The Teacher Shortage Is a Signal About American Priorities
States are paying teachers less in real terms than they did twenty years ago. The shortage is not a mystery. It is a predictable outcome of choices made with full knowledge of the consequences.
The United States currently has approximately 300,000 unfilled K-12 teaching positions — a number that has been growing for six years and that is accelerating as veteran teachers retire in larger numbers than new teachers enter the pipeline. Teacher preparation program enrollment has declined by 35 percent since 2010. Emergency teaching licenses — authorizations for people without standard teacher credentials to enter classrooms — are being issued by states at record rates, in some cases to recent high school graduates with no college degree.
This is a crisis by any reasonable definition. It is also, unlike many education policy problems, a crisis with a clearly identifiable cause and a clearly identifiable solution — neither of which is particularly complex.
The cause: teacher compensation, in real terms, is lower in most states than it was twenty years ago. The Economic Policy Institute's teacher pay penalty — the gap between teacher wages and wages for comparable college-educated professionals — has widened from approximately 6 percent in 1996 to approximately 14 percent today. Teaching requires a four-year degree, usually a graduate certification, and ongoing professional development; it compensates at rates that were adequate when the alternative career options for college-educated women were limited and that have become inadequate as those options have expanded.
The solution: pay teachers more. This is not a controversial analytical claim among education economists; the research on teacher compensation and workforce outcomes is consistent. Higher compensation attracts more candidates, reduces turnover, and allows more selective hiring. The question is not whether higher pay would help; it is whether political systems will fund it.
The compensation collapse in historical context
Teacher compensation in the United States peaked relative to other professions in the 1970s, when the teaching workforce was predominantly female and the alternatives available to college-educated women were narrower. As the labor market for women opened in the 1980s and 1990s, the relative compensation of teaching should have increased to retain workers who now had better-paying alternatives.
Instead, it declined. The political economy of teacher compensation is unfavorable in ways that are structural: teacher salaries are primarily funded by local property taxes, meaning that compensation is highest in affluent districts and lowest in the districts with the greatest need for strong teachers. State funding formulas have been designed to equalize funding, but their equalizing effect is partial and politically contested.
The teacher unions that have historically advocated for compensation — the NEA and AFT — are primarily organized around job security and working conditions rather than compensation; their political priorities have been influenced by the interests of veteran teachers who have accumulated sufficient seniority to benefit from step increases, rather than the interests of new teachers facing inadequate base salaries.
The result is a compensation structure that front-loads low pay at career entry (when recruitment is hardest) and defers compensation to career midpoint and end (when retention is easier because workers have accumulated substantial pension benefits and schedule predictability). This structure is rational for retaining veterans and irrational for recruiting the next generation.
What the research shows actually works
The evidence on teacher quality — what distinguishes more effective from less effective teachers — is extensive and fairly consistent. Teacher effectiveness is not primarily predicted by credentials, by graduate degrees, or by years of experience beyond the first few years. It is predicted by a combination of cognitive ability, domain knowledge, and interpersonal skills that are observable in classroom practice but imperfectly measured by any single credential.
This evidence suggests that the current crisis is an opportunity: the conditions of extreme shortage create political leverage for reforms that would otherwise be politically impossible. States that increase compensation significantly while also demanding broader access to the profession — reducing credential barriers, expanding lateral entry from other careers, creating better evaluation and selective retention systems — could potentially improve both the quantity and quality of the teaching workforce simultaneously.
The evidence on specific compensation interventions is less developed but directionally consistent. Tennessee's comprehensive teacher effectiveness system — which linked evaluation, compensation, and retention — produced measurable improvements in student outcomes. Louisiana's transformation of teacher preparation, which dramatically raised the quality threshold for certification, produced a higher-quality new teacher pipeline at the cost of reduced supply that required policy solutions elsewhere.
Metaculus forecasts a 52 percent probability that at least ten states will substantially increase minimum teacher starting salaries — by at least 20 percent from 2024 levels — before 2030. The political pressure created by the shortage is already producing salary increases in states from Arizona to Oklahoma; the question is whether the increases are large enough and sustained enough to reverse the pipeline decline.
Sofia Reyes is a contributing writer at The Auguro covering education, policy, and the politics of American institutions.