We didn't have enough teachers when I was still in the classroom, and that was only halfway through the pandemic lockdown and before the ginned up don't-say-gay / CRT bs and book banning, and before Uvalde and the predictable "arm the teachers" plan. I've written about this before, here. I don't see things as being any better, and my friends who are still in the game tell me it's worse.
For whatever reason, a bunch of Big Thinkers in and around education have discovered they can get clicks by stringing together the musings of a bunch of "experts" and then putting the title "There Is No Teacher Shortage" above it all. I thought it would be fun to look at the different teams playing in this league and see if anybody knows what the heck they're talking about.
First up, we have the researchers themselves. These are organizations like the RAND Corporation, which launched its American Teacher Panel in 2014 and produces the State of the American Teacher Survey, the 2022 version of which seems to be the catalyst for lots of the discussion.
RAND has been doing this for a while, and the latest survey has been interpreted to suggest that the "teacher shortage" narrative is an exaggeration.
However, in a classic case of "I don't think this means what you think this means," when I look at the survey results they do not support the sweeping "nothing to see here" conclusions of the deniers. First there are the limitations of the survey itself, beginning with the obvious challenge of using a sample size of 2,360 point-in-time responses to generalize findings to more than three million teachers. Then the researchers acknowledge a critical underrepresentation of novice teachers (first or second year). This is a serious hole in the data considering the propensity of newer teachers to leave the business at a higher rate relative to more experienced teachers.
With respect to indicators of a teacher shortage, the actual data from this survey reveal that "74% of respondents answered yes to the question: Have You Been Asked to Assume More Responsibilities Than Normal This School Year (2021–2022) to Make Up for Teacher or Substitute Staffing Shortages?" with 41% saying they've had to make up for "Shortages of Nonteaching Staff." Furthermore, 52% listed "Taking on extra work because of staff shortages" as a source of stress with 47% listing it in the top three sources. That sounds like a teacher shortage to me.
In addition, there is this report from a bunch of RAND Big Brains including Heather Schwartz, who we'll hear from again. The report, based on the State of the American Teacher Survey and titled "Restoring Teacher and Principal Well-Being Is an Essential Step for Rebuilding Schools," offers a clue to how we get to "no shortage."
In a section titled "Poor Well-Being and Adverse Working Conditions Were Associated with Intentions to Leave," (resist the "duh"), researchers found that, indeed, stress from long hours, more responsibilities because of staffing issues, crappy pay, "exposure to school violence," racial discrimination, and harassment over Covid "safety policies" and "teaching about race, racism, and bias" were factors in teachers and principals expressing a desire to leave.
How many teachers and principals wanted to leave? According to the report, "In January 2022, about one-third of teachers and principals reported that they were likely to leave their current teaching or principal job by the end of the 2021–2022 school year," a number "up from about one-quarter of teachers and 15 percent of principals in January 2021."
Nothing to worry about, though. Only about a third of the third actually leave--at least in the first year. From the report:
Although these rates are concerning, we hypothesize that they reflect some teachers’ and principals’ job dissatisfaction rather than a major disruption in the workforce. Although teachers who state an intention to leave are more likely to resign than those who do not state such an intention, intentions to leave are an imperfect predictor of whether educators actually resign. One pre-pandemic estimate found that one-third of teachers who stated an intention to leave resigned within the next year (Nguyen et al., 2022).
It's troubling that shortage deniers don't think that 10-12% of teachers leaving every year would be troubling. But this "sense" that teachers are dissatisfied, that they express that dissatisfaction in their intention to leave the business, and that they may threaten to quit but really won't, is at the heart of much of the "no crisis to see here" reaction.
Most researchers point to the dearth of clear, comprehensive data. I would note that a lot of the data has been produced by economists and a good deal of it seems cherry-picked and massaged to serve an agenda. Nevertheless, several Big Brains have made noise recently by making categorical pronouncements like "There is no shortage." Let's take a look.
First, there are what I will call shortage redefiners. These commentators seem to be operating in good faith, observing--rightly--that there are thousands of teachers out here who have left the business because of untenable conditions. Some of those conditions are the result of the pandemic, but some have been festering for years. Still others are the result of bullying based on ideology and politics.
