Julia Pollak, Chief Economist at ZipRecruiter.
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Private sector employment levels have now recovered from the pandemic, but U.S. schools were still short nearly 300,00 staff in August 2022. That gap is now greater than 360,000 staff according to the recent findings from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The chronic staffing shortfall persists despite Congress’s allocation of just over $190 billion in emergency pandemic aid to K-12 schools—funding that was intended to provide for staff increases to support smaller class sizes, as well as provide remedial instruction and counseling to students struggling with challenges the pandemic threw their way.
As the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace, I frequently speak with talent management teams from major healthcare systems and school districts, restaurant operators and trucking companies. Just about everybody is struggling to recruit and retain workers for in-person roles in this unusually tight labor market. But public schools are operating within uniquely rigid constraints—flush with Covid relief cash but prevented from making the kinds of long-term compensation changes that really matter to candidates without more permanent funding commitments.
I've been exploring the problem from various angles, talking to teachers, pouring over job seeker surveys and studying the official data. Here's what I've come to learn about the teacher shortage.
First, in reviewing the data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), I found the initial decline in public school staffing levels was caused both by a hiring slowdown and by an acceleration in separations. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics findings via the National Education Association, the public education sector had 10.6 billion workers in January 2020. In February 2021, that number had decreased to 10 billion—a loss of roughly 600,000 educators.
Second, public schools are doing far more hiring than usual now, but it’s too little too late. According to the latest JOLTS, public education experienced one of the largest decreases in job openings and an increase in quit rates. But with staff quitting their jobs each month, and the decrease in vacancies, it appears schools are failing to make up the shortfall.
Third, the staffing declines have been extremely widespread. Only two of 49 states for which data are available have seen local government education staffing levels recover since the pandemic: Alabama and New York. States with high average teacher pay and states with relatively low pay have lost staff at similar rates.
The increase in employee preference for remote work has certainly contributed to hiring difficulties in education. But competition from remote employers does not seem to be the primary cause of the staff exodus either, since private schools have managed to expand headcount even while public school staffing has fallen.
The decline in public school headcount also does not appear to be driven by the movement of students out of public schools and into private schools, since I found no systematic relationship in the data between a city’s private and public school staffing levels. Some states and cities have seen large declines in both, and others have seen declines in one or the other. In other words, it is not that declines in public school staffing have been offset by increases in private school staffing within each city or state.
One policy experiment being run among various states with different teacher credentialing standards is to lower the mandatory requirements for educators, a tactic that has also been tried by many different employers for various roles in the private sector. But it is unclear how effective it will be in expanding recruitment. New York is known for having some of the most extensive requirements for public school teachers, and yet New York’s public schools have been among the best when it comes to maintaining headcount. By contrast, Arizona has stripped away credentialing requirements and still has large staffing shortfalls.
One key factor could be differences in wage growth between the private and public sectors. I found in reviewing the Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker by industry, that wage growth over the past year seems to be the fastest in the leisure and hospitality sector and slowest in public administration. The most recent Employment Cost Index report paints a similar picture, showing nominal wages and salaries rising 5.7% for workers in the private sector over the year, but only 3.2% for workers in state and local government.
Giving public schools the flexibility to adjust pay more frequently and to compete on compensation could improve retention rates and support an even faster pace of hiring. Another way to even the playing field would be for public school districts to leverage the same best-in-class recruitment strategies as those used by the private sector. Those may include proactive sourcing to find qualified candidates who are only passive job seekers, including those working outside the education sector today. They may also include giving open positions broader visibility across job boards, search engines and relevant online publications.
Public schools could also prioritize and support efficient engagement with candidates, such as applicant tracking systems, automated interview scheduling tools, online assessment capabilities and video interviews, which are currently used in some districts but not all. Finally, the Department of Education could improve hiring in public schools by providing education and training around hiring best practices to school administrators around the country—such as training on how to streamline hiring processes, optimize job postings for maximum engagement and reduce time-to-hire.
According to the Wall Street Journal, $122 billion of Covid relief money earmarked for schools remains unspent. From my perspective, a good use for some of that funding would be to invest in improving the candidate experience and the employee experience in public education for the long haul. The return on investment would be improvements in recruitment and talent management that could raise the capacity and quality of our schools for decades to come.
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