A teacher shortage means that demand for teachers (proxied by vacant positions) is greater than the current supply of willing teachers (proxied by new hires). But the demand side of the teacher labor market is not set through any market mechanism. In this country, we rightly think that education is a public good everyone deserves and, as a result, rely on policymakers to decide how much society should invest in public education. If policymakers set the demand for inputs into public education (like teachers) to be low relative to the socially optimal level of investment in public education (by not allocating enough funding for public schools), shortages are easy to avoid. Yet the absence of a shortage would not mean we got the level of education investment right.

Take one obvious historical example: the collapse in public education spending during the recovery from the Great Recession of 2008–2009. Figure A is replicated from the first post in this series and focuses on the period leading up to and after the Great Recession. It shows that during the recovery from the Great Recession, there was no teacher shortage in the classical sense. In 2008–2009, job openings and hires both decreased and then hires slightly outpaced job openings in the recovery of that recession. Quits also declined, and didn’t return to pre-recession levels until 2013.

Figure A

In this period, fiscal austerity—at both federal and state levels—squeezed public financing for education. This squeeze reduced the funds available to spend on positions, including teachers, and so the insufficiently few teaching positions that were open were relatively easy to fill. There was no teacher shortage in the classical sense, but the absence of a shortage hid a woefully low level of public investment in education during that time.

One way to check if the demand for educational inputs has been set too low by policymakers is to assess investments in public education relative to the underlying capacity to make these investments. A decent proxy for underlying capacity is gross domestic product (GDP)—how much output is generated in the economy over an increment of time. If this economic capacity grows appreciably faster than public education spending, then one could conclude that this spending is inappropriately low. Figure B maps the change in GDP with changes in public education spending. Both measures are normalized by public school enrollment to make this a more informative comparison: If GDP rose rapidly yet educational spending fell solely due to the demographics of a smaller cohort of school-age children, this would not necessarily be a bad thing. The graph, indexed to 2003, shows that per-pupil educational funding kept up with per-pupil GDP through 2008. In short, the nation’s investment “effort” in education was relatively constant. Yet, in the wake of the Great Recession, fiscal austerity at the state and local level led to a divergence in the country’s capacity for funding education versus actual funding for education. Weak demand for education as a result of austerity measures in public budgets led to higher student-teacher ratios, reduced teacher pay, and reduced job satisfaction, thereby worsening the working conditions on offer to teachers.

Figure B

What does the optimal demand for teachers look like?

Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen several forms of suboptimal teacher labor markets. Since 2018, the demand has outpaced supply, creating a textbook labor shortage. In the Great Recession, demand didn’t outpace supply, but lackluster public spending on education reduced the overall demand for teachers, almost certainly far below any social optimum.

While we don’t claim any particular year was perfect from the vantage of teacher labor markets, an optimal demand for teachers would reflect a low student-teacher ratio, high levels of teaching satisfaction, and strong wages and benefits. Over the last 20 years, 2008 was recent high-water mark for having one of the lowest student-teacher ratios on record at 15:1. These conditions were met with strong job satisfaction among teachers: The Survey of the American Teacher documented that the share of teachers that were very satisfied with their careers in 2008 was 62%, hitting a high since the survey began in 1984. In 2008, average per-pupil spending on public education matched the rate of growth of GDP per student, suggesting that spending was in line with our capacity to invest in education.

How many extra teachers would we need today if student-teacher ratios remained at 2008 levels? Figure C shows actual teacher employment and projected teacher employment had it kept the same student-teacher ratio it had in 2008. Even accounting for the fact that enrollment in public sector education decreased in the last few years, the gap between actual teacher employment and the teacher employment needed to match student enrollment remains strikingly large. In 2023, we were short 233,000 teachers relative to the socially optimal level of education staffing. Using a different methodology, we came up with a very similar estimate of the total teacher shortage in 2022, suggesting that while this estimate is large, this is the number of teachers we need to have a robust public education program in the United States.

Figure C

Just because 2008 was a recent high-water mark for U.S. investment in public education, this hardly means that we would not have had large social benefits from investing even more in public schools that year. For example, data on school funding adequacy in 2009 (the oldest year data are available) show districts with more than 15% of students in poverty needed an additional $1,770 per pupil (2009 dollars) to provide adequate education, and that likely didn’t change much between 2009 and 2008. To bring all districts up to adequacy would likely require even more spending than what was spent in 2008.

Conclusion

In Part I of this blog series, we outlined the current teacher shortage and suggested policies to solve this shortage, namely policies that raise teacher pay. Since 2018, job openings have outpaced hires at alarming rates and quits are on the rise. This shortage should be a priority for policymakers.

However, solving today’s teacher shortage would not constitute a silver bullet when it comes to making an appropriate investment in the nation’s public education. Since the onset of the Great Recession, funding for public education has not kept pace with our nation’s capacity to fund education and students have suffered as a result. More funds flowing to the nation’s public schools—particularly funds flowing to low-income and high-poverty school districts—would yield large benefits for students and society at large.

In a separate report, we’ve further shown that Congress has a role they could play by increasing the amount of federal dollars that go to districts across the country. Not only would those funds increase educational capacity, which would support the hiring of teachers, but federal funding is also equity based—with higher-poverty districts receiving a larger share of the funds.

There are two key problems in the teacher labor market. Since at least 2018, and especially since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, labor market data has clearly signaled a textbook labor shortage for public school teachers. Closing this shortage and attracting—and retaining—enough teachers to fill currently vacant positions should be a high priority for policymakers at all levels of government. To accomplish this, the obvious strategy is to increase the attractiveness of teaching jobs—both through higher compensation for teachers, but also via investments that make teaching easier and more rewarding.

