What’s the Solution to Teacher Shortages?

“Researchers say cries of teacher shortages are overblown. Schools are going on pandemic hiring sprees and overstaffing may be the new problem,” writes Jill Barshay in a recent article for The Hechinger Report. Heather Schwartz, researcher at RAND, “found that 77 percent of schools went on a hiring spree in 2021-22 as $190 billion in federal pandemic funds started flowing,” says Barshay.

The report’s findings fly in the face of the many stories declaring there is a national shortage. Rather, the shortage is occurring in some areas, notably in Milwaukee and Madison, as Urban Milwaukee reported.

While increased hiring took place at school districts across the country, richer districts often hired teachers from poorer districts creating increased shortages in those communities. Even poorer districts with modest staffing goals discovered that they lost existing teachers to other districts, leaving a shortage.

It is understandable that school districts wanted to get as many adults possible working with students at the tail end of the pandemic, considering students’ learning loss and emotional trauma. However, when those federal funds run out in two years, school systems may move to laying off teachers, writes Barshay. “So many schools were having to scramble just to stay open and staff during severe shortages. Now we have this weird other problem of overstaffing,” says Schwartz.

Not understanding precisely what is going on with the supply of teachers may result in “crude and blunt policy solutions…like throwing spaghetti on the wall,”” says Bradley Carl, co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative at the Wisconsin Center for Education. 

The reality is we currently in a period of declining enrollment in primary and secondary schools. Dan Goldhaber, the American Institute for Research’s director of Analysis for Longitudinal Data in Education Research, points out that “what we have is more teachers employed today than we did before the pandemic.” More schools want to decrease class size and give more personal attention to individual students. Godhaber doesn’t like the term “teacher shortage” and would rather replace it with “the teacher staffing challenge.”

So what’s the best way to approach that staffing challenge? Here are some of the solutions that are being considered.

More Funding

Gov. Tony Evers is directing $90 million of federal pandemic relief funds to school systems stating that most of the money can be directed toward employing teachers. Most of the relief funds already allocated went to poorer districts and complicate their long-term planning, because they are one-time funds which will not sustain new teacher hires, says Sara Shaw, senior education policy researcher at Wisconsin Policy Forum. The allocated funds must be used within the next two years. Then the schools reach a cliff.

Evers has called for $2 billion to go into public schools. This would be sustained funding, but he will not release complete details until after the November elections. Money would be allocated to special needs such as literacy, mental health and school meal programs. Evers says his plan will address the teacher shortage and help lower class sizes. But it’s unlikely the state Legislature will agree to this level of spending. And whatever money is approved would need to be targeted to the neediest districts to have the greatest impact. An equal distribution across the state could mean the richer school districts use it to grab more teachers from poorer districts, increasing the teacher shortages there. 

Hiring and keeping teachers

Teachers, on average, earn 23.5% less in wages than other professionals with similar education. Act 10 reduced teacher wages and benefits in Wisconsin. At present, Wisconsin teacher wage increases are capped at 4.7%, far less than the present rate of inflation. Fewer college students are majoring in education partly because of pay. Working conditions count as well.

Shaw says there has been a 20% decrease in the number of college students going into teaching for the last few years. “Most indicators of supply look like they are going down,” says Carl. 

And even if you can increase the number of education graduates in Wisconsin, it may not solve the problem. A significant percentage of education students in Wisconsin universities are from other states; many will go back home to teach. 

College loan forgiveness for those who agree to teacher in Wisconsin for a set number of years can increase the number of college students in education. But it doesn’t necessarily result in those graduates teaching in districts where there is the greatest need. 

Carl believes we could wipe out the teacher shortage if we concentrate on reducing the number of teachers who leave the profession by just a few percentage points. Shaw says we do the profession a disservice if we only pay attention to the hiring of new teachers and ignore keeping the teachers we already have. Increasing wages would help, but giving teachers more respect and support would go a long way. 

Goldhaber advocates paying teachers different rates depending on needed areas of expertise. He believes math, special education and other high demand teachers should be paid more than elementary teachers. Teacher unions have steadfastly opposed such measures because they have used high demand teachers to lift the wages of all teachers.

Goldhaber would pay teachers more money if they would agree to teach in hard-to-staff schools in urban and rural areas. Presently, the richest communities tend to pay their teachers higher salaries.

Goldhaber would pay incoming teachers higher wages and allocate less money to retirees. Yet he admits that experienced teachers tend to do a better job in teaching than those in their first few years of teaching, so keeping experienced teachers is important. At some point teachers tend to stay on as retirement benefits appear on the horizon.

Then there is the question of increasing the supply of minority teachers. Curtis J. Jones of the UW-Milwaukee School of Education notes that only 2% of Wisconsin teachers are African American and 1.9% are Latinx. Outside of Milwaukee Public Schools only 0.6% are African American and 1.3% Latinx. Many students of color will never have a teacher that looks like them even though research is clear that having such a teacher sometime during a student’s experience can make a big difference.

While educators understand the importance of increasing the numbers of minority teachers, teacher preparation programs struggle to make significant gains in this area. Milwaukee has tried to “grow its own,” encouraging paraprofessionals and professionals from other fields to take advantage of programs partnered with local universities to help train future teachers.

The reality is that the rise and fall in the supply of teachers isn’t that big of a problem in well-to-do districts. Eventually the unemployment rate may increase, and those with teaching certificates will once again find that elementary and secondary schools are safe havens for long term employment. The teacher shortage in many schools will dissipate. However, the teacher shortage in poor communities and rural areas is likely to continue with less notice by the media and the general public. That’s the real problem that Wisconsin and the nation need to solve.