A wonky dive into how we count the number of workers in schools

Take the headcount employment numbers with a grain of salt

There are two main ways to track school employment numbers. When the BLS reports the monthly jobs numbers, they count all local education employees. However, they count every employee the same. A full-time employee paid an annual salary is counted the same as one part-time worker.

The BLS data are fast and nationally comparable. And they come out monthly. As a result, they are often picked up by the media to give a high-level update on where employment stands across the country and for individual sectors.

For example, it’s accurate to say that, according to the latest BLS data, employment in K-12 schools is still down about 190,000 jobs (2.3%) since February 2020.

But you can’t jump from that statement to saying anything about teachers specifically, or any other type of worker within schools. There are other data sources that provide a more detailed story.

In education, we’ve long used another way to count employees. In its long-running “Rankings and Estimates” reports, the NEA counts teachers and other instructional staff using a different methodology called “full-time equivalents” or FTEs. It defines FTEs as:

A computed statistic representing the number of fulltime employees that could have been employed if the reported number of hours worked by part-time employees had been worked by full-time employees.

The FTE count is slower—you have to actually know how many full- versus part-time workers there are, and how many hours the part-timers work. But most of the data we use in education is calculated in terms of FTEs. The NEA counts the number of teachers in FTEs. NCES reports teacher salaries in FTEs.

It’s important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of both types of employment figures, because the FTE count is telling a more nuanced story than the headcount numbers.

Consider the graph below. It uses the same Census Bureau Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll (ASPEP) that I used in my recent post about teacher salaries. The data are collected annually, and the most recent data run through March of 2022.

Today, I’m looking at the employment trends by type. The red line shows full-time workers. After a brief pause in 2021, the number of full-time staff was back to setting new highs in 2022.

The green line is part-time staff. As I’ve reported elsewhere, the part-time number fell dramatically from 2019 to 2021 and still has not recovered. Across education, the remaining job losses are all on the part-time side.

Public schools are also more likely than private-sector employers to use part-time staff. Depending on the year, about 20-24% of school employees qualify as part-time, versus 16-17% in the private sector. Those staffing decisions also add more volatility to schools, since part-time workers have higher turnover rates and are easier to fire or lay off during economic downturns.

That’s why it’s important to keep looking at the FTE numbers in education. As the blue line in the graph shows, the FTE count is more stable than the headline jobs numbers. As of March 2022, it was down 0.1% from its pre-pandemic levels.

It’s possible to combine both pieces of information to better understand staffing trends. For example, the faster-but-higher-level BLS numbers are useful to see the directionality for where employment is heading (we’ve been slowly recovering since the summer of 2020). But the BLS headcount numbers can be misleading, and they have nothing to say about the type of workers schools are adding or losing.

In contrast, the FTE count is slower, but it gives a more accurate picture of total available staffing.