The teacher shortage.
It’s out there.
It’s happening.
It’s real.
A recent piece in the Hechinger Report puts it into focus this way:
When I was an assistant principal in Chicago, I would post a job opening for a physics teacher and get 20 applications. A call for an English teacher might yield 150.
That was the late 1990s. By the time I left the district, the same postings were lucky to bring in one or two qualified candidates.
Principals were calling the central office and saying, “Send me whoever you have.”
A big list of vacancies:
An estimated 425,000 teaching positions are either vacant or filled by underqualified staff — roughly one in eight of all teaching positions nationally.
The result of ignoring the shortage? Instability - which is bad for learning and bad for kids.
When a district can’t fill a position, it faces a choice: Leave the classroom empty or lower the bar. Most simply lower the bar, and in turn, feed the problem. Teachers with emergency permits or provisional licenses and individuals with no teaching background are placed in front of students who need the most support. Those teachers are also far more likely to leave, the Learning Policy Institute reports, creating a cycle of instability that is hardest on the schools already struggling to attract talent.
The author of the piece offers some solutions - from improving recruitment (and starting with kids in high school) and developing better training and mentorship for teachers, including early exposure to classroom environments.
These are great, and the writer notes data supports both approaches.
However, one other issue matters a lot, too: Teacher pay.
In 2025, the teacher pay penalty stood at an estimated 25.2%—meaning teachers earned about a quarter less than comparable college graduates in other professions. That’s a slight improvement from 2024’s record high of 26.9%, but still more than four times the 6.1% penalty recorded in 1996.
All the recruitment efforts and training work won’t move the needle much if teaching remains a field with comparatively low compensation.
There’s empirical evidence that boosting pay will help.
Teacher pay matters. Investing in the people who have direct contact with students is a direct investment in student success.
When teachers get paid more, students do better. In one study, a 10% increase in teacher pay was estimated to produce a 5 to 10% increase in student performance. Teacher pay also has long-term benefits for students. A 10% increase in per-pupil spending for each of the 12 years of education results in students completing more education, having 7% higher wages, and having a reduced rate of adult poverty. These benefits are even greater for families who are in poverty.
A school district in Oregon moved starting pay in the district from $38,000 a year to $60,000 a year. In the process, all teachers received at least a 15% raise.
The move was approved by 100% of union members voting.
Boosting pay worked:
In recent years, we generally would be lucky to have a single applicant for a position, fully qualified or otherwise. After announcing the salary schedule change, we had pools of qualified applicants to consider. It was a fun spring. Our administrators were having to have these rich conversations about best fit, really digging into things like, ‘Here’s a full table of highly qualified people; who is going to best fulfill the needs of our school? It’s a conversation that most districts don’t get to have right now.
So, yes - focused recruitment helps. And, yes, give those in college preparing to be teachers more and more focused training, including lots of time in classrooms.
But also - and very importantly: Pay teachers more. A lot more.
I left in 2013 at the age of 57 with multiple degrees right when I should have been valued for my expertise. Yes everyone would like to be financially compensated but that’s not why people are leaving. The system has been hijacked since NCLB to only focus on test scores which is a toxic environment for both students and teachers. It destroys the natural motivation of students to learn and teachers to teach. High stakes test scores are a “dirty” fuel & replaced everyone’s intrinsic “clean fuel “ which is people’s natural love of learning.
One thing you need to know: school systems absolutely invest in teachers. Over 90% of a district's annual budget goes to employee salaries and benefits. In order to pay teachers more, their municipalities need to provide adequate funding to school districts. Check out Norwalk, CT. For years, the budget advocated for by our superintendent was not met. By millions. We can't pay teachers more if we don't have more to give.