Local teacher shortages are real. We aren’t sure about a national one.
With schools reopening across dozens of states this month, some education leaders are ringing the alarm: There aren’t enough teachers to fill open positions right now.
In Texas, teachers are deserting the classroom at high rates, with Houston alone reporting nearly 1,000 vacancies in early August. In Maryland, more than 5,500 teachers reportedly left the profession in 2022, leaving Baltimore with an estimated 600 to 700 vacancies going into the fall.
Department of Education officials in Pennsylvania are calling that state’s shortage a “crisis,” and experts there say the state will need “thousands” of new teachers by 2025.
Kansas is facing what has been called the most severe teacher shortage it has ever had: about 1,400 teaching jobs are unfilled. In Florida, there are about 8,000 teacher vacancies, up from 5,000 at the start of school last year. The shortage is reportedly also dire in other states, including Nevada, California, Illinois, Arizona, and Missouri. Some experts say that even school districts that don’t usually face shortages are struggling with vacancies, and it’s hard to hire teachers even for subjects that are typically easy to fill.
Meanwhile, teachers have made it plain that they are unhappy. Seventy-four percent of respondents in the American Federation of Teachers’ June survey of nearly 2,400 members were dissatisfied with the job, up from 41 percent in 2020, and 40 percent said they’d probably leave the profession in the next two years.
Teacher shortages are nothing new. The teaching profession has been perennially plagued by shortages for the last 50 years. But what’s happening this year might seem like a perfect storm: Long-term trends in the profession and a healthy job market in other fields are colliding with a couple of extremely difficult years in the classroom.
A mass exodus from teaching, as more teachers quit and fewer newly minted educators are available to take their place, feels like it makes intuitive sense this year.
But is it actually happening? The US does not collect timely, detailed national data about teacher employment, so it’s difficult to definitively conclude whether there is a national teacher shortage going into the 2022-23 school year. That has led to practitioners, education policy experts, and union leaders talking past one another.
The first uncertainty is how a shortage is even defined. “There are so many different measures of teacher shortages, and there’s no national standardized definition of what a teacher shortage is,” said Josh Bleiberg, a post-doctoral researcher studying school reform at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, who recently co-wrote a working paper about the challenges of studying the teacher labor market in real time.
On the one hand, local news outlets are reporting on shortages in response to local vacancy numbers provided by school district leaders and principals, and union leaders are speaking out based on survey data from their member bases or other preliminary information. And on the other hand, there are policy experts looking at state-level data who are more cautious about making declarative teacher turnover claims about what’s happening nationwide.
“People talk about shortages from different perspectives and both of those perspectives are right, but they can lead to different conclusions,” said Matt Kraft, a professor of education and economics at Brown University who co-wrote the paper. “So if I’m a school leader, I can very authentically say, ‘I don’t have the people I need.’ And then someone else can be sitting at the state or national level and be looking at the numbers and saying, ‘There is no shortage.’”
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Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
While these data challenges complicate the teacher shortage debate, educators, education leaders, and experts at every level seem to agree that a crisis lies in how little America values its teachers and how transparent this has become in the last few years.
“There is definitely a crisis of morale and confidence. The belief that one can do good work and do good for young people and have a rewarding, satisfying career in teaching has gone down the tubes,” said Dirck Roosevelt, the director of doctoral specialization in teacher education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “That’s been coming for a long time.”
What we know about the teacher shortage
Some communities have always struggled to hire teachers. Urban school districts that typically serve Black and brown students have traditionally faced shortages: Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at Penn GSE and leading expert on the country’s teaching force, told Vox that “high-poverty, high-minority, urban, and rural public schools” have had among the highest rates of turnover, based on analyses of several decades.
“When we talked about teacher shortages in 2015 or 2010 or even 2000, we were talking about shortages in communities of color, in particular,” said Jacqueline Rodriguez, the vice president of research, policy, and advocacy at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “We were talking about communities that were traditionally under-resourced.”
This year, she’s seeing more examples of those struggles spreading to wealthier, whiter districts, too. In Virginia, wealthier communities in the Washington, DC, suburbs, including Alexandria, Crystal City, and McLean, usually have no trouble attracting teachers, but “they’re seeing huge percentage decreases in submissions of applications, or, in some cases, they don’t have any to choose from,” she said. That situation would be nothing out of the ordinary in Norfolk, Virginia, where the schools in the poorest neighborhoods have struggled for years to keep teachers.
