That finding comes from a hodgepodge of state documents and research reports. With the caveat that those sources may count things in slightly different ways and at different time periods, the pattern that emerges is consistent. 

In fall 2020, the country was still in the thick of the COVID pandemic. The economy was on uncertain footing, many schools stayed remote and teacher turnover rates fell. That is, more educators stayed put. 

But as the world began to open up, teachers started leaving in higher numbers, first in 2021 and then again in 2022. That fall, the country hit modern highs in the percentage of teachers leaving their positions. 

But those moves were temporary. Last year, Wall Street Journal (and former 74) reporter Matt Barnum found that teacher turnover rates in 2023 for each of the 10 states for which he was able to find data. Not all the changes were big, but the trends were all falling. 

For fall 2024, the current school year, I was able to find data from six states: Colorado, Delaware, Arizona, Texas, South Carolina and Massachusetts. All but Texas experienced year-over-year declines in teacher turnover. 

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey shows similar trends nationally. For a broad category that includes all state and local government education employees, employee quit rates surged in 2022, fell in 2023 and then decreased again in 2024. Similarly, the American School District Panel from found turnover rates falling among teachers and principals in the fall of 2023 and 2024. Notably, the biggest declines were seen in the places where turnover had surged the most during the initial pandemic years. 

You could squint at the data closely and note that turnover rates are still a bit higher than where they were pre-pandemic. But zoom out, and the numbers look broadly similar to historical trends. For example, Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald looked at from 1984-85 to 2021-22 and found that total turnover, including teachers who left the profession, switched schools, or left teaching but stayed in education, has ranged from about 14% to 20% in Washington since the mid-1980s. It did indeed hit a modern peak (of 19.8%) in 2021-22, but Goldhaber and Theobald’s in Washington showed turnover was again starting to fall in 2023. 

How should we put these figures in context? First, despite its recent surge, public education has maintained than any other industry except for the federal government. In any given month, less than 2% of public education employees leave their jobs, compared with rates twice that high in the private sector. 

Within public education, teachers tend to have lower turnover rates than other employees do. Colorado, for example, has published by role since 2007. The chart below shows the results. Teachers (in red) tend to have similar turnover rates as principals (light blue), but those are much lower than the turnover rates in other roles. Paraprofessionals, in dark blue, typically have turnover rates that are 10 to 15 percentage points higher than teachers do. 

How should we square this with soft data coming out of teacher surveys? Those results are messier, but they could fit the same basic trajectory. One high-quality study out of Illinois found that teacher working conditions worsened substantially from 2021 to 2023. And research looking at a range of survey and pipeline indicators suggested that the state of the profession was as of data ending a couple years ago. More recently, Education Week’s Teacher Morale Index a significant rebound in 2024-25 over the prior year.  

None of this is to say that policymakers should be content with the status quo. And indeed, there continue to be problem spots. Rural schools, those in low-income areas and certain teaching roles, especially in special education, tend to have higher turnover rates than others. But those call for more specialized and tailored solutions rather than universal policies.  

Moreover, policymakers can at least take heart that the worst of the teacher turnover surge appears to be in the rearview mirror. 

According to the from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public K-12 schools added 160,000 jobs last year. Coming on the heels of big gains in 2021 and 2022, the country has now had the biggest three-year gain since the mid-1970s.

Of course, 2020 was a historically bad year, and schools still aren’t fully back to their pre-pandemic employment highs. But they’re close. Meanwhile, student enrollment is down, with on the horizon, which means staffing levels per student continue to fall.

With all this hiring, there’s been a lot of attention to the number of people that schools would like to bring on. That number has gone up as schools look to replace employees who leave, while trying to hire new tutors, mental health counselors and other staff.

But it’s worth putting public education’s hiring challenges in the context of other sectors in the economy. In the Bureau of Labor Statistics chart below, each line represents a major industry. The data lump all of public education together under “state and local government education.” That group (in turquoise in the graph) includes both K-12 and higher ed.

As the chart shows, all the lines have gone up over time — meaning all employers are struggling to fill their job openings. But public education regularly has the lowest job opening rate among all major industries.

In percentage terms, as of the latest data in November, public education employers had a job opening rate of 2.8%, the lowest on the chart. That means, for every 100 employees, schools were trying to hire 2.8 more. In comparison, the private sector as a whole had job opening rates twice as high. So did other state and local government employers. 

These data are seasonally adjusted, which helps to smooth out things like the large number of cashiers and delivery drivers hired by retailers in the weeks leading up to the December holidays.

The seasonally adjusted data are better for comparing across industries, but there is one time of year where schools hire at similar levels as other employers, and that’s the back-to-school rush. Every summer, K-12 schools “lose” about 1.5 million workers, including teachers, aides, bus drivers and other staff, only to rehire the same number of employees back in the fall. 

