The teacher shortage facing the nation’s public schools reached new heights this year, according to multiple reports this past summer and fall from major media outlets. Officials at the Department of Education have added to that narrative. Outgoing Secretary of Education Arne Duncan discussed the shortages in an August Los Angeles Times op-ed, writing:
This situation is compounded by shortages of qualified math and science teachers, which disproportionately affect schools serving low-income and minority students. In California, teacher shortages in math, science and computer education have persisted for more than a decade. This school year, California districts will need to fill more than 21,000 teaching positions, many in hard-to-staff STEM subjects.
John King, Duncan’s replacement, also made similar statements at an American Enterprise Institute event earlier this summer. On the whole, the coverage suggests a looming crisis for staffing public schools.
But the national data tell a different story. Last week, the National Center for Education Statistics released a report (which I authored when working for a prior employer) that shows the difficulty public schools have filling vacant teaching positions has dropped considerably over the past dozen years. The report uses data from the Schools and Staffing Surveys from 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012, which asked a national sample of principals about vacancies in their schools and the difficulty they faced filling them. The percentage of public schools with at least one difficult-to-staff position dropped by more than half between 2000 and 2012, from 36 to 15 percent.
Nat Malkus|National Center for Education Statistics
These pronounced decreases in staffing difficulty were evident across the board. To be sure, as Duncan accurately states above, the challenges principals face in staffing teachers is greater in certain schools and for certain positions, particularly high-minority, high-poverty schools and for math and special education teachers. High-poverty and high-minority schools appear to have somewhat smaller reductions over time compared to low-poverty and low-minority schools. However, across every comparison made, reports of difficulty in staffing dropped substantially, and in 2012, most estimates were half of what they were in 2000.
On the national level, we are not approaching a crisis involving increasing teacher shortages. If that were the case, principal reports of difficulty in staffing would certainly be rising. Other research has also suggested that the reporting on shortages is overblown. These findings, however, don’t mean that there aren’t any issues with the supply of teachers or staffing public schools. And in light of these results on difficulty in staffing, there are three ideas to consider.
First, there isn’t really a national supply of teachers. States have different teacher licensure requirements, which make trouble for teachers transferring between locales. States also differ in the number of teachers their university systems produce. Just because the national numbers of difficulty in staffing are down doesn’t mean there aren’t real shortages in some states.
Second, less staffing difficulty can be seen as an unadulterated good, but it doesn’t necessarily mean schools and school districts are getting better at hiring teachers. Changes in the labor market will not affect hiring policies in the same way, or with the same elasticity, when the supply of teachers shrinks and expands. Faced with staffing difficulties, districts may have responded by loosening hiring standards in multiple ways. When the labor supply improves, however, there isn’t the same countervailing pressure to tighten up hiring practices. That pressure is bound to be particularly lax if the popular narrative about teacher shortages is overblown.
Finally, the patterns in staffing difficulty remain problematic for particular kinds of schools and subjects and again mark the pain-points in our education system. Some heightened difficulty in specific subjects, like math and foreign language, can be comfortably attributed to reasonable supply constraints. There is no such comfort around the greater difficulty that high-minority and high-poverty schools face when staffing teaching positions, which add to the list of challenges these schools already face.
Hiring and keeping quality teachers is the most important thing schools can do to improve student outcomes. The multiple and controversial policies that states and the Department of Education have promoted to improve teacher quality suggests we still haven’t figured out the best way to do that. However, politicians, schools and the public are better served facing that challenge without a false sense of crisis surrounding an overstated national teacher shortage.
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