Back-to-school season has been overshadowed by concerns over a shortage of teachers. Consequently, the US education secretary, Miguel Cardona, calls for funding to keep teachers from leaving.
The head of the teacher's union, Randi Weingarten, call the issue as a five-alarm situation.
In actuality, there is little proof that the number of teachers quitting the profession has grown nationally.
Schools have struggled to hire sufficient teachers. But the issues are tied more to hiring, especially for non-teaching staff roles.
Schools with federal pandemic relief money create new posts and struggle to fill them amid low unemployment and fierce competition for personnel, according to a report from AP News.
Schools in some areas, notably in sections of the South, have struggled to find enough teachers to staff their classrooms since far before the COVID-19 outbreak.
Additionally, there is a severe lack of instructors in several educational specialties, including bilingual education and special education.
Some districts have fewer or less-qualified teachers due to shortages.
The public middle school in Bullock County, Alabama's rural Black Belt, had no licensed math instructors in the previous academic year.
"It really impacts the children because they're not learning what they need to learn," said Christopher Blair, the county's former superintendent.
"When you have these uncertified, emergency or inexperienced teachers, students are in classrooms where they're not going to get the level of rigor and classroom experiences," he added.
While the nation lacks vacancy statistics in numerous areas, national pain points are clear.
The COVID-19 Pandemic caused the biggest reduction in education employment ever.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school employment declined from 8.1 million in March to 7.3 million in May. Since then, employment has increased back to 7.7 million, but schools still lack 360,000 posts.
Chad Aldeman, policy director of the Georgetown University Edunomics Lab, stated that the country is "still trying to dig out of that hole."
Massive Burnout
According to polls of teachers, many had thought about quitting their careers. They are under pressure to protect children from firearms, catch up academically, and handle the widespread issues with mental health and behavior.
There is a cottage industry of coaching services for teachers to assist them to find other occupations because there are so many instructors quitting.
Brittany Long, founder of Life After Teaching, a resource network, newsletter, and Facebook group with 40,000 members says it's a lonely road trying to find out what to do next when your entire identity has been teaching.
According to statistics from LinkedIn, the majority of former teachers are seeking better-paying positions and remaking themselves as software engineers, executive assistants, and recruiters.
An educator exodus is not only alarming for the future of the profession and generations of students but also for the importance the country sets on a vocation dominated by women, per Bloomberg.
According to the most recent NCES data, around 76% of the 3.5 million public school teachers in the US were female during the 2017-18 academic year.
As women leave academia for higher-paying, less-stressful, and more creative jobs, education might experience a generation-long brain drain.
According to Barbara Biasi, an assistant professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, "This is good for women, but it's bad for schools."
The situation will only worsen based on an AFT union survey conducted in June. It indicated nearly 2 in 5 teachers intend to resign in the next two years.
Salaries haven't kept up with inflation, student behavior issues have worsened during the epidemic, and schools have become a political battleground, among other reasons.
According to a report from the National Education Association, the average starting salary for the 2020-21 school year will be $41,770. This is 4% less than the previous year when prices are taken into account, and it is the lowest it has been in at least a decade.
The COVID-19 Pandemic's Impact on Teachers
The pandemic caused whiplash. At first, instructors were praised and told to be paid $1 million.
Dirck Roosevelt, the director of the Ph.D. program in teacher education at Teachers College, Columbia University, recalled that later on, they were warned that they were selfish.
Teachers were seen as heroes for being on the front lines throughout the pandemic, and many swiftly switched to online training to keep learning to continue, according to a Vox report.
When it was time to return to the classroom, many teachers feared for their health and that of their families.
"The massive demoralization of the teaching force is a huge problem. There are lots of indications of teacher unhappiness and teachers expressing a desire or an intent to leave the profession," said Roosevelt.
"If teachers are profoundly demoralized, that's going to affect the quality of their teaching, sooner or later."