But even closing the current mismatch between vacancies and hiring in teacher labor markets would not imply a socially optimal level of investment in the teacher labor force or public education more broadly. Shortages occur when supply lags demand. And demand for teachers is driven by policymakers’ decisions about how much society should invest in education for kids. If this demand is low, hiring enough teachers to meet it is easy, but it does not address the underinvestment in public education.

This post focuses on the first problem: Today’s labor markets clearly show the supply of willing teachers is lagging demand. It documents the shortage and highlights solutions. A forthcoming post will focus on the second problem: Demand for teachers and other educational inputs is a political decision, and we have long stinted on this investment. There is no market system that ensures society is spending sufficiently on education and hence that demand for teachers is truly healthy relative to unmet social needs.

Some good news: Education employment has recovered since COVID-19 recession

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing transition to remote learning reduced employment not just for teachers, but also for school bus drivers, cafeteria staff, special education professionals, and English language learning instructors, among others. Figure A shows employment changes since the start of the pandemic in the private sector (the dark blue line) and in state and local government education (lighter two blue lines). K–12 teachers comprise 45% of local education and post-secondary (college) teachers comprise 30% of state education, making these industries good proxies for teacher labor markets. At the beginning of the COVID-19 recession, both the public education sector and the private sector saw enormous job losses, but this was more pronounced in the private sector. 

Figure A

However, employment in the private sector bounced back to pre-recession levels much quicker than in state and local government: By April 2022, private-sector employment growth had rebounded back to pre-COVID-recession levels, whereas state and local government education were still 7% and 4%, respectively, below pre-recession levels. It wasn’t until October 2023 that employment in local government education finally caught up to pre-recession levels and not until February 2024 that employment in state government education caught up. Today, employment in these sectors is about 1% above where it was in February 2020.

If we use state and local government education employment in February 2020 as a benchmark, one might conclude that the teacher shortage has been resolved. And this employment bounce-back was no small feat: The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated teaching difficulties and increased political polarization of the classroom. And many teachers reported additional stress during this period. Districts utilized their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds to staff up in the wake of the pandemic—choices that clearly worked (see other examples here and here). Hiring enough teachers to get back to the February 2020 pre-COVID-19 benchmark should be celebrated. But it’s not the end of the story.

Despite gains at the national level, disparities in teaching labor markets remain

The overall measure of employment used in Figure A obscures the unevenness of the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, as some schools recovered much faster than others. Disparities in schools being able to fill education positions persist and some positions remain harder to fill than others. Figure B shows the share of schools that reported feeling understaffed entering the August 2023 school year using a survey of nearly 4,000 public schools. The figure reveals that lower-poverty, majority-white schools are less likely to report feeling understaffed than high-poverty schools or schools with majority students of color. Only 42% of low-poverty schools reported feeling understaffed, compared with 57% of higher-poverty schools. Similarly, only 41% of schools that were less than 25% minority said they felt understaffed, compared with 49% of schools comprised of students that were 75% or more minority.

Figure B

The overall progress on the education shortages also varies by position type. A survey that scraped recent job postings in the state of Washington found that elementary education teacher positions got filled nearly twice as quickly as special education, English as a second language, and STEM positions. 

Despite recovered employment levels, a textbook teaching shortage remains

Even before COVID-19 destabilized education, the education labor market had long been characterized by indicators of chronic shortages. In the years leading up to the pandemic, the teacher labor market saw high job vacancy and quits rates and stagnant hires. Figure C provides historical context on job flows in state and local government education from 2001 to present. The figure shows that hires roughly kept pace with job openings until early 2018, when job openings started outpacing hires. Teachers were already growing less willing to accept teaching jobs and their associated compensation rates and working conditions in the period leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure C

The slow hiring of new teachers might be less damaging if the teachers that were hired stayed in their role for a long time. However, in the lead up to the COVID-19 pandemic, the quits rate also steadily rose from 0.60 in January 2013 to 0.83 in February 2020. Even before the pandemic, teachers were leaving the profession at high rates. Today, the quits rate remains elevated and job openings still outpace hires. One sign of positivity is that the vacancy rate is trending down faster than the hires rate, suggesting that progress is being made in matching teacher demand and supply. But an overall historical and current picture shows a pronounced teaching shortage that existed well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusion and policy advice

Teacher shortages existed in the lead up to COVID-19. These shortages were exacerbated in the wake of the pandemic as the attractiveness of teaching—both in terms of relative pay and work conditions—plummeted relative to many other jobs held by similarly educated workers. Today’s labor market for teachers is characterized by an excess of openings relative to hires and a rising quits rate (and one that is historically high for the profession).

One of the biggest contributing factors to teacher shortages is low teacher compensation. As of 2023, teachers were paid 26.6% less than workers with similar education credentials. Improving teacher pay would not only draw more eligible candidates into applying for jobs but would also help retain teachers longer and improve the quality of the teacher workforce—a key component influencing student achievement. 

Normally, labor shortages are resolved by market competition pushing up wages. But because this isn’t the type of labor market for education, it won’t happen for teachers. In education, teacher pay is not set in a perfectly competitive labor market where employers are private, profit-seeking entities. The labor shortage will only be solved by policymakers affirmatively deciding to raise the pay of the nation’s public school teachers and undertake investments that help children’s education and make the job of teaching them in our public schools easier and more rewarding.

The impact of a national teaching shortage is profound and will impact students for year to come. Teaching shortages lead to larger class sizes, stressed and over-burdened teachers, and financial strain on the education system. Teaching quality will be threatened and education disparities will harden, with students in high-poverty districts losing out the most.

