Where Did All Those Teacher Vacancies Go?

Districts are using *one weird trick* to make many of them go away

Counting the number of teacher vacancies in a given district was and remains a weird statistic.

That’s because vacancy numbers are hard to understand without knowing multiple pieces of context:

• Timing: A job opening in April or May or June is very different than one that is still unfilled after the school year starts in September or October. Job openings in education are extremely cyclical, and they peak in August every year.

• Magnitude: Is 100 vacancies a lot or a little? That number might be a lot for many small businesses and most school districts, but the answer depends on how many workers the employer has. If a district has 100 vacancies but employs 5,000 teachers, roughly the size of the Baltimore City district, that works out to a job opening rate of just 2%.

• Comparison: Is a 2% job opening rate high or low? Knowing this rate might mean something for an employer who’s familiar with staff counts and can do basic division, but a typical citizen might be better informed if they knew that the latest job opening rate for the private sector is 5% overall. For public education (including higher ed), it’s 2.4%.

Ok, so now we actually have a data point that we can compare across time and industries. But we still don’t have much of an understanding for why a district might have job openings. Is it because they’re trying to replace people who left, or are they trying to add more staff to their payrolls?

From an employer’s perspective, even a “successful” hire may not feel like it if they didn’t have many choices of candidates or felt like they had to settle. (Paul Bruno had an excellent piece for Education Next breaking down all these issues way back in 2022.)

But the last reason I am suspicious of the teacher vacancy numbers is that they’re… kind of made up. They reflect more about a district’s ambitions rather than what they can actually afford.

And, as I noted in a recent piece for The 74 about San Francisco Unified’s budget woes, we’re starting to see this play out:

The district has also kept its total staffing levels in check. Unlike many others, it did not hire a host of new administrators, paraprofessionals, school counselors or other support staff. 

However, that’s not for lack of trying. In December, one of the first steps the San Francisco school board took to reduce its long-term budget deficit was to eliminate 927 unfilled positions. This month, the district agreed to impose an immediate freeze on new hiring. 

Media reports last fall decried San Francisco’s teacher shortages and cited the number of vacant positions the district had. But with a stroke of a pen those “vacant” positions went away once the district realized it could not afford to hire more people.

Not to be too snarky, but one way employers can fix a worker shortage is to decide that they can’t actually afford to pay those people anyway.

I expect to see more stories like this over the next year or so. Laura Testino, a reporter from Chalkbeat Tennessee noted the same thing was playing out in Memphis, with the district wiping away 450 vacancies due to the end of ESSER funding.

We won’t ever be able to document how much of the “vacancy” numbers were just pure fabrication, but I expect they’ll continue to shrink as districts realize they can’t actually afford to hire the number of people they said they wanted to.

Update as of 2/25/25: EdSource is now reporting that San Francisco Unified issued 837 layoff notices this month for teachers, counselors, social workers, teachers aides, administrators and other staff.