Urban school districts paying parents to drive their kids to class. Four-day school weeks in rural towns. Long-term substitute teachers and “acting superintendents” who stay in their posts for years.
The nation’s public schools have spent $190 billion of federal stimulus money on creative methods to replace departing droves of K-12 teachers, bus drivers and administrators who quit or retired during the COVID-19 pandemic. But nationwide shortages in key support staff, administration, elementary school, special education, math, science and foreign language roles have persisted as the academic year winds down and the federal money runs out.
The Department of Education reported last month that 67% of public school districts responding to a survey need to fill “multiple teaching vacancies” before the 2024-25 school year starts. Another 59% said they also have to fill non-teaching roles this summer.
Both numbers are up from a similar survey before the 2022-23 school year, the federal agency’s National Center for Education Statistics noted. Overall, the Education Department estimated that 95,000 fewer employees are serving public school students than before the pandemic.
More than half the public school districts in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan and Nevada struggled to hire teachers this year. Officials say rising numbers of Spanish-speaking and special needs students, declining enrollments and burnout among faculty and staff all added to their recruitment struggles.
“Education has traditionally had shortages in certain subject and geographic areas, but they seem more widespread now and the challenge in filling them has gotten harder,” said David Griffith, an official at the National Association of Elementary School Principals. “We need to improve the appeal of the teaching profession [through] compensation, job satisfaction, support, status and reputation.”
COVID — and the spending it brought with it — has proven a lasting disruption to the system.
According to an analysis of federal data by Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, most of the nation’s 14,000 public school districts have added teachers and staff while losing students since locking down their campuses in March 2020.
Between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years, the center found public school enrollment fell by 2.3% — or 1.1 million students — to 46.5 million. Over the same period, full-time staffing increased by 1.5% or about 97,000 people to 6.4 million employees.
“The federal government dropped life-changing money on schools and gave them three years to spend it, resulting in a hiring frenzy,” said Marguerite Roza, an education finance expert who directs the Edunomics Lab. “After three years of districts clamoring to hire new staff with their federal dollars, they’ve now made a U-turn to balance their budgets as the money dries up this summer.”
Ms. Roza said the hiring boom added thousands of counselors, classroom aides and tutors to large, multicultural school districts in low-income areas. Those schools reported the sharpest enrollment drops but received the bulk of the stimulus funding.
For example, while national public school enrollment declined by 2%, or 450,000 students, from 2016-17 to 2022-23, the Edunomics Lab found it fell by 7.3% in California over the same period. Ms. Roza said districts in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles must now rely on attrition, layoffs and “pink slips” to reduce their payrolls before August.
Vacancies for unpopular jobs have nevertheless persisted in several struggling districts over the past year, forcing administrators to improvise:
• Parents in the Chicago Public Schools could receive up to $500 a month to drive their children to class after a shortage of bus drivers left more than 5,000 primary students without rides in the fall. Further east, Philadelphia’s public schools have offered $300 a month.
• In Arizona, one of several states where a quarter of teaching jobs are chronically open, school districts filled about 4,000 of their 7,500 vacancies this year through an “alternative pathway” that certified adults without previous classroom experience to switch to teaching careers.
• More than 150 of the nation’s 3,000 largest public school districts are seeking new superintendents to start work in July, according to the K-12 school tracking website Burbio. In the meantime, districts are relying indefinitely on long-term substitutes. Bainbridge Island School District in Washington state has appointed an interim superintendent to serve for 18 months as the system searches for a new permanent candidate.
• The Associated Press estimated that nearly 900 school districts shortened instruction to four days a week during the 2023-24 school year due to insufficient staffing. That’s up from roughly 650 districts in 2019.
• As of October, the federal NCES found teacher shortages had prompted 42% of U.S. schools to put non-teaching staff in the classroom. Another 40% had expanded teachers’ duties to include other roles, 28% had increased class sizes and 24% had shared teachers or staff with other schools.
• More than one-third of schools told NCES they will need to hire staff in general elementary, special education, math, language arts, classroom support and bus transportation this summer.
Hard lessons
Education experts say grade schools have been especially short-handed as they have enrolled growing numbers of bilingual and special education students in recent years.
Primary schools now ask teachers to meet “the diverse needs” of students in ways that can be “extremely time-consuming and mentally taxing,” said Susan Fumo, assistant superintendent of human resources for Freeport School District 145 in rural northwestern Illinois.
“Elementary classroom teachers are clearly struggling the most,” said Ms. Fumo, who noted that her district enrolls 3,500 students from “diverse backgrounds.”
Schools at all levels have struggled to attract teachers with math and science degrees, said Pam Grossman, vice president of the National Academy of Education, a non-governmental organization.
“People with degrees in STEM have many higher-paying career options to choose from, which makes it difficult to attract and retain teachers in these fields,” said Ms. Grossman, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
In Colorado’s Mesa County, about 250 miles west of Denver, District 51 has started several hiring initiatives — including financial bonuses, expanded outreach to international applicants and a $10,000 salary increase over the past three years.
Andrea Haitz, a mother of three who serves as president of the school board, said the district still had “more openings in general education this year” than in the past.
“Special education, secondary math, secondary science, culturally and linguistically diverse [teachers] and school counselors are the most difficult to fill,” Ms. Haitz said. “I think in general it’s harder to fill all positions since the pandemic.”
Public schools also have struggled with an exodus of families who switched to private education and homeschooling during pandemic lockdowns. According to school choice advocates, many of those families have no intention of returning.