In 2023, almost half of U.S. K–12 students were Black, Hispanic, or AAPI, while only a quarter of teachers identified in the same way (Figure A). This large disparity has major implications for education policy. 

Figure A

Improving teacher diversity leads to better student outcomes 

Research links same-race teachers to better educational outcomes for students. Cheng (2017) finds that increasing the representation of Black teachers “even by a single percentage point” is associated with lower suspension rates among Black high school students. Lindsay and Hart (2017) find that exposure to same-race teachers is associated with reduced rates of exclusionary discipline (out-of-school suspensions, in-school suspensions, and expulsion) for Black students in elementary, middle, and high school. Same-race teacher matches are also associated with lower high school dropout rates and greater college aspirations. Gershenson, Hart, Lindsay, and Papageorge (2017) estimate that exposure to a same-race teacher during elementary school not only reduces the high school dropout rate by 39% for the most economically disadvantaged Black male students, but also increases the likelihood that persistently low-income students aspire to attend a four-year college and take a college entrance exam.  

Moreover, same-race teachers are shown to improve test scores at magnitudes that could potentially help close the Black-white achievement gap. Egalite, Kisida, and Winters (2015), for example, find that same-race teacher matches have demonstrable impacts on test scores in math and reading for both elementary and middle/high school students, but at greater magnitudes for Black students relative to white students. This suggests that if the racial composition of teachers moved closer to the racial composition of the students they teach, one would likely see a measurable decline in the test score gaps between Black and white students.

Same-race teachers can also improve outcomes that may be more difficult to quantify numerically. Egalite and Kisida (2017) find that middle school students who are assigned to teachers of the same race report higher personal effort, happiness in class, feeling cared for and motivated by their teacher, and higher quality of student-teacher communication.

Figure B shows the difference in shares of teachers and students, for each educational category, by race and ethnicity in 2023. A positive difference indicates that the share of teachers in a given racial group is larger than the share of students in that same group. From Pre-K through high school, the figure shows that the share of white teachers exceeds the share of white students by 22.1 to 27.7 percentage points. The figure also shows that Black, Hispanic, and AAPI teachers in all schooling levels are underrepresented relative to the shares of students from those racial and ethnic groups. This demographic mismatch is largest for Black and Hispanic high school teachers and students. For example, the share of Black teachers is 7.6 percentage points lower than the share of Black students in high school, while the share of Hispanic teachers is 15.8 percentage points lower than the share of Hispanic students in high school. Of all the groups, the differences in the share of teachers and students are smallest for AAPI students across all levels of schooling.

Figure B

Taken together, this array of benefits for students of same-race teacher matches underscores the importance of recruiting more teachers of color as part of any effort to address the national teacher shortage and reduce racial disparities in academic outcomes. Further, raising pay for teachers and increasing the representation of teachers of color today could help ease any future shortage of teachers by making the teaching profession more attractive to students of color making career decisions in the next two decades.

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.

Key findings:

• New School Pulse Panel data show that educators’ feelings of being understaffed fell by eight percentage points in the past year, suggesting an improvement from pandemic heights of understaffing stress amid a widespread teacher shortage.
• Some improvement in feelings of being understaffed may be linked to American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds. SPP data show that 37% of public schools created positions with ARP funds.
  • Of these schools, 15% created positions for academic interventionists, 14% for mental health professionals, and 6% for academic tutors.
• But disparities filling teaching vacancies remain: While difficulty filling vacancies declined in majority white schools and in schools in higher-income neighborhoods, it increased in schools in lower-income neighborhoods and in schools with greater than 75% minority students.

The COVID-19 pandemic greatly exacerbated a long-standing and widespread teacher shortage in schools. By mid-2022, several indicators of teaching shortages and staffing stress were at record highs. Recent data from the School Pulse Panel (SPP) show that understaffing stress in schools has relented somewhat in the past year, though progress remains modest and uneven. The SPP also indicates that funding from the American Rescue Plan (ARP) has helped close some of these staffing gaps and address pressing needs in the nation’s schools.

While schools have been struggling to fill vacancies long before the pandemic due to chronic low pay and compensation, the stress of teaching during the pandemic made the teacher shortage even worse. A RAND 2022 report showed that 73% of teachers reported having “frequent job-related stress” compared with 35% of working adults, which can contribute to otherwise qualified potential teachers taking positions in other fields. This degradation of non-wage-related working conditions means that schools need to pay teachers more to retain them and adequately staff schools, yet this salary increase has not happened. In 2022, the teacher pay penalty—the gap in pay between teachers and similarly educated workers in other professions—hit a new high of 26.4%.

New School Pulse Panel data allow us to assess how school staffing has fared in the aftermath of the pandemic. Administered by the National Center for Education Statistics, the SPP has sampled school and district staff on a monthly basis since 2021. In August 2023, they surveyed 3,998 public elementary, middle, and high schools about staffing needs. Given the long-standing teacher shortage, the latest SPP data can be seen as an indicator of how effective the nation has been in alleviating long-run school staffing stress over the past year.

Figure A shows the percentage of schools that feel their school is understaffed entering the school years in August 2022 and 2023, including by the share of students that are in a minority group and by neighborhood poverty. (Note: we use the term “minority students” to be consistent with the terms used in the SPP survey.) The figure shows that feelings of being understaffed improved between 2022 to 2023, falling by eight percentage points. The improvement was relatively widespread, holding regardless of the share of minority students in the school. Feelings of being understaffed also declined in schools with lower neighborhood poverty, but there was no change in schools with higher neighborhood poverty.