“The types of inequities that students had to navigate over the last several decades have always existed for students of color, but they are only now permeating white communities,” Rodriguez said. “And we’re starting to recognize that the teacher shortage is not simply about the pandemic.”
The American teaching workforce is huge: In 2018, there were 3.5 million teachers in public and charter schools. So far, there is no comprehensive national data about teacher turnover, so the understanding of teacher shortages rests on these anecdotes from individual schools, districts, and some states.
“I think what is clear among all the noise is that there hasn’t been a mass exodus. In some districts there have been elevated rates of teachers leaving,” said Heather Schwartz, senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. “‘Mass exodus’ is an undefined term. But we may all think of it as doubling or tripling the normal attrition rate and we have not seen that.”
Some data sources suggest that the number of teachers really has declined, even if it hasn’t yet hit mass exodus levels. There were about 270,000 fewer school staffers in July 2022 — including teachers, bus drivers, counselors, and librarians — than there were in January 2020, according to preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Bleiberg and Kraft, using both national and state-level data, found that overall employment in the K-12 labor market declined by 9.3 percent at the onset of the pandemic and was still 4 percent below pre-pandemic levels in March 2022.
A survey from RAND of 291 school district leaders, released in July, found that 58 percent of district leaders foresee a small shortage this year and 17 percent anticipate a large shortage. The survey also found that more than three-quarters of district leaders said that they have expanded their teaching staff, in some cases including substitute teachers, above pre-pandemic levels as of spring 2022.
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Matt Rourke/AP
Ingersoll pointed to heavy pre-retirement quit rates — teachers leaving the profession who aren’t old enough to retire — though the evidence so far is largely local or anecdotal.
“In economic downtimes, there won’t be a surge in retirement and quitting. Sure, teaching may make people unhappy, but if there aren’t [other job] options out there, people won’t leave,” he said. “As the economy improves, there will probably be a huge pent-up surge in teacher quitting and teacher retirement. And in fact, it looks like that’s what’s happening.”
Why there is record teacher dissatisfaction
The usual culprits for teacher dissatisfaction are ever-present. About 75 percent of pre-K to grade 12 teachers who participated in the AFT survey reported that conditions have changed for the worse over the past five years.
The reasons included their workload, greater responsibilities, unrealistic expectations, student behavioral issues, pay that doesn’t keep up with inflation, a lack of support from school leadership, and a lack of support from parents. About 74 percent of respondents said they would not recommend the teaching profession to a prospective new teacher. (Other large surveys of teachers from the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the country, and RAND tell a similar story.)
While these factors have been at the root of teacher satisfaction for a long time, experts are identifying new stressors that, coupled with burnout, are pushing teachers over the edge.
“There’s been a whiplash during the pandemic. At the beginning, teachers were celebrated and told they should be paid a million dollars. Later on, they were told they were incredibly selfish,” said Roosevelt, of Columbia University. Teachers were viewed as heroes for being on the front lines during the early days of the pandemic, with many of them quickly transitioning to online instruction to keep the learning going. But when it came time to return to the classroom, at the risk of sacrificing their health and that of their family’s, many teachers wanted to draw the line.
“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.”
Teachers also face a lack of trust that’s been growing for decades, Roosevelt said, with the “relentless tsunamis of mandates related to what to teach, what not to teach, and the endless folly of how to measure everything.” Mandates, restrictions, and top-down oversight has eroded teachers’ professional democratic autonomy, according to Roosevelt.
Though salaries do influence a teacher’s decision to remain in the field, they haven’t historically been the biggest factor in the decision. “When we analyze the data on teacher quitting and turnover, salaries and benefits do matter but not as much as how much say, how much voice, and how much support teachers say they have,” said Ingersoll. “Those kinds of factors are more frequently cited by teachers as what made them decide to leave.”
Still, the “teacher pay penalty,” the reality that teachers are paid less than their non-teacher college-educated counterparts, has gotten worse over time. A new study from the Economic Policy Institute, an independent nonprofit think tank, found that the weekly wages of teachers have remained relatively flat for nearly three decades.
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Courtesy of Ivory Bennett
For Ivory Bennett, 31, formerly a 12th grade English teacher in Dallas and her school’s cheerleading coach, the decision to leave the profession just before the start of the 2021 school year, which would have been her seventh year in the classroom, was a difficult one. “It was very hard, but I had to do it for three reasons,” Bennett told Vox.
