When educators gathered in Chile for the UNESCO World Summit on Teachers this summer, they convened to discuss solutions to a problem plaguing communities around the globe: a shortage of teachers that’s projected to worsen unless schools can both attract new recruits and entice them to stay.
K-12 education worldwide is facing a two-pronged dilemma: A global shortage of 44 million teachers by 2030 and not enough funding to train or retain them, according to a report released by UNESCO and the International Taskforce on Teachers for Education 2030 following the summit. Countries around the world risk not having enough teachers — or not enough high-caliber teachers — for the rising number of students expected to enter primary and secondary school within the next five years.
The report’s findings reflect what some school districts and states have been grappling with in the United States, where research has consistently shown that teachers face lower rates of well-being and satisfaction with pay than similarly employed workers in other fields.
By The Numbers
A major contributor to the teacher shortages worldwide is a shortfall of investment in training and sustaining a teacher workforce even as the population of K-12 students continues to grow in some regions, with some of the biggest funding needs projected in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to the report. Each will need $25 billion and $35 billion, respectively, to finance the number of new teachers needed in schools by 2030.
The projected financial need for European and North American teacher investment is roughly $5.4 billion over the same time period.
“Too many young teachers are leaving within their first years because of low pay, heavy workloads, limited professional development, lack of technological training, and in many places, the neglect of the value of the teacher,” Amina Mohammed, UN deputy secretary-general, told attendees at the teacher summit, “a lack of recognition that demotivates and paralyses. Ultimately, we are asking the impossible of teachers: to build the future without the tools, trust and conditions they need.”
A major constraint on education spending is that governments around the world have cut education funds and other public services as they grapple with debt, the report explains, while the supply of new teachers isn’t enough to offset teacher retirements. In lower-income countries, individual families’ payments for public school attendance represent a larger share of education funding and a burden on parents’ finances.
The UNESCO report’s recommendations for increasing the global teacher supply include legal protections for education funding, professionalizing the teacher workforce, and creating equity for teachers when it comes to workload and pay.
For example, the Republic of Korea has tried enticing teachers to rural areas with higher pay and lighter workloads. Peru and Gambia have also implemented higher salaries for teachers who work in low-income regions.
The Importance of Well-Being
The report reflects some of the same struggles school districts in the U.S. have been facing in sustaining the domestic teacher workforce, according to a study of K-12 teachers’ working conditions by the RAND Corporation.
Elizabeth Steiner, an education policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, says the data shows that there is no singular factor when it comes to explaining teacher shortages in the U.S. — and a solution that works in one context might not work in another.
“Teacher shortages are very nuanced,” Steiner explains. “Shortages for special education teachers look very different than they do for middle school math teachers. The challenges faced in rural districts look very different than the challenges in urban districts. What it looks like in Arkansas is going to be really different than what it looks like in South Dakota or New York or Texas, because policies and context vary so much. It’s a very, very local issue in many ways.”
Overall, pay and benefits matter, with the recent RAND report on teachers’ intention to leave the profession showing that 39 percent of teachers saying too-low salaries were a source of stress, and 63 percent said they felt burned out.
Then there are working conditions, which include supportive administrators, collegiality among the staff and professional development. Teachers reported working about 10 hours outside of their contracted hours. Managing student behavior was the most common source of work-related stress, with 52 percent of teachers saying it was an issue.
“Sometimes what we see in the media, at least in what we see in policy, is that policymakers try one thing,” Steiner says. “There are lots of policies right now around improving teacher pay, and that’s great, it’s very necessary, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Leaders should try to think about making those changes in combination with attention to also improving working conditions.”
The research also found that teachers consistently report worse well-being than similar professionals, and the problem is significantly worse among female teachers. Sixty-eight percent of female teachers reported experiencing frequent job-related stress compared to 46 percent of their male peers.
“It is true that females generally in the general population say that they are more stressed and feel more anxious and more burnout than males, but female teachers are so much higher than female, similar working adults,” Steiner says, noting that 75 percent of teachers are women and 90 of elementary school teachers are women. “That suggests there’s something unique about the context of teaching or the working conditions teachers experience that are affecting these worryingly high rates of job-related stress and burnout. We’re still exploring potential reasons why that might be.”
Finding Solutions
Megan Boren has been monitoring teacher shortages and districts’ struggles with recruitment since before the Great Recession of 2008. The 16-state region covered by the Southern Regional Education Board, where she serves as director of the educator workforce program, is in need of about 250,000 more teachers. It’s a problem that makes Boren envious of the global average teacher turnover rate of 9 percent, according to UNESCO. In the American South it’s about 20 percent.
The board has focused its recent education workforce research, done in partnership with Vanderbilt University, on understanding new teachers — the group at the highest risk of leaving the field within their first five years.
They found that teachers who come to the profession via nontraditional pathways are more likely to quit than their peers who went through traditional four-year bachelor’s degree teacher prep programs. Boren says that, while not true of all alternative programs, researchers believe that educators from those pathways haven’t mastered their content areas or pedagogy as well as their peers from traditional routes, which makes it a high risk factor for turnover.
They also found that teachers who start off in middle or high school, high-poverty or low-performing schools, or those who enter in their 20s versus career-changers in their 30s are more likely to quit within five years.
“If satisfaction is low (and) they are planning to leave, we do see a high correlation that they actually do leave in a few years’ time,” Boren says.
Boren says research from Texas Tech shows that the preparedness of teachers has a real dollars-and-cents impact on how much K-12 students go on to earn as adults. For every 10 percent more prepared their teachers were, according to the data, students were projected to earn an additional $120,000 over their lifetime.
“That’s not a small amount of dollars,” Boren says, “and, of course, it’s an average. Imagine if we could increase a student’s ability to be consistently taught by prepared, supported teachers by 50 percent, how much the economy and individual families could benefit.”
The board is working to show district and state leaders that programs supporting early-career teachers — those that offer mentorships or teacher residencies — have a significant return on investment when it comes to helping new teachers succeed and stay in the profession. Boren says that Gen Z teachers are consistently reporting feeling less prepared to start working than past cohorts, and she thinks that should alarm lawmakers and education leaders.
“(Teacher preparedness) seems to have gotten a bit worse even with COVID, as our schools, our students, the technology, our world has very drastically changed in the last few years, and the preparation programs have been sort of put on notice that they’re not necessarily all keeping up very well,” Boren says. “The other negative trends we’ve seen are not going to get better if those who are going into the profession say they feel less prepared for the reality they face.”