But diverting public funds away from public K–12 schools and toward private schools does not guarantee educational opportunities will be expanded for all students—and this is especially true in rural communities. Most obviously, because students in rural communities often don’t have a private school option and therefore cannot use the vouchers, state voucher programs—which are financed by all the taxpayers in a state—amount to an education subsidy for wealthy urban families at the expense of strong public schools. Moreover, for rural areas that can support multiple school systems, voucher programs introduce a potentially large cost for the students that remain in public schools, as any sharp drop in public school enrollment will raise the fixed cost per pupil of running schools. For example, school facilities and staff that are efficient for 1,000 students in a school may no longer be efficient if enrollment were to drop to 800 or 900.

Voucher programs work like this: Parents who wish to send their kid to private school can receive public funding to cover part of the tuition or education-related expenses, rather than paying out of pocket. In states with vouchers programs, this added cost to government of paying for private educational expenses makes a big dent in state budgets—see examples here, here, and here. These programs also often entail fraud and abuse of funds and strip away funding for public schools. As a share of K–12 budgets, voucher spending accounted for as much as 26% in 2025, squeezing public schools of sorely needed funds. Moreover, recent reports have documented accounts of voucher funding getting used for high-end concert tickets and rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft. For wealthy parents in urban districts who were already planning to send their kids to private school, these slippery regulations and extra funding for education expenses are a feature, not a bug, of voucher programs. Vouchers are disproportionately taken up by students already attending private school, compared with those who consider a private school option when voucher laws get passed in their state.

For students in rural areas with no private school option, voucher programs simply mean there is less to spend on public schools, which leads to teacher shortages, fewer educational opportunities, and worse building maintenance. In rural communities with homeschooling or private school options, voucher programs impose an added cost to public education when students transition from public to private school.

We call this cost the fiscal externality of voucher programs, and it is borne by school districts, students, and their families when voucher-driven declines in student enrollment intersect with the fixed nature of many school costs. In rural districts, many key education costs—such as interest on bonds issued in the past, heating, electricity for school buildings, bus drivers, and even some staff—cannot easily adjust to student enrollment declines.

While public schools’ fixed costs do not decline when they lose students to voucher programs, their revenue does. Thus, when students in rural areas take up vouchers to leave public school for private school or homeschool, public schools have less revenue to cover the same level of fixed costs. The costs that can be adjusted—such as supplies or certain personnel—will get forced down due to shrinking school budgets. These variable costs are crucial for effectively educating children, meaning students who remain in public schools will pay the price of voucher program takeup.

This fiscal externality therefore leaves districts unable to deliver the same level of instruction to the remaining public school pupils. When students leave public schools in rural areas with voucher programs, there are fewer resources available on a daily basis to educate kids—fewer teachers and other staff members and fewer curriculum and education supplies. Education quality suffers.

How large is the fiscal externality that voucher programs impose on public schools in rural districts? Take the McComb Local School District in Ohio, which had 627 students in 2022 and is classified as a rural district according to the U.S. Census. Using EPI’s Fiscal Externality Calculator, we estimate that a 5% decline in enrollment would lead to an increased cost of $520 per pupil for the remaining students in the district, or a total of $309,530.

The key assumption is that there is some fraction of schools’ costs that is fixed and can’t be adjusted in the near term when enrollment falls. We assume that instruction and services costs (the cost of teachers and services like transportation, counseling, nurses, and school administrators) can only partially adjust to changes in enrollment. Specifically, we assume that when enrollment declines, instruction costs are only able to adjust by 50% of the enrollment decline, and service costs are only able to adjust by 20%. We assume that capital and building and maintenance costs can’t be adjusted at all. (Users can set their own adjustment rates for their school districts using the fiscal externality calculator here. The method behind this calculation is detailed in our report.)

Under these assumptions, aggregating all the rural Ohio districts using the rural categorization of school districts from the National Center for Education Statistics, a voucher-driven 5% enrollment decline would impose a fiscal externality of just over $206 million on Ohio public schools.

