Schools across US forced to get creative amid teacher shortage

As students head back to class, many school districts are struggling to find enough qualified teachers to fill their classrooms. NBC’s Maggie Vespa reports for TODAY on the variety of reasons teachers are leaving their roles.

About: TODAY brings you the latest headlines and expert tips on money, health and parenting. We wake up every morning to give you and your family all you need to start your day. If it matters to you, it matters to us. We are in the people business. Subscribe to our channel for exclusive TODAY archival footage & our original web series.

Connect with TODAY Online!

About: TODAY All Day is a 24/7 streaming channel bringing you the top stories in news and pop culture, celebrity interviews, cooking, and more. All in one place.

#school #teachers #parenting

[janetslater]

There isn't a shortage of teachers. There's a shortage of support for teachers, which they desperately need. If you don't have the support, you don't have the teachers.

[chloejackson]

I just walked away from teaching after 10 years teaching in the US and in the Middle East and it’s the best decision I could have ever made. Teaching has caused me so much anxiety and has taken a toll on my mental health and I finally had the strength to walk away and it feels amazing.

[kelsblair]

What broke my heart is when a I ordered chipotle and this older women maybe in her 40s delivered my food and I gave her decent tip and she was so grateful. She said she had just had a board meeting and is 6th grade AP math teacher and was told that she had to teach two additional regular math classes because of shortages. She burst out crying and I just gave her a huge. Man it made me tear up. What’s worst is that she didn’t get a pay raise and said her rent was going up.

This is sad especially with so many making millions for sitting n YouTube, throwing a ball etc. no disrespect but it’s really sad how much public workers get paid when they do so much

[s.j.anderson]

A national teacher shortage is just a clever way of saying that some people have made a passion driven profession so unbearable that the people who were once willing to work for the low wages and poor quality benefits are no longer willing to do so.

[King-dpcm]

Nothing is going to change until more teachers leave and districts and local governments really start to feel the impact. Pay teachers what they are worth and make working conditions better for everyone!

[twentynineteen]

It's the administrators. Plain and simple.
---30 year classroom veteran

[heidiperez]

Pay them better and give them better benefits and they won't leave!

[cardenfoy]

Another story broke in the mid-south about a bus driver shortage. I pointed out there is never an administrator shortage at these schools. There is always a bus driver shortage, a teacher shortage, you name it, but there is NEVER A SHORTAGE OF ADMINISTRATORS

[breal]

DO NOT go into teaching in the US!!! It is a stressful, unappreciated, and even dangerous profession. If your calling in life is to become a teacher, learn a new language and go teach someplace else, like Asia or Latin America where teaching is hard but at least you get the respect you deserve. If you like working with kids in a school setting, go be a school custodian, bus driver, or safety officer...No eight years of school required and you make almost the same in salary.

[dillardphilosophy]

Our education system needs an overhaul, starting with administrators. Administrators are granted license to bully and threaten teachers, resulting in widespread emotional and psychological harm to teachers. Administrators lack the ability to control students (i.e., they have no good solutions), but they can control teachers (e.g., by holding their jobs and teaching license hostage with an archaic and convoluted observation system, and worse), so blame teachers for what students do, and hold teachers rather than students accountable for discplinary issues and poor grades. In particular, high schools are dominated by narcissists individuals with doctors of education, which is the most useless doctorate. Until we curb the abuses and excesses of EdD principals and administrators, our education crisis will only worsen.

[marilynrybak]

Our County schools have absolutely no problem hiring teachers. In fact, it’s very competitive. Teachers from other schools districts are trying to get a teaching job here in our County. Why? It’s because our schools, thankfully, still have good policies concerning the removal of disruptive students. Our teachers do not have to deal with behavioral problems day in and day out. They can actually TEACH! And, our school teacher salaries are lower than the counties the teachers are fleeing from. So, until all school
districts adopt better policies regarding disruptive students - to remove them from a regular classroom setting, so the teachers can teach and all of the other students can learn- these school districts will continue to suffer a lack of enough teachers. It’s really simple. What do we do with the disruptive students? They go to a special class or school who have other types of professionals / teachers who are rotated out after a year or two, tops, so they don’t get burned out, to deal with and to try to teach the disciplinary problem children, while we allow the teachers in the regular classrooms do what they are hired to do- TEACH.

[lucysjourney]

Yep. My cousin was a teacher for 15 years she quit last year. Maybe if they took better care of the teachers and paid more this wouldn't happen.

[stephsteph]

I taught in Japan for about 6 years and loved it. Came to the US and began teaching, and I quit after two years. More than pay, the two main issues were

1) admin and these fancy new teaching ideas that do not work (Japan still teaches phonics over sight words which is why Japanese kids can read English well despite not speaking it. Please go back to 90s phonics-- I also worked a tutoring center and that's the main thing they do to catch your kid up, using materials from 1970s-1990s, pen and pencil!)

