With all the talk of teacher shortages, you might think that schools would have *fewer* teachers. But no, that’s not true.
In fact, here’s a startling statistic:
…public schools added 173,000 students and 159,000 employees in the 2022-23 school year, including 15,000 additional teachers.
That stat is courtesy of a newly updated project I worked on with The 74 to understand how staffing and enrollment numbers are changing across the country. Go read the full article to see data for individual districts.
Nationally, schools employ more teachers than ever. And, because student enrollments are down from where they were pre-pandemic, most places have effectively lowered their student-teacher ratios. This is true for 41/50 states and for three out of every four districts.
Of course, every piece on the shortage / surplus question has to mention that the numbers are not the same for every state, school, or subject area. In particular, the districts in yellow or orange on the map above actually do have fewer teachers per student than they did pre-pandemic. It would be fair to say that most schools in Florida or Louisiana or Nevada, for example, have a shortage of teachers. They literally have fewer teachers per student than they did pre-pandemic. And even in places that have made big investments in new staffing, it’s been harder for them to hire teachers in STEM subjects and special education.
Was this staffing increase a good bet? That’s harder to say for sure, but the staffing surge has meant that districts had less money to raise base salaries.
Speaking in a purely budgetary sense, you could argue that districts are now over-staffed. I don’t mean that to imply that students are having all of their academic and socio-emotional needs met, simply that districts are carrying staff positions that they won’t be able to afford in the coming years. They used their one-time federal relief money to add more employees, and that money will expire at the end of this year. When that fiscal cliff hits, districts will be forced to make some hard choices about whether they want to keep those staff and, if so, how they plan to pay for them.