Rural districts have the most to lose when states enact voucher programs. For rural communities, vouchers are not a cost-free policy that simply expands education options for children—they are a subsidy for wealthy urban and suburban families at the expense of strong public schools. Voucher programs also introduce a large potential cost for the students that remain in rural public schools. The public spending declines associated with the introduction of vouchers will reliably cause significantly worse educational outcomes at a time when states should be spending more—not less—on public schools. States that promote voucher programs at the expense of funding for strong public education are signaling that rural students are not a priority. 

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).

Here are five things we only know about our schools thanks to the NCES.

1. We know that 31% of public schools are using non-teachers in teaching roles because of staff shortages. The NCES School Pulse Panel tracks vacancies and needs across the country. It shows the breadth and depth of staffing shortages, which can best be remedied by increasing educator compensation.
2. We know that kids from poorer families enter kindergarten with greater skills gaps than kids from wealthy families—and exposure to schooling closes these gaps. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study tracks cohorts of children from year-to-year, allowing us to compare outcomes for different children across the country. Among other things, we know that contrary to right-wing propaganda, parental involvement in their kids’ education has risen faster for lower-income households in recent decades and this has actually reduced skills gaps between kids from different economic backgrounds even as continuing increases in inequality wedge these gaps apart.
3. We know that students are more likely to be targeted for harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity in majority-white schools. The School Survey on Crime and Safety tells us what kind of safety issues there are in schools, and how often they occur. It includes detailed figures on violent and nonviolent incidents, school safety practices, and the presence of law enforcement in schools.
4. We know that one-parent and two-parent households have the same trouble finding child care. The new National Household Education Survey is the first survey to systematically look at the educational arrangements of children not yet in kindergarten. From that report, we learned that 11% of parents were unable to find the child care program they wanted for their child, and that rate was the same regardless of household size.
5. We know that red states spend less on their students than blue states. While individual states track school district finances, the NCES gathers all this data in one spot, giving us a clear snapshot of the whole country. This allows us to see that Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Mississippi spend the least per pupil on education, while New York, New Jersey, the District of Columbia, Vermont, and Connecticut spend the most.

All of this comes from a department with fewer than 200 employees. The contributions of NCES staff are vital to our understanding of what makes schools work, and the removal of those staff is a loss for the whole country.

The U.S. public education system needs all sorts of reforms to boost its capacity to provide an excellent education to all children. But public education is also why the United States became the richest country the world has ever seen, and its future depends on maintaining and strengthening this system—not tearing it down.

What does the Department of Education do?

The Department of Education (DOE) accounts for about 3.5% of the entire federal budget and provides crucial funding for public K–12 schools, narrowing some of the huge gaps between needed resources and state and local revenue. Specifically, the DOE provides funding for low-income children through Title I funds and funding for special education through IDEA programs. These resources help balance the scales of school funding, as high-poverty districts often get less funding from local sources, which rely heavily on property taxes. The DOE also administers crucial programs—like Pell grants and loans—that make college attendance possible for those who are not rich. 

Often, demands to “abolish” the DOE are accompanied by vague reassurances that the money spent by the DOE will somehow be “returned to the states.” But the vast majority of money spent by the DOE is exactly given to state and local school systems. Figure A shows that just over 51% of federal funding goes to the third of districts with the greatest need (as measured by district poverty), while only 18% goes to the third of districts with the lowest neighborhood poverty. Unless one is entirely confident that a Trump administration-led effort to “return” this money to state and local districts will somehow be as effective in targeting higher-poverty districts, it is a near-guarantee that any effort to cut or abolish the DOE will take money directly out of those districts whose students need it the most.

Figure A

The DOE has also sought genuine efficiencies as one of its key endeavors. The DOE in previous administrations has tightly monitored colleges that took federal government resources and failed to provide a quality education. Given the skyrocketing cost of college attendance and the rising importance of having a college degree, the DOE’s efforts to find these efficiencies should have been widely praised and built upon. Instead, however, the Trump administration has blocked these efforts. For example, the Obama administration’s DOE implemented two rules cracking down on for-profit colleges that saddled students with debt but failed to provide a quality education. These rules sought to cancel debt for these ill-served students and fine the colleges. But the first Trump administration rolled back these rules.

The biggest proponents of abolishing the Department of Education make vague claims about K–12 public schools “indoctrinating” children in “leftist” values. But the federal government has almost no direct sway over what is taught in K–12 public schools, that is overwhelmingly decided on the ground in local school districts. If parents in these districts (or anybody else) want a curriculum change, they should focus their attention on local decision-makers, not the DOE.