These commentators offer an honest reminder that schools have been difficult to staff for a long time, and with all the present stresses on teachers, lots of us have simply declined to continue. Add that to a depleted pipeline--for the same reasons--and you get places like Arizona and Florida inviting folks to "come on down" and join the team. Lots of teachers have decided not to teach, these folks argue, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Petula Dvorak, columnist for the Washington Post, is a redefiner, and she does it in her article "There’s no shortage of teachers. We’ve just driven them out of schools." The first sentence? "There’s no teacher shortage."
She goes on to discuss the challenges of working the classroom in 2022 and gives important attention to the role the gender shift from male to female has had in licensing the present public contempt for teachers. She ends with: "The crisis isn’t the lack of teachers. It’s the nationwide disrespect for those in the profession." I don't exactly agree, but at least she did talk to a couple of teachers.
I find this argument curious and wonder if it would be made in any other area. If suddenly all the surgeons in the country decided they couldn't take it and became gardeners, would they simply be surgeons in waiting? Wouldn't we have a surgeon shortage? I think people waiting for operations might think so.
Or if people thought soldiering was too dangerous and stopped believing the patriotic hype and opted to sell shoes instead, we would certainly be hearing about a soldier shortage and worrying about national security.
I'm also fascinated by the claim that there isn't a "national" shortage, but merely an uneven distribution of teachers and teacher candidates across districts and states. In what other area would we say, for example, there may not be any plumbers where you live, but there's lots of them in a big city in the next state over, so you're all set.
You can't take your pipes to them, so unless you can convince the plumbers to come to you, you've got a plumber shortage. And a problem.
In other words, for people making this argument, there continues to be a theoretical reservoir of teachers out there who are just in the wrong place, or who may be temporarily disenchanted with the profession but would certainly return if we'd just treat them better. As one of those whose disenchantment led to retirement at the first opportunity, I find this argument unpersuasive.
It is important to examine the conditions that lead teachers to avoid a subject area, or a geographical area, or leave the business altogether, or that discourage people from becoming teachers in the first place. However, to the extent that this line of argument disguises and even minimizes the challenges of staffing today's schools, I find it counterproductive.
I can tell you from my own experience that people who leave the classroom find other jobs and discover other things to do. We are no longer teachers and to define us as such and thereby lessen the gravity of the situation is naive at best and destructive at worst.
There is also a subset of the redefiners that is not operating in good faith. They maintain that any shortages are "only" in certain specialties, only in certain areas of the country, only in low income schools. It's difficult to ascertain whether they are arguing that these conditions disqualify the shortage from being "national," or that because the conditions only exist in these schools the shortage isn't as important.
The Economist, for example, called the concern over the shortage "hysteria" and suggested we not get too excited because "most pupils will have a teacher" and the schools experiencing shortages are just "the usual suspects." I'm not kidding.
And in a May 2021 article for school choice champion The74, Dan Goldhaber, an economist with the American Institutes for Research (and someone who has been on the too-many-teachers train for a while), writes that "there is not an overall teacher shortage. Nationally, each year, there are tens of thousands more people prepared to teach than there are available teaching positions."
He does, however, acknowledge that there are "more specific challenges to staffing classrooms in particular schools and subjects." Among the usual suspects? Goldhaber finds that "high-poverty schools in Washington need to replace about 400 more teachers every year than do low-poverty schools."
Even so, his big worry is money. "If the message is that people en masse are turning away from teaching as a profession, it might push policymakers toward generic solutions to the problem, such as across-the-board pay increases." A terrifying thought, apparently.
Just a side note: In what other pursuit do we question whether paying someone more results in more people wanting to do a thing?
So we've got researchers and redefiners, and many of them are honest, and some of them are wrongheaded, and some just see what they want to see.
But there is another side of the shortage debate that is definitely not honest. These Big Brains set out to "prove" what they want to be true. They pick and choose their “experts” and massage what little data is available to support their claims. Their team includes academics and the ideologues who cite them. They are the shortage deniers.
We’ll get to them. Next.
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