Remember me
When I was an assistant principal in Chicago, I would post a job opening for a physics teacher and get 20 applications. A call for an English teacher might yield 150.
That was the late 1990s. By the time I left the district, the same postings were lucky to bring in one or two qualified candidates.
Principals were calling the central office and saying, “Send me whoever you have.”
What happened to all the candidates? That question has never been fully answered in the national conversation about teacher shortages, in part because too much of that conversation has been devoted to arguing over whether a shortage exists at all. It does. And the cost of pretending otherwise falls on students who can least afford it.
The standard rebuttal to teacher shortage claims is a national one: Aggregate supply, measured against aggregate demand, looks roughly balanced. Recent headlines about teacher layoffs may seem to bolster that argument. But most of those layoffs are driven by enrollment declines, expiring pandemic relief funds or district budget cuts, not by a sudden surplus of qualified teachers.
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A district may eliminate some positions because it has fewer dollars to spend, while still struggling to hire special education teachers, bilingual educators or high school physics teachers. Budget reductions change how many positions a district can afford; they don’t solve the longstanding challenge of finding qualified teachers for the schools, grade levels and subject areas where they’re still desperately needed.
Data backs this up. An estimated 425,000 teaching positions are either vacant or filled by underqualified staff — roughly one in eight of all teaching positions nationally.
And these vacancies aren’t distributed evenly across subjects and school districts. Forty-eight states report significant teacher shortages in special education, where vacancies are twice as common as in other specialties. In Illinois, vacancies in the wealthiest districts dropped 31 percent since 2023, an analysis by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability found, while in the poorest districts they declined just 5 percent. In Chicago Public Schools, specifically, they actually rose 21 percent, though efforts are underway to fix the pipeline.
When a district can’t fill a position, it faces a choice: Leave the classroom empty or lower the bar. Most simply lower the bar, and in turn, feed the problem. Teachers with emergency permits or provisional licenses and individuals with no teaching background are placed in front of students who need the most support. Those teachers are also far more likely to leave, the Learning Policy Institute reports, creating a cycle of instability that is hardest on the schools already struggling to attract talent.
Nor is this just about teachers retiring. Ninety percent of teacher demand is driven by attrition, and about two-thirds of teachers leave for reasons other than retirement. Teachers are leaving because of deteriorating working conditions, declining professional prestige and the growing challenges of the job.
I understand why. During my first month in the role, I cried every day. Teaching, especially at the beginning, can be profoundly isolating. Without mentors and peers who understand the struggle, many new teachers leave before they have a chance to succeed.
Related: Federal policies risk worsening an already dire rural teacher shortage
The good news: A handful of districts and states are proving there’s a better way. Their teacher recruitment and preparation programs share a few things in common.
First, they recruit deliberately. They target young people who want to make a social impact, and who grew up in the very communities they hope to serve. In Hatch, New Mexico — a state where 36 percent of all teacher vacancies are in special education — Maria Gomez, a Hatch Valley High School graduate, returned to her alma mater and made it her mission to send other local students into the profession.
The students she mentored are now returning as teachers themselves, recruited not with broad messaging but with a specific pitch: You understand these kids, because you were one of them. This is a plus: Research shows that students fare better academically when taught by someone who shares their background, and teachers with roots in a community are more likely to stay.
They get candidates into classrooms early. No aspiring teacher should discover teaching isn’t for them during their student teaching semester in their senior year of college. Effective programs put future educators in real classrooms early and often. In 2018, Michigan began requiring teacher candidates to have at least 600 hours of clinical experience as part of the state’s approved educator preparation programs. This requirement ensures that teachers build skills and gain classroom exposure throughout their training, not just at the end. Michigan is now certifying more teachers than at any time in the past decade, a step toward filling vacancies.
They build community. It helps to build cohorts of people going through the same experience at the same time and to pair aspiring teachers with mentors whose job is to help them grow. Josh Payne, an instructional coach in Aurora, Illinois, knows this from experience. Josh participated in a teacher preparation program that placed him in a cohort of new teachers upon graduation and paired him with mentors. In a recent conversation, Payne shared that the program kept him from leaving and inspired him to become a mentor himself. Today, he said, his school district has six teachers from the same program that prepared him.
None of this is magic. But it requires treating teaching as a profession worth entering, not a gap to fill with whoever is available. The next time a principal calls the central office asking for whoever is available, there should be an answer:
“Here are 20 qualified candidates.”
The pipeline exists and can be built. Now leaders must act.
Alan Mather is the president of Golden Apple Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring, developing and recognizing excellence in teaching and leading in education.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about America’s teacher shortage was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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