2) Parents not disciplining their kids and teaching them basic etiquette, and then not allowing teachers to correct these issues and hold students accountable. No respect or responsibility from about 2/3 of the students in classes I taught.

Not doing that again.

[alabaster]

It's egregious that one of the most important professions just doesn't pay what it should and the people in this profession are treated miserably. Add to that the fact that teachers have to put up with kids who act like they were raised in the wild and so you can't blame them.

[gracesealey]

The discipline problem with students is a huge problem. If teachers could just have problem kids removed even temporarily, from the classroom would go such a long way to reduce stress levels for teachers. We are largely at the mercy of students who are troubled, disrespectful, verbally abusive, and sometimes violent. Who wants to get up everyday and go into an environment like that?

[AlyssaK-tpwk]

I’m so glad I just graduated, senior year I didn’t get a real teacher until second semester not kidding. Now I get professors at college !

[christinecrow]

At the beginning of the school year when your school goes from unfilled teaching position to saying "We're fine. We've got it covered." Parents and the press need to start asking questions about HOW those positions were filled. Here are some ways that schools are "filling" those positions.

1) If the class is an elective (nonrequired class) they simple eliminate the class and redo the schedules of all the students who had wanted to take those classes.

2) For elementary classes and core mandatory classes, they don't fill it and then divide all the students into existing classes so class sizes increase drastically.

3) They eliminate an elective class such as Home Ec. and move that teacher into a mandatory core class such as science or math. While at least their is a certified teacher in the classroom, the teacher does NOT know the material and will be one chapter ahead of the students all year long.

4) In middle school and high school they will divide a teacher's six class and then beg for volunteers and then force six other teachers into giving up their prep periods\. This has a double whammy because not only are they loosing their prep periods, they are probably teaching an area they are not certified in so it takes ten times longer to prepare for each lesson.

5) Hire one of the schools subs to fill the position until its filled. Some of these positions will not be filled at all. So the sub becomes a long-term sub. They get paid significantly less that teachers and this means that when the school needs a sub because a teacher is sub, there's not one available. Best case scenario is the sub is a certified teacher, but probably not in the area they are teaching. PS we also have a sub shortage as well.

6) They hire someone with a degree in the area that they are teaching, but they have never worked in a classroom before. Most of student teaching is spent not on content information but on classroom management and thing that you should and CAN NOT do in the classroom. I wonder if anyone has done a study on how many more legal issues have come up because of just throwing non-certified teachers into the classrooms. I'm especially thinking about all the mandatory things that we have to do for Spec. Ed students here.

7) They put a para into the position. In this case the para does not have a degree, but does have some school experience from working as a para. But it comes as a real shock to paras to make this move, just how much lesson planning, prepping, parent contact, training, meetings etc. that goes into the job. You can't leave at 3:00,

8) A combination of 6 and 7, they put someone in who has no recent experience in a school and had no content area either. This person may or may not have a degree.

9) They divide the students and put them in a teachers classroom who is teaching a different subject. Its basically a glorified study hall with the teacher monitoring them plus trying to teach her regular class.

10) Here is the most recent one. The teacher and the students are not in the same building. The teacher is teaching her class in one town and having a "zoom meeting" on the overhead projector with an entire different class in a different town. SO now she is teaching twice as many students, plus having to deal with all the discipline problems that come from not being in the same room as her students and oh yeah being forced to essentially stand still so she stays withing the camera view, which means she can't walk around her own classroom and help/monitor students.

11) Same scenario with one teacher and two different classes in two different buildings/towns. In this case it is not a zoom meeting, but A and B days. On A days the teacher is in A school and the B students are working on packets. Then if flipflops on B day with the teacher traveling to the other school. So half the time the kids are getting very little instruction.

12) Students are basically forced into online classes if they want some of the electives.

13) They give college seniors in the education field and quick start and essential free pass to their teaching certifications. The problem is the last thing you do as a student is your student teaching. This semester of working in the classroom under a certified teacher is where you actually learn how to be a teacher. This is theory becomes practice. Skipping this means that the chances for success their first year, drops drastically. We already see almost half of all new teachers leave before their 5th year, we can't afford to increase this percentage.

14) Hiring new teachers from other countries. This can lead to some interesting issues.

I am sure I am missing a few. Back to what I was saying at the beginning of the list, if the school is saying they've got it covered, more questions need to be asked about how they are actually covering it and what the long term consequences will be. Maybe its time to seriously start looking at why so many teachers are quitting and deal with that issue instead.

[TheCasualRealtor]

Any band-aid is just that. Fixing the problems are not even on the horizon. But teachers keep leaving and I’m proud to say that I’m one of them.

[nighle]

One of the reasons is every school has at least a half dozen assistant principals. Assistant principals deal with administrative work and do not teach in the classroom.

[nawal]

"We love u" ain't gonna pay our bills or get our dignity back from those disrespectful kids aaaand their parents