First, she felt undervalued in her school community. “I felt like I was being hazed, constantly. I was treated unkindly and did not feel respected or supported. The vibe was soul-sucking and joy-depleting. Also, there was little emphasis on actual academia and too much emphasis on state testing,” she said. Bennett realized that teaching took a toll on her physical and mental well-being. “I was being treated with so much disregard and ultimately decided to prioritize my health,” she said.
And then there’s the compensation. As a teacher with a master’s degree in education, Bennett said she wasn’t getting paid enough for what was expected of her. During her final year as a teacher, she earned $57,500, up from about $26,000 during her first year as a teacher in Oklahoma City.
She walked away knowing that her students probably wouldn’t have an English teacher or a cheer coach that year. Bennett now works for a nonprofit where she trains first- and second-year teachers.
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Courtesy of Ivory Bennett
“I think it’s worse now than it has been,” said Roosevelt. “There has not been a golden era for teachers in this country, but there were many generations where a teacher could find some honor in the work in some parts of society. They wouldn’t necessarily get paid well, but they felt they were doing something that was valuable and important. There was a certain camaraderie that existed, and we just don’t have that now.”
State-level legislation, like bans on how teachers talk about race, gender identity, and sexual orientation, along with discussions about arming teachers in schools and mask and testing mandates, have only exacerbated existing tension around school-based culture wars, going back to the fight over whether to teach evolution or the Bible.
The tug-of-war over whether parents, teachers, district administrators, or state legislators make the decisions is finally driving more teachers out. About 88 percent of teachers in the AFT survey said education was “becoming too politicized” where they worked and 82 percent said that, where they worked, educators were becoming targets of political and ideological attacks.
“We as a public, and as legislators, decided that they didn’t do a good enough job of making decisions as experts in their own fields, so we need to start legislating how and what they teach,” Rodriguez said. “We undervalued the teaching profession, and then we legislated against what teachers knew was in the best interest of kids, which includes things like social-emotional learning, trauma-informed instruction, and being culturally responsive.”
Teachers are worried about how vacancies would impact their ability to be effective in the classroom.
“In the last two years, I’ve had to be five teachers — for a semester long in two cases — in addition to my own class load as we have people leave mid-year or can’t find candidates to hire,” said Nick Clark, a Fort Worth, Texas, high school calculus teacher who has been teaching for 15 years. “I don’t have the time to meaningfully plan, grade, or mentor the extra students and still be highly effective for my own students.”
Some states like Texas are looking into loosening certification requirements. Others are relying on long-term substitutes, and Florida is considering allowing veterans without bachelor’s degrees or teaching experience to lead classrooms. Other districts are having teachers cover extra classes and sometimes asking administrators or district personnel to step in. Some are hiring teachers on the spot at job fairs, increasing salary offers, or enticing educators with four-day workweeks.
Teachers have a bigger impact on student achievement than any other factor at school, and experts warn that some quick fixes could backfire if they recruit teachers who are unprepared.
One-fifth of the new teacher hires in the country have never had any practice with kids ahead of time, Ingersoll said, and beginning teachers have among the highest rates of turnover of any group of teachers. Overall, more than 44 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years. The lower entry standards also risk de-professionalizing the field.
The constant turnover prevents educators from building a pool of knowledge about best practices within the field and doesn’t allow young practitioners to learn from older ones. “You certainly don’t get people sticking around long enough to gain the protections of tenure, or the self-confidence to stand up to policies that they think are wrong or to advocate for good policies,” said Roosevelt.
Students, perhaps, have the most to lose in the face of teacher shortages. “Their learning losses are stacking up, and their self-confidence declines,” Clark, the high school teacher, said. “I do my best to be available, but having 300+ students just isn’t tenable. The extra load and duties make coming back less and less appealing every year.”
The MCU’s version of a legal procedural can be fun as hell.
Beneath She-Hulk’s quippy gags, trippy world-building, and zippy cameos is a heartfelt question: What if you dared to be big?
For Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany), that query comes quite literally as she’s gifted with the powers of a Hulk. To be a Hulk — like her cousin, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and his alter ego — means having super strength, near invulnerability, and heightened athletic prowess, among other powers. But those gifts come with a price. Over several Marvel movies, starting with Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015, we’ve seen Bruce struggle with lack of control, loneliness, and his fear of hurting others. That’s all not to mention the duty, and burden, of using his abilities to protect and save the defenseless.
