The post-COVID teacher shortage is easing, but significant gaps remain on the ground as the new academic year approaches.
While some recovery from pandemic shortages is a hopeful sign for the profession, experts say schools, especially low-income ones, are struggling to fill vacancies.
“We would definitely still think there is a teacher shortage. It has improved in some ways and in others it has remained the same,” said Hilary Wething, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“I think there’s good news: we’ve seen state and local education employment fully recover to pre-COVID levels, to February 2020 employment levels, but that’s not really the full context, because employment levels in this industry in February 2020 were still below what we would expect to have fully robust education employment in our country,” Wething added.
In June 2020, teaching jobs fell more than 15 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In June this year, the numbers reached pre-pandemic levels of an annual increase of 0.7 percent.
“That’s good, but it’s not the level that we really want to reach when we think about public education, employment, we never fully recovered from the austerity measures that were put in place after the Great Recession,” Wething said.
“As soon as we had COVID, both private and public employment fell, and private employment actually recovered much more quickly than public employment. One of the reasons for this was because private sector salaries were able to grow very quickly and this induced more people into the private sector”, he added. “Public sector wages remained quite stagnant in the months and years following the pandemic, but in the last year they have finally started to catch up with private sector wages. And so we might think that one of the reasons this gap in public sector employment has finally been closed is because of rising public sector wages.”
In June of this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 290,000 job openings in state and local education jobs, but only 152,000 hires.
And salaries may not solve all problems, as the education sector has seen a decline in the number of people entering teacher programs for years, part of which has created a problem that has worsened during the pandemic.
“I think the teacher shortage has existed in the United States for a long time. The pandemic has certainly made the teacher shortage worse in many ways, right? In particular, what we are seeing is that enrollment in and completion of teacher preparation programs has declined by 30 to 35 percent over the past 10 years, so the number of people enrolling to become teachers has declined substantially over the past 10 years. . ” said Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor at Kansas State University who has studied teaching jobs.
“We have fewer teachers who are entering the profession and now we have more teachers who are leaving the profession in recent years.” he added.
Experts say teacher shortages vary greatly from state to state, especially as emergency pandemic funding comes to an end.
In September, the nearly $200 billion that was donated to schools during COVID-19 will disappear and some districts may have to lay off employees they hired with the relief money.
“I think we will see some layoffs happening in some states where they have hired several thousand additional teachers. And then there will be states like Kansas and Missouri, where I am now, where we will see a continued worsening of the teacher shortage,” Nguyen said.
Some experts argue that the new emphasis on the teacher shortage has been shortsighted given ongoing difficulties with the issue, even if they have only been exacerbated by COVID-19.
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2023, 45 percent of public schools were experiencing a staff shortage, an improvement from 2022, when 53 percent of schools were experiencing a teacher shortage.
Most of the drop came from schools in low-poverty neighborhoods, with a 10-point drop in concerns about staffing shortages between 2022 and 2023.
But for schools in high-poverty areas, vacancy fears among educators remained at the same level between 2022 and 2023, at 57 percent.
“There have been and will continue to be schools and school districts that struggle to hire teachers, and there will, have been and will continue to be subjects in which it is much more difficult to hire teachers,” said Dan Goldhaber, vice president of the American Institutes of Education. Researcher and director of the CALDER Center.
“And so a lot of the stories about teacher shortages tend to be pretty generic and talk about teacher shortages without the nuance that it has always been much harder to staff special education and STEM classrooms than it has been to staff classrooms. of elementary education. It is always much more challenging to hire teachers for high-poverty schools. So I think these challenges, these more specific challenges, will probably continue even when there isn’t a huge focus on the teacher market in general,” Goldhaber added.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
