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EdSurge
Is Teaching Still an Appealing Profession? A Growing Teacher Shortage Worries Experts
By Stephen Noonoo
Mar 4, 2021
Long Beach Unified, one of the largest school districts in California,
is facing a worrying but all-too-familiar problem: Finding enough
qualified teachers, or even substitutes, to fill what some experts see
as a growing shortage in the midst of an unpredictable pandemic.
This year, leaves of absences in Long Beach increased by 35 percent,
and fewer than half of its 1,100-member substitute pool signaled a
willingness to work, Assistant Superintendent David Zaid told
researchers from the Learning Policy Institute, which recently
published a report on the teacher shortage in California. “When you
think about going from 1,100 all the way down to 450, that was a
significant amount,” Zaid said.
Long Beach’s experience tracks with a nationwide shortage of
substitutes. In an Education Week survey conducted at the end of last
year, nearly three-quarters of school and district leaders cited it as
a major problem, with most saying they’ve had difficulty covering
classes as a result.
But the country’s teacher shortage runs far deeper than substitutes. It
has morphed into a serious, existential threat for the profession. And
there are indications it may be getting worse.
The LPI report found the stress of COVID-19 starting to contribute to
early retirements, prolonged leaves and burnout in the rural and urban
districts they surveyed. Some systems are asking existing teachers to
take on additional responsibilities to fill gaps, along with leaning on
administrators, interns and, increasingly, under-credentialed teachers
to cover classes.
The number of under-credentialed teachers and those using emergency
permits to teach are typically a good indicator of shortages, says
co-author Desiree Carver-Thomas, because districts are only authorized
to hire them when well-qualified teachers are not available.
“Most districts have found teachers to be in short supply, especially
for math, science, special education and bilingual education,” the
authors write. According to federal data, more than 40 states have
reported similar shortages for the 2020-21 school year.
A Pipeline Problem
The causes of teacher shortages are complex—and the result of patterns
and trends that are years in the making. The teacher workforce
typically consists of a careful balance between those exiting the
profession and those returning to the classroom or entering for the
first time, in addition to factors like class size. In a given year, a
sudden spike in retirements or a drop in college graduates pursuing
teaching as a career can have a big impact.
This past summer there were fears of a mass exodus from the profession
due to retirements, which could have plunged the teacher corps into
crisis. One Education Week poll showed nearly a third of all educators
considering leaving their jobs. But retirements were actually down in
some states that reopened early, and they were up only slightly in
others. It was the same story among the California districts included
in the LPI report: Retirements were causing problems for only about a
third of districts. In interviews, though, administrators worried that
the longer the pandemic drags on, the more chance that older teachers
concerned for their health and taxed by expanding workloads will start
to trickle out of the classroom.
The real issue may be lining up their replacements—namely enticing
enough college students to enter pre-service teaching programs.
“The signs are concerning,” says Michael DiNapoli, the deputy director
of federal policy at LPI. “We’ve long had an attenuated pipeline into
the profession.”
Over the past decade, enrollment in teacher prep programs has declined
by more than a third, according to the National Center for Education
Statistics. Recent data suggests that overall higher education
enrollment is down 4 percent in fall 2020—particularly among Black and
Native American students, which is troubling for a field that is trying
to recruit more-diverse teachers.
Driving the drop are concerns about the cost of college and fears of ballooning student debt.
“It’s hard to say it will be very appealing for young [students] to go
into a profession that just at the beginning underpays you by about 20
percent relative to other professions,” says Emma García, an education
economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “That is a pretty
significant cut in your paycheck, and that is a penalty that has been
growing for the last couple of decades.”
When teacher shortages get dire, they can have an adverse impact on
students, who benefit greatly from highly-qualified teachers that stay
in the classroom and hone their craft. An earlier LPI report from 2016
estimated there could be as many as 100,000 vacancies for
well-qualified teachers nationwide—with many under-credentialed
teachers and substitutes picking up the slack, especially in
under-resourced communities.
“There is an impact on equity,” says Jeffrey Freitas, president of the
California Federation of Teachers, on a call with reporters to discuss
the LPI report. “And we’ve seen that in many lawsuits in the past. When
there’s a teacher shortage, what’s hit most are the schools serving
low-income students and students of color.”
In general, experts warn against short-term fixes to deep-rooted
problems. LPI has signaled support for teacher residency programs that
help diversify the teaching workforce and encourage retention. And
they’ve identified numerous federal grants that, if funded or properly
distributed, could help train more-qualified teachers and help them
graduate debt free.
Some of the suggestions in the LPI report mirror the conclusions of an
Economic Policy Institute brief, which suggested raising teacher pay,
removing onerous licensing requirements that keep otherwise
well-qualified teachers out of the classroom and designing stronger
professional support networks that boost teachers’ investment in their
careers. That last point is a longer-term ambition, but one that could
help make the field more attractive to new teachers and those who have
already left the classroom.
“If you really look into what the data says about what teachers think
about the profession, they say they lack support,” García says. “For
your young students, it’s very hard to say, ‘I’ll go into teaching’
knowing that there are very weak supports and very few opportunities
for professional development. It doesn’t make the profession very
appealing, frankly speaking.”
Read this and other stories at EdSurge
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