School leaders across the country often complain about how difficult it is to hire teachers and how teacher job openings have skyrocketed. Because these shortages are not universal, addressing them is challenging. Wealthy suburbs may be flooded with qualified applicants for elementary schools, but remote rural schools may not be able to find anyone to teach high school physics.
A study published online in April 2024 in the Journal of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis shows the inconsistencies in Tennessee's teacher shortage. One school district in Tennessee had a surplus of high school social studies teachers, while a neighboring district had a severe shortage. Almost every region had difficulty finding high school math teachers.
Tennessee's teacher shortages are even more severe in math, foreign language and special education
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Economists have long argued that solutions must target specific shortages. It might also be a good idea to raise the salaries of all teachers or provide subsidies to train future teachers. But broad policies to foster the entire teaching profession may not alleviate shortages if teachers continue to gravitate toward popular specialties and geographic areas.
There is a widespread shortage of high school math teachers in Tennessee.
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The glut of high school social studies teachers was next door to a severe shortage
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Elementary teacher shortages have been a problem in Memphis and Nashville, but not Knoxville.
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Some school systems have experimented with targeted financial incentives. A separate group of researchers studied what happened in two places, Hawaii and Dallas, Texas, when teachers were offered significant pay increases ranging from $6,000 to $18,000 per year to fill hard-to-fill jobs. While special education vacancies continue to grow in Hawaii, financial incentives to work with children with disabilities have inadvertently exacerbated the shortage of general education classrooms. In Dallas, incentives attracted high-performing teachers to high-poverty schools. Student performance then soared so much that the school no longer qualified for teacher pay increases. Teachers left and students' test scores fell again.
This does not mean that targeted financial incentives are bad or failed ideas. But both studies show how important the details of these pay increases are, as there may be unintended consequences or obstacles. Some educational specialties, such as special education, may have problems that cannot be solved by raising teacher salaries alone. But these studies can help policymakers find better solutions.
I learned about the Hawaii study in March 2024 when Roddy Theobald, a statistician at the Institute for American Studies (AIR), published a research paper titled “The Impact of a $10,000 Bonus on Hawaii’s Special Education Teacher Shortage.” Annual meeting of the Center for Longitudinal Data Analysis in Educational Research. (This paper has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal and is still subject to revision.)
Beginning in fall 2020, Hawaii began providing an additional $10,000 per year to every special education teacher. If a teacher lands a job at a historically hard-to-staff school, they could receive a bonus of up to $8,000, for a total pay increase of $18,000. In any case, it was a huge amount of money, exceeding the basic salary of $50,000.
Theobald and five co-authors from AIR and Boston University calculated that the pay increase reduced special education vacancy rates by one-third. On the surface, it sounds like a success, and other media outlets have reported as such. But special education vacancies actually increased during the study period, which coincided with the coronavirus pandemic, and ended up being higher than they were before the salary increase.
What was reduced by one third was the gap between special education and general education. Despite $10,000 being provided exclusively to special education teachers, vacancies for both teacher groups initially plummeted during 2020-21. (Perhaps the urgency of the pandemic inspired all teachers to stay on the job.) Then vacancies began to grow again, but special education vacancies did not grow as fast as general education vacancies. This is a sign that the special education vacancy could have been much worse without the $10,000 bonus.
As researchers examined the data, they found that these differences in relative vacancies were driven almost entirely by job transitions in understaffed schools. General education teachers crossed the hall into special education opportunities to earn an extra $10,000. Theobald described it as “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
This career transition was possible because many general education teachers were initially trained to teach special education and held the necessary certifications. Some have never even tried special education and instead decide to enter general education classrooms. But the pay increase was enough to make some people reconsider special education.
Special education teacher vacancies in Hawaii initially declined after a $10,000 salary increase in 2020, but have since risen again.
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The study does not explain why so many special education teachers left their jobs in 2021 and 2022 despite pay incentives, or why more new teachers do not want these high-paying jobs. In a December 2023 article in Mother Jones, special education teachers in Hawaii described difficult working conditions and the fact that there are too few teaching assistants to help with the special needs of all students. Working with students with disabilities is difficult, and perhaps no amount of money can offset the emotional exhaustion and exhaustion that many special education teachers experience.
In contrast, Dallas' salary increase experience began as a textbook example of how targeted incentives should work. In 2016, the city's school system designated four low-performing, high-poverty schools for its new Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) initiative. Highly rated teachers can receive an additional $6,000 to $10,000 (depending on individual evaluations) to work in struggling elementary and middle schools. Existing teachers were vetted to keep their jobs and only 20% of staff passed the criteria and remained. (There were other reforms, including slightly longer school uniforms and school hours, but teacher salaries were the main driving force and accounted for 85% of the ACE budget.)
Five researchers, including economists Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Steven Rivkin of the University of Illinois at Chicago, calculated that while test scores spiked immediately after the pay incentives began, scores at other low-performing elementary and middle schools in Dallas barely budged. . Student achievement at the previously lowest-performing schools is close to the district average for all of Dallas. Dallas launched its second wave of ACE schools in 2018, and researchers found similar improvements in student achievement. The results are presented in the research paper, “Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Understaffed Schools.” I read the January 2024 version.
The program has proven so successful in raising student achievement that three of the four initial ACE schools will no longer receive funding by 2019. More than 40% of high-performing teachers left ACE schools. Student achievement has fallen sharply, reversing most of the gains achieved so far.
It has been a roller coaster ride for the students. Amber Northern, director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, blamed her elders for failing to “prepare her for the accomplishments she wanted.”
Nonetheless, it is unclear what should have been done. Allowing these schools to continue collecting salaries would drain millions of dollars that could be used to help other low-performing schools.
And even if every low-performing school has enough money to pay its teachers, it doesn't have an infinite supply of highly effective teachers. Not all of them want to work in challenging, high-poverty schools. Some prefer the easier conditions of high-income magnet schools.
These were two well-intentioned efforts that demonstrated the limits of investing money into specific types of teacher shortages. At best, it's a cautionary tale for policymakers moving forward.
This story about teacher salaries was written and produced by Jill Barshay. Hechinger Reportis a nonprofit, independent media outlet focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.