Privatization is not the answer

Nearly 90% of K–12 students attend public schools. A strong research base indicates that these schools would benefit from higher levels of resources, with dollars translating directly into higher test scores and better post-school outcomes for students. Privatization of public schools is not a serious option to make them better—yet privatization is the clear goal of the Trump administration.

Secretary McMahon has a long history of favoring voucher programs, which allow parents to use public taxpayer dollars to send their children to private school or home school. There is no evidence to suggest that private schools or homeschooling could possibly translate these resources into more effective student outcomes than public schools (see evaluations of the evidence here, here, and here). Further, the majority of students who “take up” vouchers are already attending private school, basically providing a windfall to affluent parents at the expense of public schools.

These voucher programs pose a grave danger to public school budgets in states where right-wing advocates have had early success. In states like Arizona, voucher programs have ended up costing nearly 10 times its projected cost. To the degree that growing voucher programs do entice some parents to send kids to private schools, there are direct fiscal costs to students choosing to remain in public schools (see our district-level calculator to learn more).

Recent proposals put forward by Republicans, backed by the White House, seek to create a national voucher program in the form of a new tax credit where taxpayers who donate would get 100% of their money back. While most tax credits for charitable causes are structured where part of the contribution is paid by the government and part by the taxpayer, in the case of this national voucher tax credit proposal, the government would pay for all of it. In effect, their effort to privatize education at the national level essentially functions as tax shelters for the wealthy.  

Like most of the Trump administration’s efforts, the drive to diminish the DOE shows they have no serious interest in making public institutions work better or more efficiently, they just want them stripped of resources.

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/

School bus drivers remain a vital part of the education system. Roughly half of school children rely on bus services to get to school. Interrupted services and instability can disrupt learning time and contribute to absenteeism. Reduced bus services can be a particularly challenging hurdle for children with disabilities, who sometimes travel far distances for specialized education. With many students and families already trying to recover from challenges and learning disruptions caused by the pandemic, it is more important than ever to have services as basic as bus transportation to school functioning effectively.

Bus driver employment has improved, but remains woefully inadequate

Figure A shows 12-month rolling averages of K–12 school bus driver employment. The figure shows employment broken out by whether the bus driver is a state and local government employee (i.e., they’re employed by the school district or other relevant state or local public agency) or a private-sector employee (i.e., the school district contracts bus service to a private company or the bus driver works for a private school). The data show that school bus driver employment continues to be far below pre-pandemic levels. There were approximately 192,400 bus drivers working in K–12 schools in September 2023, down 15.1% from September 2019. Employment for state and local government school bus drivers has fallen 13.6% to 156,600 workers over the same period, while private school bus driver employment has declined 21.5% from 43,300 workers to around 34,000.1

Although school bus driver employment has increased from its trough in the pandemic (when it was down 32.5%), states and local governments have much to do to return school bus driver numbers to adequate levels. Figure A shows that even before the pandemic, the number of bus drivers working in elementary and secondary schools had not returned to levels that existed during the Great Recession. Approximately 290,000 bus drivers were employed in the fall of 2009, but those employment levels declined 21.8% by 2019. This marked decline reflects the results of austerity and budget cuts beginning in the early 2010s.

During the same period, student enrollment at public K–12 schools grew by 1.4 million. Like other public education workers, public school bus drivers are being asked to do more with less overall capacity. Asking fewer bus drivers to pick up more students means longer routes, earlier morning pick-ups, and later drop-offs. These burdensome logistics can increase the likelihood of a student missing school time and diminish their chances of participating in other activities—not to mention the additional burden they can place on parents trying to coordinate work schedules.

Figure A

Bus drivers tend to be older and are paid dismal weekly wages

Although the worst health threats of the pandemic have abated, school bus drivers are still sharply impacted by the pandemic’s fallout. School bus drivers tend to be significantly older than the typical worker. In 2021, 72.6% of state and local government school bus drivers were age 50 and older, compared with 37.5% of state and local government employees and 30.8% of private-sector workers. The age makeup of the school bus driver workforce made these workers more vulnerable to the effects of COVID, contributing to workers leaving the profession and being reluctant to return. Since the return to in-person schooling, bus drivers also report increased confrontations with students and parents.