“Teachers and students are leaving government schools in droves, abandoning a sinking ship,” said Sheri Few, president and founder of United States Parents Involved in Education, a conservative parental rights group.
‘Alternative pathways’
With teachers in short supply, some administrators have decided to change the definition of what qualifies as a teacher. Over the past three years, most states and school districts have spent public money on “alternative pathways” that allow candidates without education degrees to get licensed. They say these programs have kept classroom shortages from getting even worse.
Florida lawmakers have allocated more than $3 billion to increase teacher salaries since 2020. The state has also established a program for retired military veterans and first responders without previous classroom experience to receive a five-year teaching certificate and a $4,000 hiring bonus.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has made the issue “a top priority,” a Florida Department of Education spokesperson said in an email.
In Arizona, Justin Wing, assistant superintendent of human resources for Mesa Public Schools, said the suburban district near Phoenix “significantly increased” starting salaries to attract in-demand special education and math teachers.
The school board also voted unanimously last month to raise the salaries of returning teachers by 4% and of other returning staff by 3%.
“We typically need to fill 400 to 600 certified positions annually,” Mr. Wing said. “We are currently in the process of hiring for next school year.”
School choice advocates have cheered the efforts to hire non-professional teachers.
“Much of the blame for any shortages rests directly at the feet of the teachers’ unions and teachers’ colleges, which together have squeezed the pipeline of talented and well-prepared educators by creating artificial barriers to new teachers entering the classroom while failing to provide them any meaningful preparation in their studies,” said Matt Beienburg, director of education policy for the conservative Goldwater Institute in Phoenix.
According to state policymakers, easing certification barriers has helped increase the number of people training to be teachers.
Over the last two fiscal years, Michigan lawmakers appropriated over $1 billion of taxpayer money to address educator shortages, after spending nothing on it in previous years.
“Michigan’s efforts to address the teacher shortage, still a very significant issue in the state, have nonetheless begun to bear fruit,” said State Superintendent Michael Rice. “In the last five years for which data are available, the numbers of individuals in a teacher preparation program increased from 9,512 to 14,829.”
The Nevada Department of Education said in an email to The Washington Times that it had 2,958 vacancies for licensed employees in October. That included “critical shortages” in special education, elementary education, computer literacy, science, math, school social workers, school nurses and school psychologists.
Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo and the Nevada state legislature “invested historic funding for public K-12 education during the 2023 legislative session,” the email said. “Teachers across the state are receiving pay raises of approximately 18% to 20%.”
Lindsay Record, press secretary for the Illinois State Board of Education, said a $45 million grant program helped 170 districts with acute shortages hire 5,399 teachers over the past year. She noted that Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker has proposed another $45 million investment next year.
“Funds have allowed districts to find creative and sustainable solutions to fill vacant positions and retain teachers,” Ms. Record said.
While the federal government does not regularly track teacher quit rates, the education journal Chalkbeat reported last year that more teachers in eight states left their classrooms after the 2021-2022 school year than before the pandemic — Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Washington.
Public schools in most states also have reported upticks in depression, anxiety, violent incidents and campus safety concerns among their students since reopening from the pandemic.
“I know a few teachers in the Chicago suburban area who have quit recently and they tell me … that the lack of student discipline has become much worse since the pandemic,” said former social studies teacher Chris Talgo, a research fellow at the conservative Heartland Institute in Illinois. “I’ve also heard that the recent influx of migrants is wreaking havoc in Chicago-area schools. Teachers are scrambling to accommodate students who do not speak English.”
On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Wicomico County Executive Julie Giordano said education officials have increased the number of school resource officers.
“We know the school system is doing everything in their power to make sure that our teachers are well compensated, trying to improve the climate of the schools, and trying to address school discipline the best they can,” said Ms. Giordano, a Republican and longtime former public high school teacher.
More money
According to years of federal data, schools with higher percentages of poor and minority students struggle the most to hire and retain teachers.
The nation’s two biggest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, have long supported using federal dollars to raise the pay for young teachers in challenging schools.
According to the NEA, the average public school teacher salary rose to $69,544 in 2022-2023. The NEA projected that salaries would grow another 3.1% in 2023-24 as New York, California and Massachusetts bumped their average annual salaries to nearly $100,000.
The Biden administration says some 30 states and the District of Columbia have raised teacher pay since 2021, in no small part because of the federal dollars that flooded the system during the COVID lockdowns.
“To support COVID-19 recovery, the administration secured $130 billion for the largest-ever investment in public education in history through the American Rescue Plan provided to more than 15,000 school districts and secured nearly $2 billion in additional Title I funding to date; both funding streams can be used to support teacher salaries in our most underserved schools,” the White House said in a news release last month.
But critics say many jurisdictions did not spend the flood of funds wisely and failed to prepare adequately for the day when the money spigot was turned off.
Too many school districts used that money for “ill-advised” hiring sprees, said Virginia Gentles, director of the Education Freedom Center at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum.
“Many districts spent the temporary funds on permanent staff, at the same time public school enrollment was plummeting due to families leaving public schools, moving away, and having fewer babies,” Ms. Gentles said. “Now districts will need to lay off teachers because they will have to face the budget adjustment realities that accompany enrollment declines.”
As they prepare for layoffs this summer, public schools would do well to focus on the diversity and quality of teachers over their level of seniority, said Heather Peske, president of the nonprofit National Council on Teacher Quality.
“They can also set policies to protect teachers from layoffs in specific shortage areas like special education, STEM subjects, teachers of multilingual learners, teachers in hard-to-staff schools, or schools designated for support because of low-performing status,” Ms. Peske said.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.