America is facing a teacher shortage

Get out those apples, because maybe one per day will make the teachers stay. School districts across America are currently scrambling to deal with a nationwide shortage of educators for all levels, according to new data.

While it’s hard to know exactly how short schools are, since no national database precisely tracks the issue, here’s what we do know: during the 2022-23 school year, an estimated 320,000 teaching positions across the US were either vacant or filled by non-certified educators, up from 200,000 the previous year, according to the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

• Things haven’t been any better this school year, with 86% of all US public school districts saying they struggled to hire teachers.

Driving the trend… Experts point to a wide range of factors, including pandemic-induced exhaustion, low pay, worries about gun violence, staffing shortfalls, contentious political battles over what they can or can’t discuss in the classroom, and constantly changing remote learning and other Covid protocols.

📸 Big picture: There are currently 567,000 fewer educators in America’s public schools than before the pandemic, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, representing an overall drop of more than 15%. And this trend doesn’t appear poised to reverse itself anytime soon.

• In December, the most recent month with available data, the US education sector hired just over 0.54 employees for every open position created, close to its lowest-level on record (set in 2022).
• The proportion of college freshmen in America who intend to major in education has fallen from between 10%–13% in the early 1970s to 4.3% in 2018. The number of US graduates who majored in education dropped by more than half over that same period, while America’s overall population increased by ~56%.

📊 Flash poll (long-form): Calling all 20,000+ classrooms using the DONUT: How would you deal with America’s teacher shortage? The best answers will be featured in tomorrow’s newsletter.

• Submit a response here.