This makes the fall hiring season especially chaotic. The graph below shows the raw, non-seasonally adjusted hiring rate for public education by month; August is the one time of year when these employers go into full-on hiring mode.

We’re now in a moment of relative calm. Job opening and hiring rates are both trending downward as the market cools, and that’s likely to continue as school districts spend down their remaining federal ESSER funds.

As noted at the beginning, the big hiring numbers over the last few years have more than made up for elevated rates of employee departures. But turnover rates also seem to be coming down. 

For example, after in teacher turnover in 2022, new data out of , , and all show teacher turnover rates were down slightly in 2023.

There are other signs of progress in the education labor market as well. A over the summer found teacher stress and anxiety levels were back to pre-pandemic levels. After years of slow progress, the teacher workforce diversified rapidly during the last few years, fueled in part by temporary waivers of state licensure requirements. And the latest show that teacher salaries finally outpaced inflation after a few years of lagging behind.

In other words, 2023 was a year of progress for the American education workforce. That should be welcome news after a tumultuous time.

So you give notice and move on, right?

If you’re fortunate, yes. If not, you could be faced with a suspended teaching license and a fine in the thousands of dollars for breach of contract.

Three cases heard recently by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education ended with recommendations to suspend the licenses of two teachers — one who resigned because of unspecified “family matters” and the other who quit because of low pay.

The third teacher, who testified she felt unsafe at her school, did not have her license suspended.

In Missouri, breach-of-contract fines are set at the district level and range from $500 to as high as $10,000.

“There is no teacher in the state of Missouri who would cost $10,000 to replace. That is ludicrous,” , senior staff attorney for the Missouri State Teachers Association. “It is absolutely being used as a punishment.”

While it may be used as a punishment, its primary purpose seems to be as a deterrent. An educator with a suspended license is prevented from taking a teaching job elsewhere until the contract expires. The fine is designed to reimburse school districts for the cost of finding a replacement.

Breach-of-contract cases are rare, and most times school districts will accommodate a teacher who wants to leave. Forcing educators to stay at a job they no longer want can be counterproductive for schools and students.

Nevertheless, Missouri is far from the only state with breach-of-contract penalties written into state law.

A one-year license suspension appears to be the standard practice in many states, including Arizona, California, Mississippi, South Carolina and Vermont. Other places, like Florida, Georgia and Minnesota, allow for sanctions but don’t specify.

Some states provide for even harsher penalties. Idaho, Nevada and North Dakota can completely revoke a teacher’s license for breach of contract.

In all cases, lesser penalties may be applied due to mitigating factors. California’s teacher credential commission might instead issue a “.” 

Tennessee and Texas each offer a list of circumstances under which teachers can avoid serious penalties.

Tennessee will release from contracts those teachers who that they are incapable of fulfilling their duties.

Texas acknowledges ill health of the teacher or a close family member, job relocation of a family member or a “.” Mitigating factors also include helping the district find a replacement and supplying lesson plans for said replacement after resignation.

How districts handle breach-of-contract cases varies widely according to their staffing concerns. When circumstances are good, districts and teachers tend to resolve midyear resignations amicably. But sometimes, districts will use the big stick to discourage departures.

As described by Education Week way back in 2000, license suspension ”appears to be a bit like a : The threat posed is ominous, but there are many compelling reasons not to trigger it.”

District officials don’t want to be constantly searching for teachers midyear and on short notice, but they also want to avoid getting a reputation for forcing teachers to remain, which can make it tougher to recruit new ones.

As with most labor issues, reasonable attitudes on the part of both management and workers can smooth over midyear resignation problems. But when the situation can’t be resolved, teachers can end up without jobs, and students without teachers.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Flat starting salaries. Attempts to ban books. A lack of respect. An in the percentage of Americans who want their child to become a public school teacher. 

The teaching profession must be in a state of , right?  

If so, someone should tell young people. According to that came out late last year, the number of people enrolled in teacher preparation programs rose by 6% from 2019 to 2021. Teacher preparation program completions increased a similar amount. 

In raw numbers, public schools employ more teachers than ever. And, because K-12 student enrollment is down, public schools are hitting all-time lows in student-to-teacher ratios.

But before anyone breaks out the champagne, a bit of caution is in order. Schools would like to hire even more teachers than they already employ, and they’re struggling to fill those newly created vacancies. 

On the supply side, it’s important to balance both the short- and long-term trends. It is still true that teacher preparation enrollments and completions substantially from where they were 10 to 15 years ago. It’s also possible that the rebound that’s starting to emerge in the data is a false start. Maybe the numbers will start to fall again; we’ll know better as we get more years of data. 