Jennifer also struggles with the existential questions around what it means to be big, but they affect her differently than they do her cousin, for one obvious reason.
Fictional MCU Earth is unfortunately a lot like the real world. Women are asked to shrink themselves to accommodate those around them. Jen has had a life of being told to stay out of the way, to be anyone but herself.
Within those boundaries, she’s carved out a good-enough life. She’s content. She’s comfortable. Becoming the She-Hulk threatens all of this, and not just because she becomes a lime-skinned anger monster. Her superpowers also spark in her a sense of defiance; they allow Jen to circumvent the rules set for her. Her powers offer Jen a tantalizing prospect: that she could create a life better than the one society has dealt. That is its own kind of scary, especially for someone who has learned to live a tiny life.
As she finds out, it’s not easy to choose to be big. It may even require being brave.
She-Hulk isn’t about girlbossing, gaslighting, and gatekeeping superheroism
I suppose you could call She-Hulk: Attorney at Law a “legal procedural” the same way you could call Captain America: Winter Soldier a “political thriller.” It involves a lot of generosity.
In the first four episodes critics were given, there are plots in which Jen has to figure out the legal ramifications of supervillain parole or how to serve a cease and desist to unlicensed magic users. These cases raise some perplexing philosophical questions. Like, what does the MCU want to say about prison reform and rehabilitation? Or how does the law — in which power is mostly abstract — hold actual magic users responsible? It’s a funny conceit, but the legal cases give texture to the MCU and offer a glimpse into the effects that superheroes have on civilian life.
Unfortunately, the show never really goes that deep into how cases are won or, so far, how one might navigate the complicated intersection between nuanced lawyerly duties and more straightforward superhero ones. The good guys are good. The bad guys are bad. The bad guys who are reformed are good now. Most of the time, Jen’s side is the just one.
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Chuck Zlotnick
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law largely works, though, because it’s not actually a legal procedural — it’s more of a comedic origin story. It all hinges on Maslany’s breezy and charismatic portrayal of Jen. She grounds the character with mountains of approachable appeal, like someone you wouldn’t mind eating a bagel in front of. Her performance cuts through that much-criticized CGI.
At the start, Jen is content in her circumscribed life. She’s a single lawyer with a loving but annoying family. Her paralegal (Ginger Gonzaga) is her best friend. She’s proud of her work in the DA’s office. Jen isn’t living large, but things could be much worse.
The character’s big goals in life are to date more and have a great job. She’s relatable and practical. She probably has a five-year plan. If someone threw out the idea of the endless, ever-expanding multiverse, Jen would say that she wants to live in the timeline where she didn’t amass student loans in law school. If given the choice to live a superhero’s life, she would ask if it offered health care (the Avengers famously do not).
But she isn’t given a choice. Thanks to a freak accident in which she absorbs some of her cousin’s gamma-radiated blood, Jen gains super strength, invulnerability, and broccoli-hued skin. Unlike Bruce, though, she’s able to control it. As she explains, life as a woman already means controlling anger and emotion; she’s well practiced at not seeming too mean, too rageful, too much. Switching between her Hulk form and regular civilian form is easy. That it’s so difficult for Bruce shows reflexively how men aren’t held to the same standards.
Superpowers as a symbol for female liberation — and how that empowerment threatens the status quo — isn’t new. It’s as old as the goddesses depicted in ancient legends or the accusations of witchcraft across centuries. Plus, the allegory is right there in so many Marvel and DC comic books. The show picks up this tradition and builds on it. An ongoing plot line revolves around She-Hulk’s impenetrable — that is, thick — skin!
Till now, Marvel’s cinematic track record with its female superheroes has been, well, a mixed bag. It took more than a decade and 20 movies before the studio created its first female superhero movie in 2019’s Captain Marvel. In 2021, Natasha Romanoff a.k.a. Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) received her first movie (a prequel), and that same year Wanda Maximoff a.k.a. Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) got her own series in WandaVision. Both were ultimately killed off — Wanda in Multiverse of Madness and Natasha in Endgame. The pattern of elevating a woman superhero to a high profile then having her die by self-sacrifice isn’t exactly great optics.
