Teacher shortages aren’t just a problem for the United States. There’s a “global crisis” in finding and keeping educators.
That’s what education leaders at the United Nations World Summit on Teachers in Santiago, Chile, concluded last week. In a new report unveiled there, a U.N. group estimated countries will need to recruit more than 44 million primary and secondary educators by 2030 to keep pace with demand and replace exiting teachers.
Worldwide, primary school teachers are leaving the classroom nearly twice as fast as they did a decade ago, and fewer young people are entering the profession.
Data from UNESCO, the U.N.'s Education, Science, and Cultural Organization, show primary teachers’ annual attrition rate worldwide has nearly doubled, from 4.62 percent in 2015 to more than 9 percent in 2022. Eighteen out of 21 countries with data reported teacher shortages in 2022-23.
“Too many young teachers are leaving in their first years because of low pay, heavy workloads, limited professional development, a lack of technological training, and in many places a neglect of the value of the teacher—a lack of recognition that demotivates and paralyzes,” said Amina Muhammad, the U.N. deputy secretary general, at the summit. “Ultimately we are asking the impossible of teachers: To build the future without tools, without trust and the conditions that they need.”
Across grade levels, U.S. teachers work more than 100 hours more per year on average than their counterparts in U.N. member countries. That can hurt retention, particularly for early-career teachers—which could put the United States at a disadvantage, as it has a younger teaching force than the global average.
Thirty percent of elementary and 36 percent of high school teachers are over 50, compared to 34 percent of elementary and 41 percent of high school teachers in U.N. countries as a whole.
There’s also a bigger pay gap between teachers and other similarly educated professionals in the United States than in U.N. or European Union countries. This education “pay penalty” has remained even amid recent teacher salary raises across states, and can make it more difficult to recruit highly educated people to join the education field.
UNESCO called on countries to provide more stable financial support for teachers, as well as professional training to help them integrate emerging technology like artificial intelligence and prepare students for lifelong learning.
It’s a heavy lift, as UNESCO estimates recruiting teachers would cost some $120 billion annually in salaries over the next five years at a time when education funding worldwide is expected to fall 25 percent by 2027.
“The data has been very clear that we need to fund this profession in order to elevate its status,” said Mugwena Maluleke, president of Education International, a nonprofit advocacy group for teachers and teachers’ unions in 180 countries and territories.
The summit highlighted some countries investing in ways to provide more equitable teacher recruitment and retention in high-need communities.
This summer, Australia’s legislature passed a 20 percent reduction to student loan debt for teachers, coupled with longer-term debt forgiveness for teachers who commit to work in remote schools and a program to provide more than $1,300 a month to support student-teachers during their practicum. The programs are part of the country’s push to expand the pipeline of new teachers, particularly in harder-to-staff schools.
And as part of a massive economic package in China this year, the country boosted pay for rural teachers to ensure they make at least as much as civil servants in their communities, according to Education Minister Huai Jinpeng.