Figure A

The overall improvement may, in part, be linked to the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds provided through the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP). These funds—$122 billion in total—were intended to help PreK–12 schools safely reopen and to tackle learning loss and mental health challenges brought on by the pandemic. Figure B shows that 37% of schools surveyed in August 2022 reported that they created positions for the 2022–2023 school year using ARP funds. Of these schools, 15% created positions for academic interventionists, 14% created positions for mental health professionals, 7% created positions for special education, 7% created positions for instructional coaches, and 6% created positions for academic tutors. The creation of jobs using ARP funds was fairly similar across schools regardless of the school’s share of minority students or neighborhood poverty.

Figure B

Unfortunately, the ARP did not solve shortages in certified teachers, and disparities in the extent of these shortages persist across schools. Figure C shows the percentage of public schools that experienced difficulty filling at least one teaching position entering the school years in August 2022 and 2023. Difficulty in filling vacancies declined slightly from 80% to 79% between 2022 and 2023. Underlying this modest decline, however, are larger declines in schools with less than 75% minority students and in schools in lower poverty neighborhoods. By contrast, schools with greater than 75% minority students experienced a six-percentage-point increase in difficulty filling teaching positions, and schools in higher poverty neighborhoods also experienced a four-percentage-point increase in difficulty. These findings suggest that long-standing disparities in teacher quality may have exacerbated over the last year, in which high-poverty schools suffer the most from a lack of credentialed teachers.

Figure C

Taken together, the results suggest that while schools are rebounding from the pandemic in terms of staffing overall, improvements in the teacher shortage have been felt unevenly, with schools that are majority white and in high-income neighborhoods seeing larger improvements. A shortage of qualified teachers threatens students’ ability to learn and reduces teachers’ effectiveness. When the shortage is distributed so unevenly among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds, it hinders the U.S. education system’s goal of providing a sound education equitably to all children.

In their report, Kraft and Lyon examine four broad sets of indicators of the overall well-being of the teaching profession: professional prestige, interest in teaching, enrollment in preparation programs, and job satisfaction. They compile nationally representative time-series data and find compelling evidence of four distinct periods in the status of teaching over the last half century: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a quick rise in the early- to mid-1980s, no significant change over the next 20 years, and the start of a steep decline around 2010. Kraft and Lyon’s findings since 2010 are very similar to what we found: While the pandemic exacerbated challenges facing teachers, “most of these declines occurred steadily throughout the last decade suggesting they are a function of larger, long-standing structural issues with the profession.”

Across every one of the four dimensions they examine, the data reveal a sharp decline since the 2010s. With respect to prestige, an annual survey by Phi Delta Kappan International found that the share of parents wanting their child to become a teacher, which had remained above 65% between 1993 and 2011, fell to just 37% by 2022. Interest in teaching as a profession also fell. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that the share of high school seniors who expected to be teaching at age 30 was “almost 7% in 1992 only to fall to around 3%…in the mid-2000s where it has remained.”

Given these declines in prestige and interest, it is unsurprising that Kraft and Lyon present government data showing a decline in the number of college graduates preparing to enter teaching. At its high point in 2006, the number of teaching licenses issued was equal to 22% of the total number of college graduates, but the rate fell to just 11% by 2020.

Trends in job satisfaction follow the same pattern. Kraft and Lyon cite the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, which found that the percent of teachers who were “very satisfied” fell from 62% in 2008 to 12% in 2022.

The strong decline in the well-being of the teaching profession since 2010 coincides with the rising number of teaching vacancies documented in our report. However, like Kraft and Lyon, we maintain optimism that we can reverse the declining well-being of the teaching profession and resulting growing teacher shortage by addressing the root causes. With intentional action, we can restore the education system’s core goal: to provide a sound education equitably to all children.

But in pulling together our report, we realized that the statistics we presented don’t fully capture what shortages actually look like—in practice—for school districts, teachers, and students. To convey at least a part of that missing texture, we’ve pulled together some recent journalistic and more granular accounts of how state and local school education officials have responded to the long-term rise in teacher vacancies. Unfortunately, almost all of these have proved to be less than ideal for teachers and students.

One common method of dealing with teacher shortages has been to extend the practice of online teaching, an approach used extensively earlier in the pandemic. These “teacher-saving” strategies include streaming from one in-person class simultaneously to classrooms at multiple schools, and outsourcing lessons for specific subject areas to companies offering online programs. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, several teachers at Momentum Academy in St. Louis, Missouri livestream their classes to students at three other campuses across south St. Louis. One seventh-grade math teacher at the school livestreams to the three other schools daily and travels to those schools for in-person instruction once a week. Alternatively, PBS reports that the Colonial School District in New Castle Hundred, Delaware, which started the 2022 school year with more than 20 teacher vacancies, has outsourced math, science, and French classes for over 1,200 students to two online learning businesses: Back to Basics (Learning Dynamics Inc.) and Edgenuity Inc.

Other schools are trying to fill teacher vacancies by experimenting with four-day school weeks. Some school districts tried four-day school weeks to save money after the 2008 recession decimated public education budgets, but The Wall Street Journal reports that now some school officials have turned to four-day weeks in an attempt to attract and retain teachers. The Journal cites Oregon State University professor Paul Thompson, whose research found that the number of national school districts with four-day school weeks increased from 650 prior to the pandemic to more than 800 in 2022. Journalist Zaid Jilani reports that in New Mexico, the Socorro Consolidated Schools have turned to a four-day work week to fill vacancies, replacing an earlier policy of recruiting teachers “from as far away as India and the Philippines.”

