Not Enough Teachers? What Schools Need to Know (Part I)

By Cara Gallagher, Director of Thought Leadership, Associate Director of Qualitative Research, Consultant

Are we Facing a Teaching Talent Crisis? GLP weighs in on the national dialogue.

Last summer was the first time this question came on my radar. Someone forwarded me a Twitter post about a group on Facebook called “Leave Teaching…And Smile :-).” Curious, I discovered that not only did it exist, it had over ten thousand members (it currently has 14,000). A quick search of the word “teaching” in the groups section of Facebook surfaced at least five whose sole charge is to help teachers leave the field. One group called “Life After Teaching - Exit the Classroom and Thrive” has 81,000 members and functions both as a one-stop shop where burnt out teachers can get emotional support, peruse jobs posted by other members, and connect with transitional career counselors and resumé coaches. 

This trend is not unique to primary and secondary education. Academics in higher education are feeling the same strains and taking their frustrations to Facebook. One group called “The Professor Is Out” – created only a year ago and already has 24,000+ members – was created to help tenured professors leave higher education. Subreddit group r/Professors has 100,000 members and offers “a place for professors to BS with each other, share professional concerns, get advice and encouragement, vent (oh, especially that), and share memes.”

Teachers Leaving is not a “New” Problem

What strikes me is that most of these groups were created before the pandemic. Interestingly, many were formed in 2018 or 2019, immediately before Covid started. This certainly challenges the prevailing narrative that Covid caused teachers to flee classrooms for different careers. While the formation of these Facebook groups may have begun before the pandemic, it’s fair to assume burnout and job fatigue were underlying conditions that Covid may have worsened at an accelerated rate.

So our answer to the question about whether or not we have a talent crisis is “Yes, and no.”

Context… a Slow Burn, and Conflicting Data

The teacher shortage is more than a decade in the making: Remember that the field historically has always had a higher turnover rate than others. Thirty percent of educators leave the field within 6 years of entering it. After secretaries, childcare workers, paralegals, and correctional officers, teachers have the fifth highest turnover rate by occupation. 

In November, the Wall Street Journal published an article about quit rates across different sectors. One data point that was particularly troubling was that “quits in the education sector—which accounts for a larger share of employment in Northeastern states than many others—have risen at the fastest pace of any industry since January (2021).” In May of 2021, the National Department of Labor reported public education employment dropped to levels not seen since August of 2000. 

These two points, combined with a reality that the pipeline of teachers entering education training programs has been in a steady decline since 2010, raise some concerns; however, what they don’t take into consideration is the degree to which Covid has adversely impacted the teacher workforce. 

New research gives us a glimpse of how Covid may be disrupting both the current and future teacher labor market. According to American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) member surveys, in 2021 and 2022 about 20% of institutions reported a decline in new undergraduate enrollment of 11% or more; 19% of undergraduate-level and 11% of graduate-level teaching programs saw a significant drop in enrollment this year. Additionally, in February, the NEA published an alarming report that “55 percent of educators are thinking about leaving the profession earlier than they had planned.” This is an 18% jump from when teachers were asked about their likelihood of leaving last August and takes into account factors such as their age, years of service, proximity to retirement, role at the school and impact on children. 

But talking about leaving is not the same as leaving: Chad Aldeman, a researcher at Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab who studies public education policy and the teacher labor market, recently found “the [teacher] quit rate has held at lower or average rates during the pandemic. But here’s the thing, openings are way outpacing hiring right now, and that’s partially thanks to the big infusion of federal funding that’s created the opportunity to hire more people, and that’s leading to a higher vacancy rate.” Aldeman also points out “voluntary ‘quit’ rates were slightly above the 20-year average, while ‘total separations’ that include quits, layoffs and retirements were slightly below average. State-level data for teachers shows that turnover has remained on par with long-term historical trends.” With that said, Alderman is cautiously optimistic. “The story of next year has yet to be told,” he said.

To compare public school data with independent and private schools, NAIS Career Center looked at monthly job postings before and during the pandemic to see what if any impact Covid had. “Because of the traditional contract renewal schedule, the peak job posting activity usually occurs in March and April. If we consider 2019 as a representative pre-pandemic year and compare the job postings to 2021, we see that, after a delayed start, the number of jobs posted were consistently and significantly higher than the pre-pandemic patterns. Even more troubling is what we are seeing for this year. The number of job postings in 2022 is even higher. Overall, the number of new jobs posted to the Career Center in the first three months of 2022 is 59% higher than in 2021.”

According to NAIS, “clearly the fact that the number of job postings is so high relative to historical data is an indicator that schools are facing hiring pain.”

Another troubling data point is that there was a 12% decline in the number of job seekers looking at openings posted to NAIS job center database. 

Conditions, Perceptions, and the Problem 

When the data conflict, we are left with no conclusions and the news cycle coupled with anecdotal observations fill the vacuum. And as we know: Perception is one version of reality. 

But if it feels like teachers are fleeing schools as part of this phenomenon we’re calling “The Great Resignation,” there’s probably some truth to that. The reality is that teachers – like everyone else during the pandemic – took stock and reevaluated their lives, jobs, and futures. They looked around and saw school boards shouting over what they could and couldn’t teach, how to be healthy and safe, and whether or not they were “essential”. Teachers switched up their lesson plans for in-person, hybrid, and/or online learning on a moment’s notice and endured an endless stream of thundering emails, opinions, and national debates about whether or not kids should stay home, learn online, go back in person, and wear a mask. As these challenges continued through the end of the 2020 school year and settled into the next two years, so did symptoms like fatigue and burnout. 