However, many of the challenges of the profession predate COVID. For one, school bus driver wages are far lower than most other workers, according to our analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata. The typical school bus driver earned $20.00 an hour in 2022, which is 16.8% less than the median wage for all workers in the economy ($24.04). However, the average public school bus driver works only around 32 hours per week, meaning that the weekly wages for bus drivers are significantly lower than the hourly wage might imply. School bus drivers often are not full-time employees and instead work a “split-shift” schedule coinciding with the beginning and end of the school day. Figure B shows that, in 2022, the median school bus driver earned $548 in weekly wages, which is approximately 43.0% less than the median weekly wage for all workers ($961).

Figure B

Since the Great Recession, hourly wages of school bus drivers have struggled to keep pace with median worker wage growth. Figure C shows that real hourly wages for the median worker grew 5.3% between 2008 and 2019, while growth was only 1.5% for school bus drivers. During the same period, weekly wage growth for school bus drivers (7.0%) slightly outpaced the median (5.6%). This is because school bus driver hours grew modestly over the decade, presumably because employment decreases and student enrollment increases required more hours of work to be filled by fewer workers. From 2019 to 2022, hourly wages for school bus drivers increased by 4.9%, a welcome increase over the post-Great Recession period but still lagging median worker wage growth (5.7%).

Further wage increases are badly needed for a profession that must recruit new workers, especially since current low wages mean many bus drivers live in poverty. In 2021, 7.8% of school bus drivers had incomes below the poverty line, which is greater than the 5.6% share of private-sector workers in poverty and more than double the 3.4% of public-sector workers in poverty.2

Figure C

Improving bus driver jobs and solving staffing shortages are not only important for the welfare and success of students, but also for advancing racial and gender equity. Figure D shows that like other public-sector workers, school bus drivers are disproportionately Black and women workers. In 2021, 20.0% of state and local government school bus drivers were Black, compared with 13.3% of all state and local government employees and 10.8% of private-sector workers.3 Women are more concentrated in the school bus driver profession than in the private-sector workforce, but not at such high levels as in the overall public sector. More than half (54.3%) of state and local government school bus drivers are women, compared with 46.8% of all private-sector workers and 59.5% of all state and local government workers.

The concentration of Black workers and women in public school bus driving reflects the public sector historically offering more equitable opportunities for women and people of color. In particular, state and local government jobs are subject to equal opportunity and affirmative action regulations that have been shown to be effective anti-discrimination policies.

Figure D

An effective public education system depends on critical support staff to run effectively. The current bus driver shortage is a result of more than a decade of disinvestment in these professionals. The unfair burden of these disruptions is most damaging to the education and well-being of the students who need it the most, particularly students with disabilities. In light of these disruptions, it is imperative that state and local policymakers, school districts, and communities act to fairly compensate and invest in their bus drivers and other school support staff.

Notes

1. The data in Figure A is restricted to bus drivers reporting that they work in elementary and secondary schools. This classification leaves out a significant number of school bus drivers but is the only way to examine trends in school bus driver employment before 2018. Prior to 2018, there was only a single Census Occupation Classification code for bus drivers, with no differentiation between school bus drivers and other types of bus drivers. The 2018 codes added separate Census codes for school bus drivers and “transit and intercity” bus drivers. With the updated classification, we can identify that around 33% of school bus drivers do not work in the elementary and secondary school industry. Table 1 shows that the majority of these school bus drivers work in “bus service and urban transit.” In 2019, there were more than 106,000 school bus drivers employed in “bus service and urban transit,” around 30% of the total number of school bus drivers. Unlike school bus drivers in elementary and secondary schools, “bus service and urban transit” school bus drivers are more likely to be private-sector workers. In 2019, 83.5% of these workers were in the private sector, compared with 17.4% of school bus drivers classified in elementary and secondary schools. “Bus service and urban transit” school bus driver employment was also significantly harmed by the pandemic. From 2019 to 2021 (the most recent ACS data available), employment for this subset of school bus drivers fell 18.7%, compared with 16.5% for all school bus drivers. For now, the pandemic does not seem to have significantly changed the share of workers who are privately or publicly employed. The share of school bus drivers who are state and local government employees increased slightly between 2019 and 2021 from 59.2% to 62.2% since private school bus driver employment fell more steeply during the pandemic.

