Business insider has an article out on the teacher shortage and the claim that we currently have the equivalent of 307,000 openings. The way this was calculated assumes that we kept a solid student to teacher ratio and didn’t have teacher layoffs back in the day. But we did and we cut budgets – but if we had kept employment the same with our current student population we would need 307,000 teachers today that we do not have.
The Learning Policy Institute looked at the actual number and came up with over 112,000 teacher openings and that number will grow each year since we continue to have more K-12 students but also see a continued decline in education school enrollments.
Bottom line – regardless of the exact number – we need thousands of new teachers NOW!
