad, and ugly— as to why and how the pandemic has highlighted that need, and as to which lessons education policy can learn as we move forward.

Let’s start with the obvious bad: many of our children have experienced extreme adversity over the past 10 months. Unfortunately, our systems—public education and others—are not equipped to provide the supports students need to cushion their stresses, pain, and loss. This lack is evident even in normal times, but much more so during the pandemic. Leaving aside the irreparable personal losses many have suffered with more than 400,000 dead, reports also document spikes in child poverty, hunger, homelessness, and associated mental health problems and trauma. Just two examples follow. There were almost 14 million children living in a household characterized by child food insecurity during the week of June 19–23, 2020 (This is over twice as many as during peak of the Great Recession in 2008 and 5.6 times as many as in all of 2018). Since the pandemic began in March, mental health-related emergency room visits have soared (health professionals document a 24% increase among elementary school-aged children, and a 31% rise among those between middle and high schoolers, compared with the same period last year). The lack of preparation and the inability to respond appropriately to the pandemic itself reflect broader societal weaknesses that are our collective responsibility to change.

The ugly is that it took a pandemic to make the value of SEL evident to all. We knew from the experience in effective schools and from extensive research, including ours, that social and emotional learning is integral to effective traditional academic learning. However, SEL, or intentional instruction to nurture these skills, has been substantially underappreciated in policy, due in part to overemphasis on the cognitive aspects and lack of understanding that the range of skills students acquire throughout their school years develop in tandem. This long-term failure to properly advance the development of the whole child also undermines the development of a healthy society and of our social capital.

The good in all of this is that finally placing SEL prominently in our upcoming education policy agenda, and or making whole-child education the norm, will significantly boost our recovery from the pandemic and help rebuild a better education system. A comprehensive approach to SEL reflects our acknowledgment of the full range of skills that matter, the natural variation among children with respect to different traits, and the multiple factors that help nurture them (both in and out of school). And this focus on SEL offers us a lever to lift children up: some of these traits have likely improved during the pandemic, while others have deteriorated—so noting both of these realities will boost the efforts of educators working to help students make up for lost ground.

As such, as we design a relief, recovery, and rebuilding strategy for the education system to meet that goal, we must equip schools with the resources and tools to meet all of students’ needs, rather than a narrow (and misguided) focus on closing gaps on traditional outcomes. This will require implementation of diagnostic assessments that inform teachers about where students are socially and emotionally, as well as in traditional academic areas, as well as the adoption of strategies to bolster children’s social and emotional strengths and address their social and emotional needs. As we continue to weather the pandemic and prepare for its aftermath, we have the opportunity of making whole-child education the norm as standards, instruction, assessments, and wraparound supports are structured, which will finally mean that SEL is front and central in our education policy agenda going forward.

This is the second blog post in our “Learning During the Pandemic” series. Over the next few months, we will be releasing more blog posts on various consequences of COVID-19 on students’ learning and development and on the actions needed to recover the lost ground and lift children up during and after the pandemic.

Lavado, Joaquín Salvador, Quino. 2007. Toda Mafalda. Buenos Aires, Ediciones de la Flor.

As many parents and teachers have seen, these are the likely realities for students in 2020. Because learning time in school matters, and students’ learning and development tend to vary greatly even when schools operate in normal circumstances, challenges to learning were magnified when schools closed—due to prolonged cuts to learning time in school, the access to some “substitute” educational opportunities during the pandemic, and the many factors that influence out-of-school learning.

In this blog post, we review the consequences of reduced learning time in school settings during the pandemic, and what the evidence tells us to do about it when we begin to control the spread of the virus. (For a detailed review of the challenges COVID-19 brought to education and our policy recommendations, see “COVID-19 and student performance, equity, and U.S. education policy: Lessons from pre-pandemic research to inform relief, recovery, and rebuilding.”)

One initial finding is particularly clear: We should anticipate that the major disruptions to and shortening of learning time has impeded student learning. An easy benchmark estimate is that, on average, not having been able to complete the school year leads to an across-the-board loss in student performance on math and reading of at least 0.1 standard deviations (SD), likely larger in earlier grades. (Note that an effect size of 0.1 SD would be considered a moderate effect in education evaluation, even small for small-scale, targeted, model programs; however, because the (at least) one-third school-year-length reduction we are handling here affected all students, it would lead to a very sizable aggregate loss in performance.)

Overall, the causal link between amount and quality of instructional time in school and student performance is well established by research on the length of the school day and on school cancellations. And while the gains per additional hour or day may be modest, they point both to the possibility of regaining some lost ground by making up for these months and to the critical role of the quality of education received.

Other pandemic-relevant lessons are found in research about summer learning. Often interpreted as consistently pointing toward a “slide,” the most recent research is more focused on the large variation in summer learning among students, on showing that different students learn different things, and on the fact that some students experience gains while other lose in their academic performance. For example, a recent study finds that slightly over half of the students lose nearly all their school-year progress, but the rest of the students actually maintain their school-year learning. During the lockdowns, learning has likely varied a lot, making both the concept of average performance and the tools used to evaluate it—standardized tests—less meaningful or useful.

We also emphasize how important it is to understand the evidence from the chronic absenteeism research regarding students at serious risk of falling behind in school and even dropping out. This is a particular concern now, because the pandemic may act as a “revolving door” that ushers students at risk of dropping out away from school (the United Nations recently defined the risk of increased dropping out as a “generational catastrophe” that could have enormous repercussions in developing countries). The absenteeism research also points to a range of reasons for, and thus strategies needed to reduce, student absenteeism. In the current context, policymakers and practitioners need to address the root causes—academic disengagement, socioemotional distress, economic challenges, health problems, and others—and to target the relevant supports.

