Teacher staffing is stabilizing in most subjects, but teacher-pipeline problems and declining working conditions could cause ongoing shortages in high-need subjects like science and special education.
New longitudinal data on staffing in Washington state suggest that preservice teachers may not be trained to enter the education fields that most need them, and active teachers need more support—particularly in special education—to keep them in the classroom.
The study was released last week at the annual meeting here of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, which has been studying school staffing issues.
For the study, CALDER director Daniel Goldhaber and his colleagues scanned twice-weekly job-posting data from 283 school districts in Washington (which teach 99 percent of students in the state), as well as teacher endorsements—qualifications to teach specific grades or subjects above a basic license—from December 2021 to September 2024. They compared this to administrative data before and after the pandemic to track how the pool of available teachers has changed for different grades and subject areas in the state.
The researchers found that the teaching supply has bounced back to meet demand overall—both because more teachers are now getting certified, and because districts may be rethinking staff positions created using federal pandemic relief funds, which expired last September.
“If you go back in time, school districts had $190 billion from the federal government [from ESSER] and they were encouraged to spend it,” Goldhaber said. “So I think some portion of that spending went to new positions that wouldn’t have been there in the absence of the ESSER money.”
While the number of new Washington state teachers earning credentials fell in 2020 compared to 2015-2019, they returned in higher numbers in 2021 and 2022. Overall teacher attrition, measured by the share of teachers from the prior year no longer teaching at the same school, also returned to pre-pandemic rates.
At the same time, with the end of federal pandemic recovery funding this school year, district hiring also slowed. Overall, that meant there were eight to nine new teachers available for every 10 teaching positions posted.
“If you think about this in the aggregate, that seems like good news. We’re basically replicating the current size of the workforce within each of these subject areas,” said Roddy Theobald, a study co-author and CALDER’s deputy director. “The problem is that demand for teachers by subject area is wildly different.”
In 2024, for example, districts posted fewer than five new openings for every 100 elementary, English, and social studies teachers on the job; teachers also outstripped positions in math, though by a smaller amount. By contrast, they were looking to hire 17 posts for every 100 special education teachers and 12 positions for every 100 science teacher.
Goldhaber said specialization mismatches like these are “a consistent problem,” because teacher-prep programs tend to train the same number of students each year in different subject areas, and students rarely get advised on changes in local or regional labor markets.
“This is why we should not talk about teacher staffing challenges in a generic way,” Goldhaber said, “because they are very different across different subjects and they’re different across different schools.”
Special education and science remain ‘chronic problems’
The study focused on Washington state and its findings mirror broader national trends, which show ongoing teacher shortages in science and special education fields. The most recent federal data, from 2023, show that schools serving low-income students and those of color are more likely to struggle to find educators.
While the pandemic may have exacerbated matters, staffing shortages in special education and science have been “chronic” problems for decades, Goldhaber said. States and districts have offered thousands of dollars in bonuses to help lure and keep teachers in both areas—though recent, widespread federal cuts to teacher-development programs have put some of these in jeopardy.
The two subjects have different root issues though, researchers found.
Fewer students in science, technology, and engineering fields enter teaching as a career. In 2021, half as many new teachers nationwide completed computer science certification compared to a decade prior.
By contrast, enough new and existing teachers have special ed. credentials to meet demand, Goldhaber said, “but the attrition out of special education classrooms is higher than in other specialty areas—and often the attrition is out of special ed. classrooms into other classrooms. So there are people in the workforce that hold a special education credentials, but they are not teaching special education.”