2. EPI analysis of American Community Survey microdata.

3. In 2021, 17.8% of private school bus drivers were Black.

Table 1

This decision marks a significant setback for colleges, which have relied on this tool for over 40 years to enhance racial diversity on their campuses and compensate for decades of both explicit and implicit race-based exclusion. Colleges must now explore options like targeted recruitment programs and using other metrics such as household income and wealth as substitutes for race-based admissions. However, flagship schools from states that previously banned affirmative action and used these alternative tactics have a poor track record of success in achieving meaningful diversity gains in their student body without using affirmative action. 

Lessons from flagship state schools 

Over the years, a total of nine states have implemented bans on affirmative action. This policy shift forced top educational institutions like the University of California and the University of Michigan to abandon race-based admissions and find new ways to admit diverse student bodies. As a result, these universities made significant efforts to foster racial diversity by investing hundreds of millions of dollars in outreach programs. However, according to two amicus briefs in support of affirmative action filed by these two universities last year to the Supreme Court, these endeavors have proven to be ineffective. Both university systems revealed perpetually low enrollment rates among students of color despite their significant investment in alternative ways to boost diversity among the applicant pool and student body.

Following California’s implementation of Proposition 209 in 1996, which banned the use of racial preferences in admissions, the state experienced a significant decline in enrollment rates across its educational institutions. Most notable was the decline in Black student enrollment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2006, only 96 students (less than 2%) self-identified as Black out of a freshman class of nearly 5,000 students. 

Although enrollment rates have shown some improvement since then, disparities in enrollment persist. For example, a mere 228 students (3%) at the University of California, Berkeley identified themselves as Black out of a nearly 7,000-strong freshman class in the fall of 2022. By comparison, the 2021–2022 high school graduating class in California had approximately 8,700 Black students that met the requirements for admission into the University of California system. These limited strides in fostering diversity have come at a substantial cost to the University of California system, exceeding half a billion dollars in investments since 2004.

Likewise, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, enrollment rates for students of color experienced a decline following the state’s adoption of Proposal 2, commonly known as the Affirmative Action Initiative, in 2006. This voter referendum also led to a state constitutional ban on race-conscious admissions. By 2021, Black enrollment stood at a mere 4%–a three percentage point drop from 2006. This is despite the growth of college-age African Americans in Michigan from 16% to 19%. Clearly, the University of Michigan has encountered challenges in ensuring that their flagship school reflects the diverse demographics of the state. 

The ban on affirmative action has made it more arduous for many universities to achieve proportional representation of underrepresented groups and imposes new constraints in racial equity and equal opportunity in higher education.

Class and wealth are not adequate measures in capturing diversity

As an alternative to race-based admissions, certain schools and advocates have suggested considering socioeconomic status—including wealth—as a criterion for preference in college admissions, irrespective of race. However, this race-blind alternative falls short in capturing the full scope of what race-based admissions could achieve. Focusing solely on socioeconomic status fails to address the specific obstacles that affirmative action was intended to combat. 

One significant drawback of this race-blind approach is its potential exclusion of deserving middle-class Black, Brown, and Native American students. These students may not meet the criteria for preferential treatment based on low socioeconomic status, despite facing racial disparities and encountering systemic barriers that hinder their educational opportunities. By overlooking the importance of race, this alternative fails to acknowledge the need to uplift marginalized racial and ethnic groups who may not fit neatly into a socioeconomic-based framework.

Moreover, according to Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America and the recently released Just Action: How to challenge segregation enacted under the color of law, when considering wealth-based admissions, it is important to acknowledge the significantly larger population of white Americans compared with African Americans. While a higher proportion of the Black population falls into the low-wealth category, the potential pool of low-wealth applicants would still consist of a significantly larger number of white students. According to Federal Reserve data from 2019, 31% of youths from households in the bottom quarter of the national wealth distribution (with a net worth of $12,400 or less) are Black. Even if preference was given to students in the bottom half of the wealth distribution (with a net worth of $121,700 or less), a smaller proportion of the eligible low-wealth applicants—24%—would be Black. Despite the belief that Black people may be overrepresented in a wealth-based program, the alternative would still be flawed in capturing many Black students.

