[The pandemic exacerbated a preexisting and long-standing shortage
of teachers. 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.]
[[link removed]]

THE PANDEMIC HAS EXACERBATED A LONG-STANDING NATIONAL SHORTAGE OF
TEACHERS  
[[link removed]]


 

John Schmitt and Katherine deCourcy
December 6, 2022
Economic Policy Institute
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The pandemic exacerbated a preexisting and long-standing shortage
of teachers. 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. _

State and local government education vacancy and quit rates, January
2001 - July 2022, Economic Policy Institute

 

WHAT THIS REPORT FINDS:The pandemic exacerbated a preexisting and
long-standing shortage of teachers. The shortage is particularly acute
for certain subject areas and in some geographic locations. It is
especially severe in schools with high shares of students of color or
students from low-income families. The shortage is not a function of
an inadequate number of qualified teachers in the U.S. economy.
Simply, there are too few qualified teachers willing to work at
current compensation levels given the increasingly stressful
environment facing teachers.

WHY IT MATTERS: A shortage of teachers harms students, teachers, and
the public education system as a whole. Lack of sufficient, qualified
teachers and other staff threatens students’ ability to learn and
reduces teachers’ effectiveness, undermining the education
system’s goal of providing a sound education equitably to all
children. 

WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT: To end the teacher shortage, we must address
the two most pressing reasons for the shortage: the long-standing
decline in the pay of teachers relative to other workers with a
college degree and the high and increasing levels of stress public
school teachers face. 

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]

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
[[link removed]]

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] so
the trends visible in the JOLTS data give some insight into the
experience of public K–12 teachers.12
[[link removed]]

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%.

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
[[link removed]]

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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).

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.

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
[[link removed]] (Schwartz
and Diliberti 2022, Figure 2).

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 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. 

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 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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.

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%.

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
[[link removed]]

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.

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]

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).

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).

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
[[link removed]]

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

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

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

4.  [[link removed]]See
references below, but especially García and Weiss 2019a–e.

5.  [[link removed]]For
another recent analysis of the teacher shortage, see NEA 2022.

6.  [[link removed]]See,
for example, Cowan et al. 2016 and Dee and Goldhaber 2017.

7.  [[link removed]]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.  [[link removed]]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.  [[link removed]]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.  [[link removed]]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. 
[[link removed]]Authors’
calculations based on the Current Population Survey, 2014–2019.

12. 
[[link removed]]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.  [[link removed]]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. 
[[link removed]]See
Gould 2022.

15. 
[[link removed]]For more
information on the survey, see IES and NCES 2021.

16. 
[[link removed]]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. 
[[link removed]]See, for
example, Cowan et al. 2016 and Dee and Goldhaber 2017.

18. 
[[link removed]]See
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 2021.

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

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

21. 
[[link removed]]Authors’
calculations using Current Population Survey data for 2021.

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

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

24. 
[[link removed]]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. 
[[link removed]]See
García and Weiss 2019a–e, Cormier et al. 2021, Steiner et al. 2022.

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

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See related work on Education
[[link removed]] | Teacher pay
[[link removed]] | Educational inequity
[[link removed]] | Women
[[link removed]] | Teacher shortages
[[link removed]] | COVID and
education [[link removed]]

See more work by John Schmitt
[[link removed]] and Katherine deCourcy
[[link removed]]

_John Schmitt is senior economist and senior adviser at the Economic
Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that uses the
power of its research on economic trends and on the impact of economic
policies to advance reforms that serve working people, deliver racial
justice, and guarantee gender equity. Schmitt served as EPI’s vice
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in 2018, he was returning to where he started his career as an
economist from 1995 to 2001._

_Following his earlier tenure at EPI, he spent 10 years as a senior
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_Schmitt has published peer-reviewed research on unemployment, wage
inequality, the minimum wage, unionization, immigration, technology,
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_At EPI, Schmitt was the co-author of three editions of The State of
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_Before joining EPI in 1995, Schmitt was a Fulbright scholar at the
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