The advice from these bodies of research for recovery and rebuilding as schools reopen and we address these challenges is extremely rich and exceeds merely pointing to interrupted learning due to shortened learning time.

• When decisions about extending the school day or year are made, it will be critical to ensure that instruction is of high quality. This means ensuring adequate intensity, including after-school activities, reducing class sizes, and having sufficient, highly credentialed staff who receive proper supports.
• In addition, this evidence tells us that children learn very differently, which we will have to address by offering both more personalized instruction and the right targeted supports.
• The evidence also indicates the importance of using the right assessments and the limitations of standardized tests, which reward a narrow set of skills and tend to be closely correlated with students’ socioeconomic background. Inappropriate use of the latter could overwhelm and mislabel children at a time when what they need are diagnostic and needs-based assessments that illuminate where they are across a range of domains and what they need going forward.
• Finally, the research on chronic absenteeism reinforces the urgency of providing appropriate support to students who are least prepared and especially to those at risk of becoming disengaged and eventually dropping out.

This is the first blog post in our “Learning During the Pandemic” series. Over the next few months, we will be releasing more blog posts on various consequences of COVID-19 on students’ learning and development and on the actions needed to recover the lost ground and lift children up during and after the pandemic.

We lay out those policy solutions in our just-released paper, A Policy Agenda to Address the Teacher Shortage in U.S. Public Schools: The Sixth and Final Report in the ‘Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market’ Series. It is part of an EPI two-year long project documenting the teacher shortage faced by U.S. public schools over the last few years and explaining the multiple factors that have contributed to it.

The culmination of this research coincided with the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the nation’s education system, which threatens to make the teacher shortage crisis even worse.

The added challenges mainly arise from three sources.

Teachers may be leaving the profession due to new challenges brought by COVID-19

First, with respect to the supply of teachers, growing evidence indicates an increase in teachers’ decisions to retire early as a result of COVID-19-related challenges that either mirror or exacerbate those described in our series of reports, and even bring in new ones:

• unsafe working environments,
• lack of supports,
• stresses associated with remote instruction,
• burnout, and other professional and personal factors.

At this stage of the pandemic, perceived lack of safety is likely a major factor. Around one in three teachers say that COVID-19 pandemic has made them more likely to retire early or leave the profession, a figure that increases to about one in two or more among those with more than 30 years of experience or those ages 50 or older (one in six public school teachers are 55 or older, according to the most recent NCES data).

The shortage in some states was actually artificially small because a significant group of older, more experienced teachers who were eligible to retire had stayed in the classroom into their 60s. Now, as the most vulnerable to COVID-19, they are likely to be the first to go.

Similarly, the challenges of teaching remotely, and the lack of support needed to do so well, will turn off new (and even less new) teachers, likely increasing already high rates of attrition. Moreover, the combination of losing colleagues to COVID-19 and the intense personal stresses and demands that the pandemic is exacting on virtually all teachers will likely drive out still more.

COVID-19 is increasing the number of teachers needed—but budget cuts caused by the economic recession will make it harder to meet that need

Second, the forces driving demand for teachers are in conflict. Meeting the safety requirements public health experts recommend for schools to operate safely, and providing the resources needed to lift up students who have lost ground, will greatly increase demand. At the most basic level, for example, just reducing class sizes to meet social distance requirements in class could substantially increase the number of teachers needed. (We further discuss needs for more, not fewer, highly credentialed teachers, below.)

Yet budgets for personnel and other needed resources are moving in the opposite direction.

Severe budget cuts affecting states have already reduced and are expected to further reduce the ability of school districts to satisfy the underlying demand. We know from the Great Recession and from recent estimates that budget cuts have led to severe reductions in public education jobs. Indeed, in April 2020 alone, U.S. public school systems lost close to 470,000 jobs—a more sudden and more severe version of what happened in the three years after the onset of the Great Recession, when more than 316,000 education jobs were lost. These losses will almost certainly become more severe as the recession drags on, especially if the federal government continues to fail to counter its impacts.

COVID-19 has highlighted just how critical the quality and equity aspects of the teacher shortage are

Third is the issue of quality and equity in education, the framework we explored in our series of reports.

Increased attrition among older teachers indicates a double loss, in terms of numbers and credentials, just at a time when the needs for more personalized instruction, smaller class sizes, and extended school schedules demand the opposite on the same two fronts. More highly credentialed teachers are needed to tackle the pandemic challenges and the inequities it has exacerbated. This will be especially important in high-poverty schools, where resources are already scarcest relative to the needs.

Policy recommendations

As troubling as this scenario is, the path forward is eminently viable. The policy agenda we set forth offers an effective strategy to retain highly credentialed teachers and attract new ones into the profession, and with the pandemic the adoption of our recommendations is even more urgent.

We structure the recommendations into two main buckets: system-level recommendations that would improve the education system broadly, and specific policy recommendations targeting the factors that contribute to the teacher shortage.

As the pandemic persists, we cannot emphasize enough how critical it is for policymakers at all levels to act immediately. And they must learn from a critical lesson imparted by the prior recession and from the evidence: Failing to understand the close connections among resources, teachers’ working conditions, and the shortage will greatly exacerbate the problems we already faced going into the pandemic.

We can ill afford to make that mistake again. We must make more resources available to enable the relief, recovery, and rebuilding stages that will help us weather the pandemic, address the adverse impacts of COVID-19 on education, and build a stronger, more equitable public education system.