Some educators realized they wanted the same freedoms afforded to those who worked from home since the start of the pandemic. The decreased responsibilities and an ability to find more separation or balance in their personal lives and their jobs appealed to them. As one member of the Facebook group “The Professor Is Out” put it, “The pandemic really exposed the cracks in the foundation and made people realize that this is not a healthy way to live. And I think that that was a wake-up call, sort of across the entire industry, that there's other options out there.”

The exact percentage of teachers that have left the field due to these “pull” factors might not be possible to gather data on for a while. It hasn’t been long enough to collect data and draw any concrete conclusions. With that said, can schools afford to wait to find out if this is or isn’t going to be a mild headache versus a full blown crisis? 

No, they can’t. The simple truth is that if educators are leaving the field and the pool of applicants is eroding, you have to take steps immediately to 1) understand the problem within your school or system and 2) develop fresh approaches to how you recruit and retain your current talent. 

Stay tuned! We’ll offer some concrete suggestions in our next blog and welcome your comments and insights as we finalize the next post.

Reminder: Read Our Recent Blueprint!

Our most recent Blueprint is dedicated to offering you timely, helpful resources on leadership (both for teams and team leaders) to bolster your collaborations, and facilitate productive, effective, and energizing experiences. While summer is often when organizations retreat to reflect back on the year and design plans for the future, anytime is the right time to focus on leadership, teaming, and organizational improvement. Let our recent Blueprint serve as a starting point for you to find resources about how to hone leadership skills, strengthen the efficacy of teams, and create a culture of coaching. 

We offer two sections of this Blueprint. The first section focuses on the purpose, discipline, and composition of teams. The second focuses on ​​being a team player. Teams with clear focus and purpose are essential but cannot perform at their best without the right dynamics, so how do you cultivate conditions for high performance? At GLP we believe coaching and facilitation skills are super powers in every context and especially when working with teams and team members. If there is one thing to help make you and your team more effective, it’s creating and sustaining a culture of coaching, and these articles help with that aim. Leaders who model a coaching culture demonstrate the value of collaboration, feedback, and vulnerability and inspire colleagues to follow suit.

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July 2023: “WOW! That was fast…”

By Sarah Goldin, Ph.D.  Partner and Director of Qualitative Research 

When meeting new clients I often summarize my career/learning journey to GLP as “Research scientist turned science educator turned education researcher”.  Representing a melding of these interests, the June 27, 2022 New York Times article “CRISPR in the Classroom” really struck a chord.

As a doctoral candidate studying Genetics and Development in the late 1990s-early 2000s, I worked in a lab that researched the function of a family of genes called the “T-Box genes” using mice as a genetic model.  One key avenue of inquiry into the roles of these genes was to create “targeted knockout” mice – i.e. mice that entirely lacked a specific gene – and then observe how the absence of that particular gene impacts development of the embryo.  And so I spent four of my six total years of graduate school trying – sadly, unsuccessfully – to make a targeted mouse knockout for the gene Tbx 2.  You'll have to trust me that my lack of success was NOT because of gross ineptitude on my part, but rather due to the vagaries of the very complicated and sensitive series of experimental steps required to make that happen.  Fortunately, a later graduate student and colleague finally succeeded in generating a Tbx2-knockout mouse (if you are inclined, feel free to check out Zach’s work here!).  

So what’s my point?   

The very first “knockout mice” – mice containing the first targeted deletion of a specific gene – were generated in 1989 (see e.g. here and here).  That the technique could work at all, no matter how problematically or inefficiently, marked a sea-change in the study of genetics. Excited by the possibilities, scientists throughout the 1990s and 2000s struggled to create targeted mouse knockouts for their gene of interest one gene at time – and doing so required an extremely high level of technical expertise and sophisticated (and expensive!) equipment and supplies. 18 years later, Cappecchi, Evans, and Smithies were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells." 

Fast forward to 2012, and the advent of the CRISPR technique.  CRISPR was first reported in a June 2012 article in Science magazine by Emmanuelle Charpentier and  Jennifer Doudna (and others).  Only 8 years after this first publication, Charpentier and Doudna were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of a method for genome editing” using the CRISPR technique.  Perhaps the “Nobel Prize fast track” says it all, but it is impossible to overstate how much of a “game changer” CRISPR was for the study of recombinant DNA and genetics.  That which previously took painstaking years with a fairly high failure rate could now be accomplished far more reliably in a highly compressed timeframe and in a much more resource/cost-effective way. 

Even faster forward to 2022, and now targeted gene editing can be accomplished by your typical high school student in a matter of days using commercially available kits from any of a number of educational supply companies, including BioRad, Carolina, Rockland, and Innovative Genomics.  Holy moly! 

Granted, students using these kits are working with fast-growing relatively simple bacteria (not mice), but the essential point (and why the article “CRISPR in the Classroom” made me say “Wow!”) is the accelerating pace of change exemplified by this one specific scientific technique.  And not just acceleration in the timeline, with profound advancements happening in shorter and shorter intervals of time, acceleration in every aspect of the technology – how long the technique itself takes to complete, decrease in cost of materials, and decrease in expertise required to successfully use the technology.

When GLP works with schools we explicitly name this accelerating pace of change as an ongoing condition - otherwise known as VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). Whether we’re talking about advancements like CRISPR or disruptive events like COVID, we have long asserted that all organizations must intentionally cultivate agility, adaptability, and a culture of continuous learning to thrive -- at every level and across every role.  It’s an imperative for organizational longevity -- and it's an even larger imperative for our learners.