Marvel’s television offerings like Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel are more promising. They have not only allowed its titular female heroes to live but actually laid solid foundations for their futures. She-Hulk joins Hawkeye’s Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) and Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) as the second generation of Marvel’s female superheroes.
But Marvel is still getting its sea legs when it comes to onscreen feminism. There are more than a few instances in which, say, Jen has a line about mansplaining or a character jokes about cat-calling. These moments seem to exist solely because the writers see them as easy signals to the audience — flashing neon signs that point out this behavior as sexist. I’m left wondering who that’s for. Perhaps I’m naive, but I’d hope that someone tuning into She-Hulk and wanting to enjoy it would know that cat-calling a woman on the street is not good behavior.
I guess I’m also deeply cynical in that I do not think a joke on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is the thing that will keep someone from participating in blazing misogyny. We’ll see how far Marvel wants to go in examining the sexist world She-Hulk pushes back against.
In She-Hulk, super powers help its hero find out who she is
What the show does particularly well is handle Jen’s identity crisis with her newfound abilities. This struggle lands more successfully than the more obvious nods to gender inequality; it includes canny observations about how women move within the world.
Being big and strong allows Jen to access a world that she’s never been allowed to be a part of. Regular people don’t get to beat up demons, throttle muggers, or save lives, but as She-Hulk, Jen can do all of those things. She wields literal physical power, and experiences joy in doing so. Even some of the things that bug her in civilian life — dating, jerks at work, family life — can be alleviated by punching some henchman.
Her Hulk form also seems to bring her closer to who she really is, and that’s something to be excited about.
Transforming into the Hulk lets Jen tap into the primal glee of not only being strong, but also being aggressive, loud, flashy, proud, cocky — things she hasn’t allowed herself to be before. These qualities allow her to thrive at her new job as a superhero law attorney, get multiple matches on dating apps, and become famous. As She-Hulk, she has an extremely hot one-night stand! Good for She-Hulk for being the first MCU superhero to use her powers for horniness.
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Marvel Studios
Indulging in it feels natural to Jen, so natural that she begins to question if She-Hulk is actually who she was always meant to be. If society hadn’t taught her to shrink, would this be her life? At the same time, what if she likes the parts of her that aren’t She-Hulk?
Jen wrestling with her sense of self and sorting which parts are the “real” her isn’t tidy.
Being a Hulk doesn’t affect her intelligence or her work ethic, yet it has enabled her to get a better job (and better health care). But her new success brings to light the way Jen has been continually overlooked and taught to undercut herself. Her new powers have made clear how unfairly she’s been treated, and now she has the ability to do something about it.
So why would she want to go back to her old life? And wouldn’t a hero, if they were really a good-to-the-bone hero, want to change the way that world works?
It seems clear the show wants us to understand that power isn’t just great responsibility, it’s also great privilege. There’s a distinction there. One is about recognizing what you owe other people; the other is about recognizing what we owe ourselves. And the joy of She-Hulk is that Jen, I think, sees both.
She-Hulk: Attorney At Law premieres on August 18 on Disney+.
A wave of magnetized particles from the sun will strike Earth over the next few days and light up the skies.
The northern lights might show up a lot farther south tonight, tomorrow, and Friday, perhaps even near you.
A geomagnetic storm is brewing, and it could form auroras over parts of Canada and the northern parts of the continental United States. Oregon, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and New York could all see shimmering skies after dusk. It’s the product of some recent rare and unusual weather in space.
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NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (yes, that’s a thing) issued a geomagnetic storm watch from August 17 to August 19 “due to coronal high speed stream (CH HSS) and coronal mass ejection (CME) influences” with the potential to escalate to G3 conditions.
Okay, now let’s unpack that.
This all began a few days ago, 93 million miles away, on the sun. A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a large burst of magnetized plasma from the sun’s corona, its outermost layer. Scientists recently detected two of these CMEs erupting on the sun and heading toward Earth. They’re expected to arrive on August 18.
The two bursts may combine en route and create a geomagnetic storm reaching G3, or “strong” levels. That means it may create auroras not just at the poles but also closer to the equator than usual.
AURORA FORECAST: Tonight’s aurora forecast for the potentially impending moderate/strong geomagnetic storm shows generally cloudy conditions over the Northeast and better than average conditions for parts of Michigan, the Rocky Mountain West, the Pacific Northwest. Details below: pic.twitter.com/OebQXDr1oU
— Space Weather Watch (@spacewxwatch) August 17, 2022