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Teacher Shortage? Where are the data?

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04 August 2022, 08:37 AM
Axtremus
Teacher Shortage? Where are the data?
I was reading yet another article on "teacher shortage" (no lack of these over the years), and I tried to search for data that will let me systematically "see" where the shortages are, and I found that I cannot find such data.

Instead, I found this: https://www.nctq.org/publicati...pply-and-Demand-Data ... which tells me most states are woefully inadequate at gathering/reporting teacher supply/demand data.

So ... since we have teachers and statisticians and economist who do research on education here, I figure I'd ask:

Any one here happens to know of any good database that would let me look up projections and hard data on "teacher shortage"? (Preferably nationwide, state-by-state or even district-by-district.)


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www.PianoRecital.org -- my piano recordings -- China Tune album

04 August 2022, 09:14 AM
ShiroKuro
Presumably this is about K-12 teachers, which I know very little about.

You might try the American Federation of Teachers, or maybe the American Federation of Teachers?


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04 August 2022, 10:25 AM
Piano*Dad
I don't do K-12.

But I would ask, what would constitute evidence of a "shortage?" Shortage means excess demand, but that's not the easiest thing to measure. In most markets, shortages are short-lived signals followed by a price increases sufficient to balance supply and demand again. So what you see is an upward movement in price. But you can see upward movements in price for many reasons, not just "no supply today."

In the teacher market, salaries don't immediately adjust, so we won't see spikes in teacher salaries. We might see upward pressure, so some "evidence" would be found in examining different movements in teacher salaries across the nation. Of course, there are a few bazillion reasons for teacher salaries to move in any particular jurisdiction, so you have a difficult empirical problem in controlling for other factors and isolating the cause.

You might look to see changes in class size, because that could be a response to "not enough teachers in our town/county/district at the going salary scale." You might see changes in the ratio of substitutes to full-time teachers.

And the list goes on.
04 August 2022, 01:45 PM
Mary Anna
One bit of evidence I see regularly is billboards along Oklahoma interstates advertising starting teacher salaries in affluent parts of Texas like Fort Worth that are roughly twice the starting salaries in even prosperous districts in Oklahoma.

The shamefully low salaries here reflect P*D's point that teacher salaries are only as related to supply and demand as state and local governments' funds and whims will allow. The billboards and the Texas salaries reflect, I presume, that those governments in Texas are more willing to let supply and demand do its work.


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Mary Anna Evans
http://www.maryannaevans.com
MaryAnna@ermosworld.com

04 August 2022, 02:41 PM
ShiroKuro
quote:
One bit of evidence I see regularly is billboards along Oklahoma interstates advertising starting teacher salaries in affluent parts of Texas like Fort Worth that are roughly twice the starting salaries in even prosperous districts in Oklahoma.


That's also probably misleading since I'm guessing cost of living (esp housing) is a good bit higher in Fort Worth TX than in many locations in OK?


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04 August 2022, 02:47 PM
dolmansaxlil
No clue where you’d find data, but anecdotally my social media feeds are full of US K-12 teachers letting folks know they have multiple positions open in their schools. One person I know has eight unfilled positions right now and teachers have already reported back to work (students come next week I believe).


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"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

04 August 2022, 03:41 PM
Piano*Dad
Another piece of evidence would be annual turnover rates. If they're rising, holding on to teachers is becoming more difficult and you're likely to see the quality of the returning staff go down ... the most mobile (better qualified/talented) are the ones most likely to leave for better options.
04 August 2022, 05:06 PM
CHAS
The K-12 schools I went to in the Bootheel of Missouri got teachers from nearby Arkansas.
They came to Missouri for better money. The school most graduated from was widely called
"an accredited day care center".
I had to learn to speak and write when I got to a university.


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Several people have eaten my cooking and survived.

04 August 2022, 11:00 PM
Nina
You can go to the BLS data site and download by year. It's keyed by SOC code, which is hierarchical. K-12 is in the 25-2xxx series
25-2000 = Preschool, Primary, Secondary and Special Education teachers

If you want to remove groups from this omnibus total, just dig down through the SOC codes until you find the one(s) that define the groups you're interested in.

In the dataset, SOC codes are labeled as "occ_code." The entire coding schema was reworked, so if you want to go before 2018 you'll have to find a crosswalk (they're around) to map the old coding to the new. None of this is easy, but you'll probably get what you need in terms of employment numbers.

That said, it seems like the question you're really asking is something like "has the ratio of students / teachers changed"? or "how many unfilled teaching positions exist"?. I'm not sure how to get at that data easily.
04 August 2022, 11:08 PM
Mary Anna
quote:
Originally posted by ShiroKuro:
quote:
One bit of evidence I see regularly is billboards along Oklahoma interstates advertising starting teacher salaries in affluent parts of Texas like Fort Worth that are roughly twice the starting salaries in even prosperous districts in Oklahoma.


That's also probably misleading since I'm guessing cost of living (esp housing) is a good bit higher in Fort Worth TX than in many locations in OK?


It depends on where you are. It wasn't as cheap to live here as I'd expected, but it obviously varies and college towns tend to be more expensive. I had a graduate student who had taught for six years in this college town and still made less than $30,000. That's woefully inadequate.

The fact that Texas needs to advertise, begging people to move there to teach, is probably the most pertinent part of that story. They're choosing to advertise here because the salaries are so low and the working conditions are so bad, so Oklahoma teachers look like low-hanging fruit.


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Mary Anna Evans
http://www.maryannaevans.com
MaryAnna@ermosworld.com

05 August 2022, 11:49 AM
big al
quote:
School administrators fear that the upcoming academic year could be off to a historically rocky start as more administrators raise the alarm on a crisis-level teacher shortage. As The Scroll noted recently, Florida has tried to fill its teacher gap with veterans, even if they haven’t completed a bachelor’s degree. Arizona has passed a new law permitting current college students to work as teachers. Elsewhere, school officials say they will have to combine several classes for instruction in gymnasiums while they struggle to recruit teachers. Because there’s no database tracking teacher employment nationwide, it’s difficult to calculate fully the scope of the shortage, but the state and district reports of understaffing that have emerged in recent weeks point to gaps of hundreds to thousands of teachers, including 3,000 empty slots across 17 districts in Nevada and significant shortages in 88% of Illinois schools. In Nevada’s Clark County District, administrators are paying $4,000 bonuses to teachers who move from out of state and $5,000 to current teachers who stay to educate the district’s 320,000 students.


Source

Big Al


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Money seems to buy the most happiness when you give it away.

Why does everything have to be so complicated, all in the name of convenience. -ShiroKuro

A lifetime of experience will change a person. If it doesn't, then you're already dead inside. -MarkJ

07 August 2022, 10:15 PM
Axtremus
Shiro, P*D, Nina, Dol, CHAS, Mary Anna, Big Al, thanks! I appreciate your thoughts and suggestions.


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www.PianoRecital.org -- my piano recordings -- China Tune album