'There is no reason for us to come'

A few days before school began last year, my schedule said that my algebra 2 teacher would be someone named STAFF04201. It was probably just a placeholder, but STAFF04201 proved to be a sign of the uncertainty the semester would bring.

On the first day of school at the public high school I attend just outside New Orleans, I found out my algebra 1 teacher would be teaching the algebra 2 class for only two months until she retired. For weeks, nobody knew for sure who would fill the position. And amid the confusion, my motivation to learn began to slip.

By the most recent count, as of August 2022, schools across the country were trying to fill upward of 55,000 open positions, analyses by researchers at Kansas State University found — a 53% increase from the year before. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that about 300,000 public-school teachers and staff left their jobs between February 2020 and May 2022. One study found that 90% of school districts had to adjust their operations because of a lack of teachers. The shortages have become so common that they aren't dominating the news cycle, as they were two years ago, but for students like myself, they still entail chaos and anxiety.

While teachers, students, and parents have all tried their best to make it work, many students still end up with huge learning gaps. Between 2020 and 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress recorded an unprecedented 7-point decline in math scores and the biggest drop in reading scores in over 30 years. I was remote during eighth grade and had a difficult time learning — especially when the class was split between in person and online, dividing our teachers' attention between those of us on a screen and those in the classroom.

Teacher shortages tend to be framed as a workplace problem: We just need to incentivize and support teachers better. But that conversation misses what's happening to students. After talking to my peers at a handful of high schools, I've realized that the impacts of staffing shortages are direr than you'd expect. And it does not bode well for the future of American education.

For the first few weeks of the 2023 school year, Sarah, a high-school freshman in the New Orleans area, did not have a Spanish teacher. Instead, her school provided an online learning platform for the class to complete assignments on and a rotation of substitutes to make sure everyone did their work. It was Sarah's first time learning the language, and she struggled to absorb any of the material. "I feel like I have to do all of the work to teach myself," she said. (Because of their ages, students interviewed for this article are being kept anonymous or referred to by pseudonyms.)

Once her school could hire a Spanish teacher, about a month into the semester, it was like a switch flipped. "The language has become significantly easier to understand," Sarah said. But her class was already behind the other Spanish classes at her school, and she felt rushed to catch up.

Even before the pandemic, American students were well behind their peers in other rich countries — particularly in math. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers assessments to 15-year-olds across 38 industrialized countries, found in 2023 that while the US ranked sixth in reading and 10th in science, it ranked 26th in math. Overall, America came in 19th for education.

Instead of learning about ancient Rome, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, he spent that part of the school day "getting better and better at watching TikTok."

The pandemic made an already terrible situation even worse, reversing decades of educational gains in some cases. Research from the Harvard University Center for Education Policy Research, Stanford University, and the Education Recovery Scorecard found that during the pandemic, "the average US public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading."

Those losses have lasting impacts. One student told me their eighth-grade science teacher quit two months before the end of the 2020-21 school year. The teacher was replaced by multiple substitutes, but that didn't result in much learning. The class had no tests, assignments, or homework for those two months — just an exam at the end of the course, the student said. Partly as a result, the now-junior has struggled in more advanced science courses like biology.

Some students have had entire classes removed from their schedules. At a different New Orleans high school, one student was scheduled to take a world-history class during his junior year, but after his teacher quit at the beginning of the semester, the course was scrapped, leaving him with a "wasted class period," he said. Instead of learning about ancient Rome, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, he said, he spent that part of the school day "getting better and better at watching TikTok." He had to take the class during his senior year instead, losing the opportunity to take a class for college credit.

When teacher shortages compound, some students just stop showing up. "Many, including myself, will come in with the mindset that since two out of our four classes don't have a teacher, there is no reason for us to come," a high-school junior who had not had a permanent teacher for several classes told me last year. "Or others will end up checking out early since there isn't anything to do in class."

The Brookings Institution found that COVID-19 led to an increase in mental-health struggles, soaring rates of student absenteeism, and an uptick in violent behavior. Even before COVID, students struggled to remember concepts they learned in a previous course — but the teacher shortages have exacerbated the problem. When I started algebra 2, the learning gaps from algebra 1, which some students at my school had taken online three years ago, were evident. We had to cover basic concepts again to help everyone catch up.

To make up for these gaps, we need more educators than before. Instead, we have fewer.

When schools run out of options, they turn to a variety of patchwork solutions. Some, like Sarah's school, have turned to online learning platforms. In a 2017 survey of teachers and principals by the National Center for Education Statistics, more than half of the respondents said their high schools offered classes taught entirely online. And during the pandemic, 77% of public schools used online learning, according to the 2022 NCES survey. Today, video lessons and self-paced online assignments often stand in for missing teachers.

That's what happened to one sophomore after her freshman science teacher quit early in the year. "Science is very hands-on, and we were just sitting there doing nothing, with most people Googling answers," she said.

Without a full-time teacher, standardized testing became "very stressful," she said, adding: "I don't know the first thing about that class even though I passed with a high grade."

Schools have also turned to substitute teachers and tried lowering — or scrapping — teacher-certification requirements to fill the gaps. But these approaches still leave students in the lurch. The same student also had her English teacher resign at the beginning of her freshman year, leaving the class with a string of substitute teachers. As a result, she said she scored worse on her state standardized tests than usual.

"I know that if I had a teacher, I would have felt more confident," she told me. Past research agrees: Underqualified teachers hurt students' ability to learn.

"Teaching is hard work. It takes skill. It takes practice. It takes training," said Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education whose research focuses on teacher-workforce trends. Qualified teachers make a difference for students, he said: "There's different components here: knowing the subject and knowing how to teach the subject. You need both."

Science is very hands-on, and we were just sitting there doing nothing.

Schools can't keep patching holes in this learning dam with Elmer's glue. Students need educators in the classroom now, especially in foundational classes like algebra 1, general science, and English. The bells-and-whistles classes that impress colleges, such as Advance Placement literature or AP calculus, can't exist without that base, and students who don't have a strong foundation will struggle in more advanced classes.

"Well-paid, well-respected lines of work, occupations, or professions, where there's adequate training and preparation — those types of jobs do not suffer from shortages," Ingersoll said. "It's deceptively simple to say: 'The way to get rid of shortages is to decrease the teacher turnover.'" But that's exactly what schools need to do.

Ingersoll said that the most critical way to keep teachers around was to provide support — especially for those newest to the classroom — and a voice. Teachers need to be able to have a say in key decisions that influence their jobs. "Where there's no voice, there's higher teacher quit rates," he said. Following the "sink-or-swim model" for new teachers also leads to high quit rates. Ingersoll suggested pairing beginner teachers with a veteran mentor to help improve retention.

Teaching is an essential profession for any society to flourish, but I don't know a single person my age who wants to be a teacher. When I ask other students why they would rather choose a different career, most say, unsurprisingly, it's because of low wages.

My school was eventually able to find an algebra 2 teacher who started at the end of September, but many others aren't as lucky. If America doesn't address its teacher shortages today, it will be left with a worse, less educated tomorrow.

Vaishnavi Kumbala is a high school student and journalist from Louisiana whose writing appears in Teen Vogue, The New York Times, and The New Orleans Times-Picayune.

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'There is no reason for us to come'

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