You - yes YOU - Can Help the Teacher Shortage

6/25/2022

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but teachers aren’t happy. Far more than usual have quit. Even more than that are thinking about quitting or threatening to quit in the near future. Quite a few are going so far as to quit or express their misery very publicly and influentially - writing editorials to news outlets or posting speeches about it on Instagram - apparently in the hopes that others will quit along with them.

Particularly challenging is the reality that quitting breeds more quitting. When there’s a teacher shortage, classes get bigger, workloads expand, time and energy has to be spent getting new teachers up to speed, teacher-less classes have to be covered by the people who stick around, and morale gets lower. All of these extra challenges make the folks who initially stuck around more likely to quit, too, further exacerbating the problem. Right now, the five biggest districts in my city, have almost 2,000 combined teacher vacancies. Numbers like this almost surely mean more quitting is soon to follow.

Teacher vacancies at the five biggest districts in my city.

To be fair, the same thing is apparently happening in lots of other professions right now, too. A lot of what’s going on is about conditions and expectations at work in our society as a whole, not just in schools. Nonetheless, the “Great Resignation” of teachers and the growing shortage seems to be getting a lot of attention right now.

However, I bring you wonderful and exciting news. You - you yourself - can help curb the teacher shortage. Yes, YOU. No matter who you are. We so often hear what “they” should do (whoever “they is”) to fix things. But I’m tired of waiting on “them,” and I’m not even sure that “they” know that they’re “them." Everybody thinks somebody else should be fixing this.

So let’s fix it ourselves.

Here are five clear, actionable ways that YOU can help end the teacher shortage.