Teachers Exodus: Attacking The Problem

It seems like every day, there’s another story about the challenges schools and teachers face with filling open teaching positions and retaining their staff. It only takes a little effort to find information to support the theory, whether from the news media, educational institutions, or the local PTA.

Since I often travel to states around the country to help schools with professional development and leadership, I get to hear firsthand how the teacher shortage affects not only schools and educators but especially the children they serve. The question that continues to come to mind is how prevalent the problem is and what is being done to fix it.

Why Are Teachers Leaving  

With all the nightmarish stories coming from the world of education, I didn’t find it surprising that 51% of teachers and 48% of principals felt under great stress several days a week. But it might be surprising to find out the statistic I just provided is from a survey in 2012.  This increased from 36% in 1988, with the lack of professional development and collaboration time as the top two reasons for decreased satisfaction.

As a school superintendent, I often heard that half of all new teachers leave the profession after five years. This often-quoted statistic came from a report by the Alliance for Excellent Education in 2014. But is the problem getting worse, or are we just repeatedly ringing the same warning bell?

Teachers Who are Closing in on Retirement 

As a school leader, I was worried that there would be a massive gap between the number of teacher openings and applicants as the baby boomer generation retired. I still hear this concern when talking with school leaders around the country. They often theorize that the turnover from this generation is a significant contributing factor to the current staffing crisis. The data doesn’t support that theory.

The last baby boomer generation was born in 1964, meaning they would be 59. At the same time, there will surely be baby boomers currently teaching; most, if not all, have met the requirements to retire. If there are a small number of baby boomers, what are the age demographics for teachers currently in the profession? The average age is 42, with 59% of teachers over 40. An additional 28% are between the ages of 30 to 40, while only 12% of teachers are younger than 30.  So, while the baby boomers are not a concern, more than half of all teachers are closer to retirement than they are starting in the profession.

The Fatigue Teachers Face 

The current and growing staffing crisis appears to be exacerbated by a teacher mental health crisis.  Whether it’s the stress from standardized testing, increasing parent scrutiny, decreasing community support, or increasing student needs, the effect is the same; more teachers are leaving the profession by quitting than they are from layoffs, discharges, or other types of separation. 

Quitting peaked in August 2020, with close to 140k, just as schools were trying to open for the first full school year after school closed with the onset of the pandemic. While there has been a decrease since that peak, teachers are still quitting at an average of over 100k, outpacing all other types of separation, including retirements and transfers. Job openings are outpacing new hires by nearly 150k in a tight national job market. And if the staffing crisis is better than ever, one-third of current teachers say they will likely quit in the next two years. With most stories being about teachers, we must include the administrators that are critical to support teachers. The stress and demand for school administrators will only grow with fewer teachers.

Addressing Staffing Issues 

If policymakers, government officials, and institutions of higher learning have known this to be a long-term problem, why hasn’t anything been done? I don’t have the answer to that question, and I doubt anyone indeed does. There has been never-ending talk about the problem, but we, the powers that be, never seem to attack possible root causes. As educators, we work to understand why a child is not successful in any particular lesson and find ways to help the child overcome that learning block. We must take the same tactic to address the current and growing staffing challenges finally.

Post Pandemic 

The first step is to understand where the problem is of most significant concern. Despite having fewer students, our schools have more teachers than ever.  The needs have grown significantly, especially with the often-cited “learning loss” from the pandemic. Many of our students are behind academically compared to prior years, and our children are also experiencing a growing mental health crisis. We don’t need more teachers; we need more teachers in specific areas. The supply needs to be more aligned with the demand.

Regarding teaching certifications, special education, math, and science are the most challenging job openings. Teacher shortages often hit schools with high-poverty and high-minority student bodies the hardest. These problems can be solved if we act purposefully as we would in a classroom to improve student learning.

Generating an Interest to Become a Teacher 

As school leaders, we can’t hope that the problem gets better. We must immediately see what the applicant pool will look like; we need to be actively engaged in growing the applicant pool. I have heard stories from teachers saying they knew they wanted to be a teacher from a young age. That was different from my experience and of many entering the profession. Maybe we decided to be an education major in college or transitioned to the classroom from another career. We have to continue to mine those pathways, but we also have to get students interested in the teaching profession at an earlier age. There are successful examples of this around the country.

Still, if we want to impact the current staffing crisis significantly, there is nothing like putting money and resources behind the effort. As the military did with the GI Bill after World War II to train a new workforce, providing training and a college degree free of charge would significantly increase interest in teaching.

A prospective teacher is challenged by the relatively low pay of the profession compared to the cost of getting the necessary college degree. How about we remove that barrier with an Educator Bill? Even better, we could increase the diversity of the education profession and target certifications in high demand. While this would significantly change how teachers are created, it’s necessary.

Investing in Our Teachers

The process of how we create teachers also needs to change. In each workshop or keynote, I ask the audience if they felt ready for the first day in their new profession. The response is the same whether I talk to teachers, principals, or superintendents. Most of the audience shakes their head no, while others cannot contain their laughter. I have never had one educator tell me they were prepared. If that isn’t an indictment of our current system, I don’t know what is. Think back to your education courses. Most were focused on theory with very little applicable to the classroom challenges. What if we stopped focusing on filling a prospective teacher’s head with useless knowledge and instead made the learning real like the best teachers do with their students? What if future teachers were immersed in the experience like a doctor’s residency instead of intermittent visitations to classrooms and student teaching during college?

They could learn and utilize effective teaching practices while getting direct and targeted feedback to improve their craft. School leaders would get to see them in action, provide support, and then recruit them just like professional athlete-free agents. If prospective teachers are part of an Educator Bill program, they are placed in school districts that need them most. If we treated the profession with the importance and relevance it deserves, we could finally solve the staffing crisis.

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Author: Richard Hughes

A Hamburg, New York-based keynote speaker, trainer, education consultant and former superintendent, Dr. Richard Hughes draws upon more than two decades of experience to impact student learning and education organizations. Rich served as a Superintendent of Schools for over 10 years at school districts ranging in size from 360 to 5,000 students, rural to suburban. Student achievement and educational opportunities significantly improved under his leadership in each of his school districts.  Rich’s current focus is to help schools and educators overcome barriers to being better in all educational practices. He also advises and provides training in areas including strategic planning, curriculum design, instruction, technology integration, interoperability, professional development, and facility planning. In recognition of his professional achievements, he was named 2017 Superintendent of the Year by the New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education and selected as a Lexington Education Leadership Award Fellow in 2015. In his free time, he is an avid martial arts practitioner. Learn more about his work and speaking engagements at www.DrRichardHughes.com