Still, other school districts have responded to the teacher shortage by lowering the standards to be considered a qualified teacher. In some cases, this has been done to allow parents and veterans to fill vacancies either as full-time teachers or as substitutes. The Washington Post reports that the Hays Consolidated Independent School District near Austin, Texas, was able to triple their pool of approved substitute teachers by waiving the requirement of at least 30 hours of college credit and hiring “eligible noncertified” parents. NBC News reports that schools in Idaho, Colorado, California, and Massachusetts have turned to parents to staff schools. In July of this year, Florida passed Senate Bill 896, which allows some military veterans who have not completed their bachelor’s degrees to receive a five-year temporary certificate to teach. According to ABC News in Cleveland, Ohio state lawmakers introduced a similar piece of legislation which, if passed, would allow veterans to bypass any teaching qualification requirements by “completing four years of service, having been honorably discharged and having a reference letter from a former commanding officer that says the veteran is qualified to teach.”

Finally, the most brute-force methods some school districts have adopted to address the teacher shortage are simply to cancel courses where vacancies are hard to fill or to increase class sizes until the vacancies mechanically disappear. The Learning Policy Institute, for example, notes that available data “most likely underrepresent the extent and impact of [teacher] shortages because districts often address shortages by canceling courses, increasing class sizes, or starting the school year with substitute teachers.” The PBS story on Delaware that we mentioned earlier, for example, also reports that some schools have closed vacancies by as much as doubling the number of students a teacher would normally supervise.

All these responses to the teacher shortage—online teaching, four-day school weeks, lowering standards, canceling courses, and increasing class sizes—reduce teachers’ effectiveness and threaten students’ ability to learn. These coping strategies are also evidence—independent of the data—of the depth of the teacher shortage that some observers attempt to deny.

Introduction 

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

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

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

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

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

Teacher shortages are widespread and long-standing

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

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

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

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

Vacancies

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

Teacher Shortage Areas data

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

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

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

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

State teacher workforce reports

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

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

Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data

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

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

Figure A

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

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

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

Figure B

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

School Pulse Panel data

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

Figure C

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

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

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

Figure D

American School District Panel data

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

Figure E

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

Decline in interest in the teaching profession

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

Falling interest in education as a field of study

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

Figure F

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

Falling number of education degrees conferred

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

Figure G

Nontraditional teacher prep programs don’t make up the difference

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

Figure H

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

Large shares of teacher prep graduates decide not to teach

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

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

The teacher shortage is bigger than unfilled or underfilled vacancies

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

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

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

Main drivers of the teacher shortage

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

Poor compensation

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

Current Population Survey data

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

Figure I

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

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

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

American Community Survey data

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

Figure J

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data

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

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

Figure K

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

Figure L

Stress

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

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

Pre-pandemic stress

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

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

Figure M

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

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

Pandemic-related stress

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

Figure N

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

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

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

Table 1

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

Conclusion

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

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

Acknowledgments

We thank Madilynn O’Hara for research assistance.

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14. See Gould 2022.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stress is the most common reason for leaving teaching early, and it is also associated with job absenteeism and poor teacher performance, negatively impacting student outcomes. As more schools face increased teacher turnover rates and intensified teacher shortages, it is essential to investigate what influences teachers’ job-related stress.

A key factor that can help reduce teacher stress: teachers’ unions. That’s according to findings in our new paper, which relies on nationally representative data in pre-pandemic periods that allow us to examine the impact of teachers’ unions on teacher stress.

We first compare the stress level of union teachers with that of nonunion counterparts, using various metrics to measure the strength of teachers’ unions. We control for various teacher characteristics (gender, race/ethnicity, education, experience, charter and secondary school indicators), district features (K-12 student enrollment, percent of students in free/reduced-price lunch programs, racial/ethnic composition of students, urbanism, district revenue, and living costs), and other characteristics, like cultural and political beliefs, that may be common for teachers in the same school district.

We find that teachers’ unions are negatively associated with teacher stress: the stress index of teachers in districts with collective bargaining (CB) agreements is .07 lower than that of teachers in districts with no union agreement, a statistically significant difference equal to about 14% of the standard deviation of the teacher stress index. Teachers in districts with higher union density also report lower stress than those in districts with lower union density, and union-member teachers show significantly lower levels of stress relative to non-member teachers.

We then examine the effect of the 2010-2011 anti-union laws in Idaho, Indiana, Tennessee, and Wisconsin on teacher stress, comparing how their teachers fared relative to teachers in other states that did not experience such legal changes. We expected that, if teachers’ unions indeed reduce teacher stress, we should observe that the institutional changes that weakened teachers’ unions in these four states raised teacher stress. The data do show that the new anti-union state legislation significantly increased teacher stress, and the magnitude of these negative impacts was greater for teachers who were male, more experienced and qualified, in secondary schools, and teaching STEM subjects.

How do unions reduce teacher stress? They raise teacher compensation and improve working conditions, which may contribute to lowered stress. Unsurprisingly, we find that higher teacher salary and shorter working hours are also associated with lower levels of stress, but even after controlling for these key factors, the negative effect of teachers’ unions on stress still remains statistically significant. This suggests that unions’ positive influence on teacher pay and working conditions plays a role but is not the only mechanism through which unions reduce teacher stress.

The positive union effect on teacher stress may be driven by unions’ role as “teacher voice.” Teachers’ unions provide more supportive leadership relationships, improved school climate, advocacy for professional development, and increased teacher morale. Because of these, the unions also correlate with teachers’ overall well-being, a critical pillar of teachers’ stress and their mental health.

In policies to improve the workplace for our teachers, policymakers should seriously consider teachers’ mental well-being. Our study suggests that, given their essential role in reducing teacher stress, teachers’ unions can provide members with more assistance in managing excess stress and burnout by offering additional support, counseling, and other in-depth services.