But three things offer hope that things are improving. 

One, it’s a broad-based recovery in terms of program types. Traditional teacher preparation programs are still the largest training ground for new educators, and they’re now serving 3% more candidates than they were at the depths of their lows. Enrollments at alternative teacher preparation programs not affiliated with a college and university are up 22%, and enrollments at alternative programs at institutions of higher ed are up another 20% over the last three years.

Two, the recovery is widespread geographically. Most states are seeing big increases in the number of teacher trainees. 

Over the last three years for which we have data, teacher preparation enrollments rose in 37 states and the District of Columbia. Kentucky, Delaware and Mississippi have seen the biggest growth, with increases in the number of new teacher candidates in their pipelines of 50% or more. In raw numbers, California has nearly 5,000 more than it did just a few years ago.  

(Note: Texas has seen enormous increases in its teacher preparation program enrollments. Those have been largely driven by its private, for-profit sector, and due to those , I’ve removed Texas from all the national data above. But Texas has seen double-digit gains over the last few years in its traditional programs, too.)

Now, enrollments are not the same thing as completions. Some people may drop out or decide they don’t want to become teachers. And, even if the supply of new teacher candidates is starting to improve, it still isn’t growing fast enough to match the rising demand. That’s particularly true in some rural communities and in chronic shortage areas like special education and STEM. 

In response, state leaders should be looking at their internal data to see how supply matches up with demand, and whether candidates are pursuing training for the most needed subject areas. Districts should continue to be creative about finding ways to expand their applicant pool and ensure they’re able to fill their unique labor needs.

Still, enrollments are a leading indicator. And that’s the third reason for optimism. With completions already on the rise, the increase in enrollments could foreshadow more growth in the number of newly licensed teachers who are about to hit the market. 

Regardless, media coverage and the general perception of the teaching profession are out of step with the actual data. It may be hard for people to accept these trends in light of the powerful doomsday narratives.  

But the data suggest that things are getting better, not worse. More young people want to become teachers, and the pipeline is growing, not shrinking.

Correction: Some statistics were amended to reflect a change in the federal data definition of enrollment in 2018-19.

Yet, I often felt overwhelmed by the number of hats I was asked to wear and my inability to meet my students’ individual academic needs. I saw too many fall further and further behind in a rigid system built for sameness and standardization. I was frustrated and saw this frustration reflected in students as they struggled to excel.

As more and more educators consider leaving the public schools for these very reasons, now is the time for systemic change. Merely patching holes in a failing industrial-era K-12 education model will continue to deliver dismal results. Instead, now is the time to redefine the role of educators and transform their role by equipping them with the strategies needed to engage more meaningfully with their students. This can be accomplished by reorienting school around personalized, competency-based learning.

With this approach, teachers work with students to design learning experiences that empower them to progress toward their individual goals at their own pace. This facilitates a stronger relationship between students and teachers and is having a positive impact on .

Research shows positive impacts of student-centered teaching on both and . But it also with greater levels of job satisfaction among teachers in higher education. Working with hundreds of educators in dozens of states and schools, the team at KnowledgeWorks has seen first-hand how this approach positively affects teacher morale in K-12.

Educators overwhelmingly say , and they have more power than ever before to of learning and their profession. With so many teachers leaving the classroom, those who remain have an opportunity to demand more power, compensation and autonomy.

Because so much education policy and politics happens at the state level, it is critically important for educators to engage directly with state leaders and policymakers — governors, legislators, state board members and education chiefs.

Here are a few things educators should advocate for to lay the groundwork for the future they want: 

• Prioritize teacher development in a student-centered vision. State policymakers should be encouraged to create a vision for K-12 education that establishes a clear set of expectations for what students should know or be able to do by the time they graduate. This vision can then be integrated into teacher preparation, credentialing, professional development and evaluation systems. For example, Virginia created a to help educators put the state’s into practice in their classrooms. The Council of Chief State School Officers and Jobs for the Future also detailed for personalized learning that states could use as a baseline. At least have similar visions in place, providing examples for other states looking to explore personalized learning possibilities.
  
• Build capacity for professional learning. State policymakers can rethink professional development, evaluation systems and school leadership programs by creating professional learning communities for educators across the state to share lessons learned. These networks can also be leveraged to disseminate best practices statewide. KnowledgeWorks has helped facilitate these learning networks in states including South Carolina, North Dakota, Arizona and Ohio. Districts could also explore pathways to personalized, competency-based learning by offering that acknowledge a specialized skill a teacher has learned. This allows educators to earn points toward demonstrating mastery in personalized-learning classroom practices and can be used to recognize and reward ongoing professional development.
  