Class-based admissions based on household income have also been a popular alternative to race-based admissions, but similarly to wealth, this criteria would fall short of the diversity objectives set by admissions offices, and undermine efforts to address discrimination. According to a study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, selective colleges that are prohibited from considering race and ethnicity in admissions decisions may regain some level of racial and ethnic diversity by adopting class-conscious admissions practices. However, the study highlights the considerable difficulties these institutions would encounter in achieving student bodies that accurately reflect the demographic diversity of their state’s high school population, which typically exhibits higher rates of enrollment across different racial groups compared with universities. The findings suggest that maintaining or surpassing existing representation without race-conscious admissions would necessitate a complete overhaul of the admissions system, requiring changes in applicant evaluation and consideration criteria. While socioeconomic status can be a relevant factor in addressing certain forms of disadvantage—and college education should absolutely be more accessible to low- and middle-income students of all races—socioeconomic status alone cannot fully replace the multifaceted impact of race-based admissions. 

The pending Supreme Court decision on student loan debt forgiveness adds an additional layer of complexity to using socioeconomic status as a proxy for race in achieving diversity. Student loan debt is yet another barrier hindering students of color from accessing higher education. Without student loan debt forgiveness, students of color hailing from low-income backgrounds encounter even greater disparities in economic outcomes. Irrespective of whether these students gain admission to universities based on their socioeconomic status, the intersection of student loan debt, structural racism, and poverty magnifies the existing gaps in their ability to afford and enroll in higher education institutions. This could impede efforts to achieve a more inclusive and diverse student body based on race and socioeconomic factors. 

The complexities of racial discrimination and the need for targeted measures to address historical injustices cannot be adequately captured by a race-blind approach alone. It is crucial to recognize the unique and ongoing struggles faced by underrepresented racial and ethnic groups and continue to advocate for holistic solutions that address both socioeconomic disparities and the significance of race in admissions policies. Affirmative action programs in higher education came into existence specifically to rectify the history of race-based exclusion, legally enforced segregation, and quota systems that capped the number of nonwhite or other minority students permitted to enroll at colleges and universities across the country. This history of discrimination had everything to do with barring students based on race, regardless of their class, and led to many of the enrollment disparities we still see today at many institutions.

What can universities do?

The adoption of race-blind admissions would not provide greater benefits to students of color compared with the existing impact of race-based admissions. Instead, any alternative approach would likely harm the enrollment rates of these marginalized groups and prove financially burdensome to implement. It is imperative to recognize the significance of race in addressing systemic inequalities and to prioritize inclusive measures that safeguard access to higher education for underrepresented communities.

Universities should persist in advocating for affirmative action specifically for Black, Brown, and Native American applicants. In an open letter issued a month before the Court’s ruling, the presidents of 27 liberal arts colleges stated, “To fulfill the promise of economic and social mobility, we need to continue rectifying the systemic barriers that have kept so many talented students of color out of higher education.” Rothstein argues that university presidents defending affirmative action programs on the grounds of rectifying past injustices could sway lower-court judges and dissenting justices to support affirmative action as a valid remedy. This approach may also pave the way for future Supreme Court justices to reject race-blind ideologies that currently impede reform efforts. Ultimately, maintaining intersectional admissions processes that include race is essential to promoting equity and redressing systemic barriers to higher education.

A 2022 study documented how hundreds of state and local anti-“CRT” campaigns have been “fueled by powerful conservative entities (media, organizations, foundations, PACs, and politicians) that exploit and foment local frustration and dissent over what should be taught and learned in schools.” Such fear-mongering has appeared especially effective in districts facing rapid demographic shifts. School districts where white student enrollment fell by more than 18% since 2000 were more than three times as likely to experience local anti-“CRT” campaigns than districts that saw little or no enrollment change in white students.

Anti-“CRT” campaigns have emboldened school boards and state legislatures to ban teaching about racism and sexism in classrooms and to disempower educators from teaching about the true legacy of white supremacy. Since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. 

