Frontline Blog

Education has a problem. To replace retiring teachers and keep up with increasing student enrollment, schools will need to hire about 300,000 new teachers every year. But less than 5 percent of high school seniors are interested in education as a major or profession. Clearly, there’s a massive gap between the number of teachers needed to fill our classrooms, and the number of people interested in becoming teachers — and many districts are already feeling the pinch.  

The hiring process can be grueling: cultivating a pipeline of prospective educators, recruiting plenty of applicants (especially for those niche positions), poring over what can feel like thousands of resumes, playing phone tag with candidates — needless to say, it’s a lot of work. But it’s all worth it in the end, when you find the best candidate for each opening in your district and they accept the job offer.  

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.

Every year, sixteen percent of educators leave their school, and half of those teachers leave the profession altogether. That puts administrators in a hard place: it can cost up to $18,000 to replace a teacher in a large urban district, and recruiting qualified teachers can be a nightmare — especially for positions like STEM or special education.  

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.