Over the last 18 years, EPI has closely tracked trends in teacher pay. Over these nearly two decades, a picture of increasingly alarming trends has emerged.1 Simply put, teachers are paid less (in weekly wages and total compensation) than their nonteacher college-educated counterparts, and the situation has worsened considerably over time.

Prior to the pandemic, the long-trending erosion in the relative wages and total compensation of teachers was already a serious concern. The financial penalty that teachers face discourages college students from entering the teaching profession and makes it difficult for school districts to keep current teachers in the classroom. Trends in teacher pay coupled with pandemic challenges may exacerbate annual shortages of regular and substitute teachers.2

Providing teachers with compensation commensurate with that of other similarly educated professionals is not simply a matter of fairness but is necessary to improve educational outcomes and foster future economic stability of workers, their families, and communities across the U.S. We explain in greater detail why teacher pay and compensation is so important in a prior report (Allegretto and Mishel 2019). In this analysis, we add two more years, 2020 and 2021, to our long-running series.

Data and relevant information

We use two sources of data, both from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). We provide a comprehensive discussion of the data and methodologies that produce our teacher weekly wage and total compensation estimates in a prior report (Allegretto and Mishel 2019, Appendix A). Following is a summary of that discussion.

First, we use Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Groups (CPS-ORG) data for the wage analyses. We focus on weekly wages, which avoids comparisons of weekly hours worked or length of the work year (i.e., the “summers off” issue for teachers) between teachers and other college graduates.3 The sample is restricted to full-time workers (working at least 35 hours per week), 18 to 64 years old, with at least a bachelor’s degree. The education restriction is made because teachers today need at least a bachelor’s degree to teach. The sample is further limited to those who reported their wage information directly (i.e., nonresponders whose wage data was imputed by BLS are excluded).4

The BLS top-codes weekly wages above a defined threshold that has not been updated for inflation since 1998. As a result, a growing share of workers are assigned top-coded wages, which has generated a growing understatement of college graduate wages relative to those of teachers. EPI replaces original top-coded values with with Pareto-distribution implied means above the CPS top-code for men and women.5

The second data source we use to assess benefits is from BLS’s National Compensation Survey’s Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) program. Specifically, we pull data on employer costs per hour worked for detailed categories of compensation for “primary, secondary, and special education school teachers” in the public sector and “civilian professionals”—the latter being the broadest category available that corresponds with all college graduates. “Benefits” in our analysis refers to employer costs for health and life insurance, retirement plans, and payroll taxes (i.e., Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation). The remaining components of compensation are “W-2 wages,” a wage measure that corresponds to the wages captured in the CPS data used above. W-2 wages are the wages reported to employees and to the Internal Revenue Service. They include “direct wages,” defined by the BLS as “regular payments from the employer to the employee as compensation for straight-time hourly work, or for any salaried work performed” and other wage items, including “supplemental pay.” Supplemental pay includes premium pay for overtime, bonus pay, profit-sharing, and “paid leave.”

A note about the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and related recession may have affected the comparability of the 2020 and 2021 data with CPS data from earlier years. Pandemic-related workforce disruptions were significantly greater than workforce disruptions at any time in recent experience. These disruptions may have affected the quality and the comparability of the CPS data for those years.

Gould and Kandra (2022) investigated the issue and provide insights into the most affected workers by demographics and educational attainment. They show that employment losses in the 12 months after the onset of the pandemic relative to the 12 months immediately prior to the pandemic were heavily concentrated among workers with less than a four-year college degree (down 17.4% for workers with less than a high school degree, down 11.3% for those with only a high school degree, and down 10.1% for those with less than a four-year college degree).6

However, employment changes over the same time frame were much smaller for workers with higher levels of formal education. According to Gould and Kandra, employment was down just 3.5% for workers with a four-year college degree, while for those with advanced degrees, employment was actually up 0.6%. Additionally, in the second 12 months (i.e., months 13–24) following the onset of the pandemic, employment more than recovered for those with at least a four-year degree, which was not the case for any other category of educational attainment.

As noted above, our sample is restricted to workers who have at least a bachelor’s degree, and according to Gould and Kandra’s findings, these are the workers who were least affected by pandemic disruptions. While it is possible that labor market disruptions may distort our findings here, we do know that workers in our sample were much less affected by the employment disruptions resulting from the pandemic than other workers.7 We therefore proceed following the same methodology we have used for earlier versions of this analysis. Any pandemic-related issues with the data that come to light will be addressed in future updates of this work.

Findings

Our findings are presented in four sections. We first present trends in annual average weekly wages (adjusted for inflation) from 1979 through 2021 for teachers and other college graduates. Next, we report annual estimates of the national teacher weekly wage penalty using standard regression techniques to control for systematic differences in age, education, state of residence, and other factors known to affect wage rates. Third, we offer regression-adjusted estimates of the teacher pay gap for each state and for the District of Columbia. Finally, we factor in nonwage benefits to estimate a total compensation penalty that includes wages and benefits at the national level (which is not possible for each state).

Weekly wage trends: The unadjusted gap

The trends in average weekly wages of public school teachers and of other college graduates, adjusted only for inflation, are presented in Figure A. As discussed in a prior report (Allegretto and Mishel 2019, Appendix A), flags to identify imputed wage data (i.e., data not directly reported by the survey respondent) are incomplete or not available for 1994 and 1995; data points for these years are interpolated and represented by dotted lines in the figure.

