What Teacher Shortage?

“There Is No National Teacher Shortage” is the headline of an August 25 article in the Atlantic. The article appears to fly in the face of a plethora of reports outlining a catastrophic teacher shortage. But the headline is clever: The word “National” tells us, as we see in the story, he shortage is not being felt by all.

Exactly what the situation in Wisconsin is, “we are not sure” says Sara Shaw, senior education policy researcher at Wisconsin Policy Forum. Comparing Wisconsin to other parts of the country is difficult. “There is no uniform definition of what a shortage or vacancy is,” says Shaw. States “collect in different ways if they are collected at all.”

The Atlantic article “is consistent with all the data I have been looking at,” says Bradley Carl, co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative at the Wisconsin Center for Education. He is working on a paper to quantify the extent of the teacher shortage in Wisconsin and hopes to have preliminary numbers out soon.

Shortages Are Not New

Carl is the co-author of the last major study in 2018 on teacher shortages entitled “Supply and demand for public schools in Wisconsin.” While the pandemic resulted in some unique conditions, Carl believes that the present shortages follow historic patterns of the past.

“There was a little blip after ACT 10,” with teachers and other public employees quitting, says Carl. The 2011 law cut public employee’s pay by about 8.5% and required that they pay part of their health insurance and retirement benefits while drastically cutting back collective bargaining rights for unions.

Shortages tend to be cyclical following patterns of high and low unemployment. During poor economic times, teaching positions are seen as a safe place to be during labor shortages; during low unemployment, the private sector offers higher wages.

Dan Goldhaber is the American Institute for Research’s director of Analysis for Longitudinal Data in Education Research. In a recent podcast he stated this: “There is a teacher shortage story every five or so years, and those stories look remarkably similar going all the way back to the late 90s.” Our largest previous teacher exodus was in 2006-07 when a strong market lured teachers away from schools similar to our present situation.

Concludes Goldhaber, “It is easy to write stories that there is a mass exodus when the stories are based upon anecdotes… The frustrations I have with the stories is that we tend to talk about the teacher labor market in very generic terms, So, we say, ‘Teacher shortage’ but the conditions are really quite different depending upon the kind of skills you are looking for… Employment requirements differ from one state to the next. And if you are looking across different schools.”

In surveys, Goldhaber says that 50% of teachers state that they are considering leaving teaching, but only 10% to 12% actually leave.

Teacher burnout coming out of the pandemic is real, but national projections may be off the mark. Teachers say they are ready to retire or leave the profession, says Carl. Yet, “we don’t see the rush to the exits yet, but we are not far enough on the backside of COVID to know whether the effect has made its way through the system.”

Poor and less desirable districts

Teacher shortages are nothing new for Milwaukee Public Schools. High school classrooms in the inner city have gone without a certified math teacher going back five, ten or more years. Difficult teaching conditions, safety, large class sizes and low pay make it difficult for the district to attract and keep good teachers. But the shortage at MPS is not equally divided. Schools with student entrance requirements and specialties may have all the teachers they need while schools in the poorest areas struggle.

Days before the beginning of this school year, Milwaukee needed more than 200 teachers. More surprising, Madison schools were still in search for 130 teachers. Madison’s student population is less than half of Milwaukee’s, so that means it actually has a greater teacher shortage than Milwaukee.

Shaw says that Madison’ superintendent Carlton Jenkins has been very vocal about his district’s teacher shortage, which has gotten press coverage. The teachers’ bargaining unit, Madison Teacher Inc., places much of the shortage on the 3.5% raise that the school board gave as opposed to the 4.7% allowed by law. While Madison is the home of the largest university in the state, which graduates a fair number of prospective teachers, it is also surrounded by suburbs that can offer better pay and more desirable working conditions.

Meanwhile, a small rural school district with only a handful of schools could be short just a few teachers and be in no better shape than Madison. But some of these districts need to shrink in size. “Some districts are in a state of denial over their declining school enrollment,” say Shaw “Your teacher workforce is going to need to shrink over time.”

That may mean closing schools. Conflicts at school board meetings over whether or which schools to close have taken place in rich and poor districts alike. But poorer districts have felt the brunt of the conflicts. Milwaukee has been reluctant to close some of its buildings for fear that state law allows those buildings to be sold to private choice and charter schools which, in turn, will take even more students away from the public schools.

Urban districts like Milwaukee might get some efficiencies through school consolidation, but class sizes are already quite large. The same cannot be said for many rural districts. Closing a rural school means long bus rides and a loss of community identity if they no longer have a school to call their own. Wisconsin does give sparsity aid to school districts with low student density population But more money isn’t going to matter if a district cannot get the teachers for those smaller classrooms. Young teachers looking for a social life beyond hunting and fishing often find isolated communities not very attractive.

Historically, suburban and larger communities have had less of a problem hiring teachers. “That is still true but less so than it used to be,” says Carl. “They used to get 100 applications for kindergarten; now they get 40.” For them, a decrease in the quality of teachers is considered a shortage.

Lack of respect

Conservative school districts have questioned the liberal orientation of many of their teachers, attacking so-called “critical race theory” and banning books that even mention alternative sexual orientation. Teachers feel that school administrators are looking over their shoulders and not supporting them when they are attacked by some members of the community.

In the summer of 2021, the Waukesha school district announced that all Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ signs had to come down. Diversity training of staff was suspended. Community members protested before the school board, and teachers said that they were leaving the district. Laura Pinsoneault of the Alliance for Education in Waukesha reports that about 134 teachers have left the district with more resigning just days before the beginning of the school year.

On April 25, at the Hartford Union High School school board meeting, teacher Sheila Parker came before the school to be recognized as the HUHS teacher of the year. She took to the podium below the stage where school board members were sitting and announced she was resigning because of the culture in the school. She was taking a teaching position at another district with lower pay and compensation but with a better work environment.

She was followed by a series of teachers who stated that the work environment was toxic, and they were being micromanaged. Hartford has seen a number of teachers leave.

Science teacher Ben Hoffmann said that the administration’s employee survey acknowledged that the entire staff, not just teachers, felt that they lacked a voice. “The morale and culture of this school is really low right now… we need to fix the culture and the morale of the staff.”

Well-to-do suburban districts are not typically districts where we see large numbers of teachers leaving, says Shaw. However, “36-37% of all applicants for teaching positions in the state were people who were already teaching in a Wisconsin public school,” says Carl. They may be going to other districts for other reasons than better pay. Rather it may be whether they are being respected and treated as professionals, he concludes. And that could be a growing issue.