Florida in particular has emerged as a primary battleground over proposals to censor truthful teaching in schools while restricting the academic freedom and union rights of educators. Earlier last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida state legislature enacted the Stop W.OK.E. Act, an acronym standing for “Wrong to our Kids and Employees.” This law limits how K–12 public schools, public colleges and universities, and Florida employers discuss race, gender, and sexual identity. 

In conjunction with attempts to restrict teaching about racism and equity, DeSantis also signed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, known formally as the Parental Rights in Education bill, that limits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity within public schools for K–3 students. These restrictions have forced many teachers and librarians to remove certain books discussing these topics and to enforce stricter guidelines on what students should and should not be allowed to read. Specifically, Florida mandates librarians go through training to avoid selecting books and instructional materials that violate any of these laws, and to “err on the side of caution” while making their selections.

In tandem with censoring Florida school curriculum, DeSantis has focused attacks on unions representing K–12 and university educators and staff, which have been the strongest organized source of statewide resistance to his extremist anti-education agenda. DeSantis started off the year by announcing support for a package of anti-union proposals aimed at eroding the bargaining power of educators and other public employees. DeSantis’s proposals repackaged and revived legislation introduced perennially in Florida in attempts to weaken public employees’ union rights. 

In May, DeSantis signed into law SB 256, a bill filled with new legal and administrative hurdles intended to make it more difficult for Florida public employees to join or maintain their unions. For example, the new law bans payroll deduction of union dues, forces local unions to undergo costly audits, and requires that an arbitrary 60% super majority of eligible employees pay dues in order for a public employee union to maintain its legal certification from the state. These attacks are a focused effort to further diminish the collective power of workers, teachers, students, and people of color.

These explicit attacks on education and educators create a dangerous precedent of censorship and erect new barriers to analyzing and addressing racism, sexism, and homophobia. It’s crucial to protect the integrity of our classrooms by providing students accurate information about our country’s racial and gender history, and how this history informs our present reality. Without this knowledge, a significant number of labor market disparities—such as wages and unemployment—as well as other U.S. institutions would remain unaccounted for.

Censorship in schools, particularly when it comes to discussions around race and gender, could have a significant impact on students’ understanding of crucial labor market realities. For instance, in 2022, women in the United States were paid roughly 22% less than men on average, with even wider gaps for women of color. Similarly, studies have shown that African American and Hispanic students have lower academic achievement and graduation rates compared with their white and Asian American peers. These disparities are rooted in systemic inequalities, and without discussing them in the classroom, students may not fully understand the extent of the problem. 

Indeed, under Florida’s new censorship regime, it is unclear whether public school teachers could legally help students understand past or present struggles to address these very disparities in their own state’s education system—including, for example, the 1968 statewide teachers’ strike (the first in U.S. history) in which 27,000 Black and white Florida teachers joined forces in the newly integrated Florida Education Association to win stronger state investments in public education and increased teacher pay. 

Within education policy, the challenges that confront us extend beyond the assault on discussions related to systemic racism and sexism. Underfunded public education, low teacher pay, and the continued segregation of school districts pose persistent challenges to equity in education and socioeconomic outcomes. 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. This teacher pay gap has increased almost continuously since the mid-1990s, when it stood at about 5% overall. Moreover, the pay gap for teachers and other local government employees tends to be largest in states where public employees have weaker collective bargaining rights. States like Florida that have recently moved to further limit educators’ union rights can expect to see teacher pay gaps continue to increase as a result.

Another key contributor to low teacher pay is the underfunding of public education, which has encouraged some educators to leave the profession altogether. As public schools continue to receive less resources, parents may start to enroll their children in private schools—segregating students even more. Parents are often incentivized to enroll their children in private schools through voucher programs that funnel public funds into private schools. In Florida, specifically, DeSantis has introduced legislation to expand private school vouchers which, when coupled with the defunding of public schools, mirror the same strategies legislators used after the Supreme Court case Brown v. The Board of Education required integrated schools in the late 1950’s through the 1970’s. This ultimately resulted in the same hysteria that resulted in white parents enrolling their kids in segregation academies.

Intertwined attacks on public education systems and the rights of education workers in states like Florida illustrate how state policies maintain disparities in educational institutions and labor markets, continuing the long legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The learning and unlearning we all must do to redress the role of structural racism and sexism within our institutions and public policies starts within the classroom—and must be protected. 

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).

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