Figure A

In 1979, teachers earned $1,052 per week (in 2021 dollars), which is 22.9% less than the $1,364 earned by other college graduates. The difference in wages between teachers and other college graduates decreased slightly into the mid-1990s, falling to 15.7% in 1996, but then increased considerably during the tight labor markets of the late 1990s into the early 2000s. The wages of nonteacher college graduates jumped by 13.5% from 1996 to 2002 during an unusual time of exceptional wage growth among low-, middle-, and high-wage earners. But inflation-adjusted wages of teachers did not grow strongly during this period, in part because teacher pay is often set by long-term contracts, and public-sector wages are not as volatile (they do not rise and fall as much) as private-sector wages. Teacher weekly wages remained flat in inflation-adjusted terms from 1996 to 2002, increasing just 0.3%, leaving the real average weekly wage of teachers 25.5% less than their college graduate counterparts.

This difference remained fairly consistent, with some ups and downs, throughout the 2000s. But, a significant widening of the wage gap has occurred since 2010 as teacher wages remained relatively flat while wages of other college graduates took off. The difference increased by 7.6 percentage points between 2010 and 2021—leaving the average weekly wages of teachers 32.9% behind that of other college graduates by 2021, the largest difference recorded in our series. 

Regression-adjusted wage gaps

To obtain an apples-to-apples comparison of earnings between teachers and nonteacher college graduates, we must control for any systematic differences in factors that typically affect pay, including a worker’s age, formal education (B.A., M.A., professional degree, or Ph.D.), marital status, race/ethnicity, and state of residence. To do this, we use standard regression techniques to estimate the weekly wages of public school teachers relative to other college graduates.8 We do this for all teachers (which includes a gender control), as well as separately for women and men.

Figure B

We present relative wages as percentage differences from the perspective of teachers, i.e., how much less (or more) teachers earn in weekly wages relative to other college graduates. We define a weekly wage “penalty” for teachers when the regression estimates suggest that teachers, all else equal, are paid less than other college graduates; the penalty appears as a negative number in Figure B. When teachers are paid more, the number is positive and is referenced as a “premium.”

Generally, the teacher wage penalty has been on a worsening trajectory since the mid-1990s. A slight shrinking of the gap in 2019 was short lived. It widened again in 2020, to 21.6%, and in 2021, the penalty reached a record 23.5%. That means that, on average, teachers earned just 76.5 cents on the dollar compared with what similar college graduates earned working in other professions—and much less than the relative 93.9 cents on the dollar that teachers earned in 1996.

Relative wage trends by gender are revealing. First, through the mid-1990s, women in the teaching profession had a relative wage “premium” (or were close to parity) relative to comparable women working in other professions. In earlier work (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2008), we showed that women teachers had a 14.7% wage premium in 1960. In 2021, they had a 17.1% wage penalty. Thus, over six decades there has been a 31.8 percentage-point swing for the worse in the relative wage gap for women teachers.

The large wage penalty that men face in the teaching profession goes a long way toward explaining why the gender makeup of the profession has not changed much over the past few decades. The pre-1996 wage penalty for male teachers, compared with other male college graduates, was already large; by 2021, it had grown to a record 35.2%.

The wage penalty for teachers overall hit record levels in 2021. When we break it down by gender, we see that both men and women faced record-high wage penalties for choosing teaching as a career.

Teacher weekly wage penalties by state

To this point, we have focused on average public school teacher wage penalties for the United States as a whole. Next, we present regression-adjusted teacher wage penalties by state. To estimate relative teacher earnings by state, we pool six years of CPS data from 2016 through 2021 to assure ample sample sizes for each state. Again, we compare public school teachers with nonteacher college graduates within each state and estimate gaps for each state and the District of Columbia.

Figure C

In no state does the relative weekly wage of teachers equal or surpass that of their nonteaching college graduate counterparts. Figure C presents state gaps in a bar chart, ranked from the largest wage penalty to the smallest (Figure D presents the same data in a map). Rhode Island, Wyoming, and New Jersey have the smallest wage penalties—at 3.4%, 4.0%, and 4.5%, respectively. Colorado has the largest gap at 35.9%. Four other states join Colorado in having wage penalties above 30%: Oklahoma (32.8%), Virginia (32.7%), Arizona (32.0%), and Alabama (30.6%).9 Teacher wage penalties are larger than 20% in 28 states.

Figure D

Adding benefits to the picture

The analysis thus far has focused specifically on teachers’ weekly wages relative to those of other comparable college graduates. Yet benefits such as retirement plans and health insurance make up a sizeable share of a worker’s total compensation package. Thus, to get a more complete picture of how teachers are faring relative to other college graduates, we need to factor in those benefits. Teachers generally receive a higher share of their compensation as benefits than other professionals do, partially offsetting the weekly wage penalty they face. In this section we examine the teacher benefits advantage and how it impacts relative total compensation.10

Table 1 provides the basic information necessary to compare the benefits packages of primary, secondary, and special education public school teachers with those of comparable workers (specifically, workers in professional occupations).11 This table draws on the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) series.

Table 1

The first pair of columns in Table 1 under “W-2 wage share of compensation” present the share of W-2 wages in total compensation for professionals in all occupations and for state and local K–12 public school teachers. The W-2 wage share of compensation and the benefits share of compensation sum to 100%. These W-2 shares allow us to examine how important wages are relative to benefits in the total compensation package.

In 2021, for example, teacher W-2 wages made up 70.1% of their total compensation. For professionals, the share was 78.5%. That means that for every dollar of teachers’ total compensation, 70.1 cents went to wages and 29.9 cents went to benefits, while for professionals, 78.5 cents went to wages and 21.5 cents went to benefits. Therefore, for every dollar of total compensation, public school teachers receive more in benefits than other professionals. We refer to this as the “benefits advantage.”12

The columns under “Public school teachers” in Table 1 provide the information for our calculations. The “Wage penalty” column reports the teacher wage penalty from Figure B, followed by the “Benefits advantage” that teachers have; combining these two figures gives us an estimate for the teacher total compensation penalty, shown in the last column. The benefits advantage for teachers partially offsets their estimated relative wage disadvantage and thus shrinks the teacher total compensation gap.

