Frontline Blog

Relatively few millennials choose teaching as a career — a trend that doesn’t look promising for school districts looking to continue hiring from deep applicant pools and keep student/teacher ratios low. It’s increasingly important that district and school leaders develop strategies targeted at recruiting, hiring and retaining millennial teachers.

You open a box of assorted chocolates, only to find that there are no labels — and no way to pick the perfect candy to satisfy your sweet tooth. You choose one, heart filled with hope, pop it in your mouth… and quickly realize you made the wrong choice — it’s the one flavor you detest.  

What will it take to get more black teachers to stay in the classroom? School administrators will have to explicitly address the racial biases and stereotyping that stifle black educators’ professional growth, argue researchers Ashley Griffin and Hilary Tackie in a new report from The Education Trust, a national nonprofit advocacy organization.  

The teacher shortage isn’t a new problem. But over the past year and a half, the situation has ramped up drastically, leading to more research on the state (and future) of teacher shortages. Now, a lot of information has come out around teacher shortages over the past few months, including our own updated survey and report.

Early in both the back-to-school rush and the hiring season, you have options. You can choose between the Lisa Frank notebook with a tiger on it, or one with a unicorn. You can hire candidate A, or candidate B, or candidate C. So you take the time to make the right decisions and get ready for the first day of school.  

Everyone has a story about the one that got away. And when you have hundreds of applications to pore over, there’s bound to be an all-star applicant you accidentally overlook. It happens to all of us at least once. But missing out on amazing candidates can mean that students lose out on the teacher of a lifetime.  

A lot of work goes into getting students ready for their first day of class — making sure they have a great teacher to support them, planning what they’ll learn over the course of the year and giving them goals to focus on. But students aren’t the only ones adjusting to a new school or classroom.

In education, there’s a lot of potential for disagreement — what to include on teacher evaluations, how to handle student assessments, what kind of curriculum to implement. But everyone — every educator, administrator, parent and member of the public — can agree on one thing: having an effective teacher in every classroom is one of the best ways to support student learning. 

The end of the school year doesn’t mean the end of recruiting applicants: some districts report having open job opportunities throughout the summer and into the school year. Others manage to fill every vacancy, only to receive late resignations for positions that must be filled by the beginning of the school year.  These last-minute hires can be extremely stressful — and the teacher shortage doesn’t help. But with enough perseverance and the right tools, districts can keep their positions filled all year round.