Tuan Nguyen believes the U.S. teacher pipeline has degenerated so slowly that teacher shortages have tacitly become accepted.
“The conditions in which people become interested in being teachers have changed so much in the last 10-15 years that in some sense, it has become the narrative that shortages—whether it’s unfilled vacancies or under-qualifications—are a normal part of schooling in the United States,” said Nguyen, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Missouri. “We used to have intergenerational families of teachers. We don’t have that as much anymore.”
Nguyen and Christopher Redding, an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Florida, want to change that cultural narrative. That’s the vision behind their new book Ending Teacher Shortages, and forthcoming documentary of the same name, due to debut in 2027.
In an ongoing project tracking the U.S. teacher workforce, the researchers have found that the number of teaching positions left unfilled after the start of the school year has risen, as has the number of underqualified teachers—defined as teaching positions that are filled by teachers who hold irregular, provisional, temporary, or emergency credentials, and teaching positions that are filled by teachers who are certified, but who are teaching in academic subject areas other than their area of preparation. The figures amount to at least 56,000 vacancies and 350,000 underqualified educators as of the 2025-26 school year. At the same time, enrollment in teacher-certification programs has flatlined in most states.
The large number of teachers prepared in the 1990s and 2000s created a buffer of extra educators moving in and out of the workforce, Nguyen said, but as more veteran teachers near retirement age, “that reserve pool is much smaller. The wiggle room in how many people [districts] might get to apply to a position has also declined.”
Nguyen spoke with Education Week about how to develop a more sustainable teacher workforce. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the most common misconception policymakers have about teacher shortages?
That there is a singular national teacher labor market, a big labor market of teachers who can easily move around.
[Policymakers] look at the overall number, and they don’t understand that ... you can have too many elementary education teachers in one state, but not enough STEM or special ed. teachers in that same state, between districts, or within districts as well. And just because you are credentialed in California doesn’t mean you can easily go and teach in Texas or in Missouri.
Some teaching specialties, like STEM fields, have had shortages for decades in spite of efforts to improve the pipeline. Why have those shortages been so sticky?
It’s not always been a constant shortage. It ebbs and flows, but I think right now, it’s at one of its highest points for STEM shortages, and there are two connected reasons for that.
One is salary. I think the salaries for teachers in many states, in many districts are too low to incentivize people with STEM skills to become teachers when you can make $60,000, $70,000 starting salaries in STEM industries.
Related to the salary problem, though, is the prestige and respect for the teaching profession. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, we had less of those problems, right? That coincided with us going to the moon and trying to do everything we could to increase STEM education. Teacher prestige was rising.
Ultimately, unless we can change the narrative of what it means to be a teacher in this country, I think it’s really hard to see how we change the overall picture.
Do you think we will shift into different labor strategies for the teaching workforce, like teachers hired through temp agencies?
That’s a stopgap measure. In some ways, it can put a Band-Aid on your problem today, but it doesn’t solve the problem at the end of the year when a lot of those teachers leave.
This is related to this idea that we can lower the bar for becoming a good teacher; we now have all sorts of routes into becoming a teacher where ... you don’t need special knowledge, you don’t need training. And what do we see? You can see this very clearly in Texas, that they come in, they’re not effective, and they leave very, very early.
What can district leaders do now to improve their teaching labor force?
Districts should look as widely as they can for teacher candidates, but I think that framing puts all the onus on districts when this isn’t necessarily a problem that districts can solve on their own. Society as a whole is not creating conditions where more people want to become teachers.
For a long time, the thinking has been, “What do we do to prevent teachers from leaving?” I think we have to flip that around and say, “What are the conditions—with salary, with working conditions, with professional development, with teacher evaluations—in which more people want to become teachers and stay?”