The benefits advantage for teachers in 2021 was 9.3%, significantly higher than the 2.4% teacher benefits advantage in 1993. This was not enough, however, to offset the decline in relative wages over the same period—from -5.1% in 1993 to -23.5% in 2021. The total teacher compensation penalty was 14.2% in 2021—widening the total compensation gap by 4 percentage points from 2019 to 2021.

Final thoughts

This report is the latest in a series that has included two books and numerous reports over the last 18 years. The picture that continues to emerge is one of a long-steep relative erosion of teacher wages. Adding benefits to the picture helps, but the 2021 total compensation gap (14.2%) is the worst we have ever reported, as are the weekly wage gaps.

Among those students who would like to dedicate their careers to teaching, many are undoubtedly choosing to forgo a public school teaching career in lieu of a better-paying career choice. The most oft-cited reason for a lack of interest in teaching—according to a survey of potential students taking a college entrance examination—is low teacher salaries (Croft, Guffy, and Vitale 2018). Parents of college-bound students may discourage them from considering teaching as a career. A poll showed that a majority of parents would not want their children to become teachers, many citing low pay as a major factor (PDK 2018).

Without targeted and significant policy action—not just on teacher pay but on school funding more generally—there can be no reasonable expectation of reversal in sight for pandemic-stressed schools and those who serve public education (see Allegretto, García, and Weiss 2022). For teachers, the pandemic exposed and heightened long-standing fissures—including worsening shortages of permanent teachers and qualified substitutes. This report again sounds the alarm on the long erosion in relative teacher wages and the widening gap in total compensation—which makes the prospects for attracting and retaining the teachers needed to alleviate shortages difficult at best.

Notes

1. See How Does Teacher Pay Compare (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2004); The Teacher Penalty (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2008); and the following issue briefs and reports in the series: Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2011; Allegretto and Tojerow 2014; and Allegretto and Mishel 2016, 2018, 2019.

2. For a wide-ranging examination of teacher shortages see the EPI summary of papers on the topic by García and Weiss (2020) and the Learning Policy Institute’s blog series (LPI 2022).

3. In Allegretto and Mishel 2019, we provide evidence that teachers work weekly hours similar to those of other professionals.

4. Our earlier work documents that BLS’s imputation method overstates teacher earnings, which is not the case for the other college graduate sample (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2008, 9).

5. For more about top-code adjustments, see EPI 2022b.

6. See Gould and Kandra 2022, Table 1.

7. CPS data collection procedures and response rates were also affected by the pandemic. McIllece (2020) provides some insights into resultant bias in top-line labor force statistics such as the unemployment rate.

8. The wage model includes controls for both public school teacher and private school teacher. The weekly wage penalty estimates are based on the coefficient on the public school teacher indicator. Regression for all teachers includes a gender control. See Allegretto and Mishel 2019, Appendix A, for specification details.

9. The state outcomes from our 2019 report are similar, which is not unexpected given that there is some overlap in the CPS data we use. In 2019 we estimated the state gaps using 2014–2019 data; in this report, we use 2016–2021 data.

10. We draw heavily on our prior work analyzing the “benefits bias”—which we now label the “benefits advantage” (see Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2004, 2008).

11. The ECEC provides compensation data for a narrower category of “primary, secondary, and special education school teachers” and for a broader category of “teachers.” We analyze the narrower category, which closely matches the definition of teachers in our CPS-ORG data, using data limited to state and local public-sector workers. The inclusion of kindergarten and special education teachers in the benefits analysis does not produce any more substantial differences than if they were excluded (as they are in the CPS sample used to estimate the wage penalty). Greater methodological detail is provided in Appendix A of Allegretto and Mishel 2019.

12. Our analysis accounts for differences in annual weeks worked, as it is based on the usual weekly wages of teachers and other college graduates, not hourly wages or annual earnings. One reason health and pension costs are higher for teachers is that teacher health benefits are provided for a full year while teacher salaries are for less than a full year.

References

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel. 2004. How Does Teacher Pay Compare? Methodological Challenges and Answers. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel. 2008. The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel. 2011. The Teaching Penalty: An Update Through 2010. Economic Policy Institute Issue Brief no. 298, March 2011.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Emma García, and Elaine Weiss. 2022. Public Education Funding in the U.S. Needs an Overhaul: How a Larger Federal Role Would Boost Equity and Shield Children from Disinvestment During Downturns. Economic Policy Institute, July 2022.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., and Lawrence Mishel. 2016. The Teacher Pay Gap Is Wider Than Ever: Teachers’ Pay Continues to Fall Further Behind Pay of Comparable Workers. Economic Policy Institute, August 2016.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., and Lawrence Mishel. 2018. The Teacher Pay Penalty Has Hit a New High: Trends in the Teacher Wage and Compensation Gaps Through 2017. Economic Policy Institute, September 2018.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., and Lawrence Mishel. 2019. The Teacher Weekly Wage Penalty Hit 21.4 Percent in 2018, a Record High. Economic Policy Institute, April 2019.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., and Ilan Tojerow. 2014. “Teacher Staffing and Pay Differences: Public and Private Schools.” Monthly Labor Review (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics), September 2014.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2022a. “Employer Costs for Employee Compensation – December 2021” (news release). March 18, 2022.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2022b. Employer Costs for Employee Compensation Historical Listing: National Compensation Survey, March 2004–September 2021.

Croft, Michelle, Gretchen Guffy, and Dan Vitale. 2018. Encouraging More High School Students to Consider Teaching. ACT Policy Research, June 2018.

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