• Incentivize and learn from district innovation. With education innovations taking shape in and districts across the country, many states have examples of personalized learning and corresponding shifts in educator practice that are ripe for replication. One state, South Carolina, has created that allow schools to achieve this by learning from others.
  
• Start small. To implement a sustainable shift to personalized, competency-based learning, teacher preparation and professional development programs will need to be reformulated to better equip teachers with the strategies needed to promote competency-based learning. However, state policymakers might first seek to reorient smaller programs around personalized learning practices. For example, and districts have established teacher residency programs for aspiring educators where this could occur. Policymakers might also consider dedicating resources or allowing districts to implement teacher residencies oriented around personalized-learning approaches.
  
• Connect to postsecondary education. States should also consider engaging with the burgeoning to inform their teacher preparation programs. Arizona State University, boasting one of the largest teachers colleges in the country, has been working with KnowledgeWorks over the past 18 months to unveil a personalized, competency-based learning specialization during the next semester.

These are just some ideas for teachers to begin advocating for the transformational changes needed to the nation’s traditional delivery of education. More ideas and state level examples can be found in this short policymakers’ guide, . 

Now, more than ever, teacher voices are needed to help advocate for the state-level changes that are needed to create a sustainable education system and teaching profession for the future.

But they weren’t enough. An estimated one out of every five requests for substitutes typically went unfilled pre-pandemic, leaving tens of thousands of classrooms unstaffed and instruction in thousands of schools in near-constant turmoil, especially in under-resourced schools serving Black, Hispanic and low-income students. COVID-19 has only further diminished the substitute supply and heightened competition among schools for a dwindling resource amid widespread teacher shortages.

But a new we’ve done of substitutes in Chicago points to a simple and relatively inexpensive solution that could go a long way toward addressing the problem: providing subs with financial incentives to work in hard-to-staff schools. Though common in the private sector, financial incentives don’t have much history in public education, where educators have long been paid based on their college credits and years of teaching.

The substitute gap is stark in Chicago, where over 100 schools in predominantly low-income communities were able to fill only half of their sub requests in the 2017-18 school year, while another 100-some schools, mostly in more affluent neighborhoods, secured substitutes for more than 95% of their requests.

Chicago’s Black students experienced classrooms without a substitute at more than three times the rate of their white peers (33% versus 10%). And students from low-income backgrounds faced uncovered classrooms more than twice as often as their more affluent peers (26% compared with 12%). These inequities, also seen in other large urban districts, make substitute coverage a matter of civil rights.

We partnered with Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s fourth largest district, to design an approach that would bring more substitute teachers into hard-to-staff schools and keep them coming back consistently. The premise was simple: The district would pay a stipend — $30 to $40 on top of the daily rate of $165 — to all subs working in the schools with the lowest rates of classroom coverage.

The program started with 75 schools in the 2018-19 school year and expanded to a total of 125 the following year. These were almost exclusively located in highly segregated Black and Hispanic communities on Chicago’s South and West sides. The stipends added only $1.1 million to the $42 million the district spent for substitute teachers in the program’s first year, and $1.7 million in 2019-20, before the pandemic shut schools down in March 2020. 

The results: Those hard-to-staff schools saw a nearly 50% increase in filled substitute requests. Essentially, subs covered an additional 114 teacher absences, on average, in each of these schools — equivalent to more than 13,000 total student-hours of classroom coverage per school. It’s hard to put a price tag on learning time, but we estimate the total potential lost investment in instructional expenditures per teacher absence amounts to $1,283. Recouping even a portion of that with a $30 to $40 incentive payment is a rarely matched return on investment in the education research world.

The payoff also extended to a slight but significant positive effect on student achievement in English language arts. The increased coverage didn’t impact teacher turnover, but it did increase teacher absenteeism slightly in 2019-20, largely because more teachers attended professional development programs knowing that their classrooms would be covered.  

At the Richard J. Daley Academy, Principal Kamilah Hampton saw the difference almost immediately after the policy took effect. “I was seeing a huge increase” in substitutes’ availability, she told us. The year before, she had struggled to fill classrooms when teachers called in sick. She would send requests to the district, but no substitutes would show up. “It was crazy. I didn’t get subs,” she recalled. “So my bilingual coordinator, my assistant principal, myself or any free clerk, we’d have to step in and cover.” 

The public school, a low-slung brick building in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, serves students from pre-K through eighth grade. About 90% are Hispanic, 10% are Black and all qualify for free and reduced-price school lunch.

Citywide, most of those taking advantage of the pilot program’s stipends were Black and Hispanic substitute teachers who lived within a 10- to 20-minute drive of the school where they were filling in. This reflects the highly segregated nature of the neighborhoods where these schools are located. Many of these subs had already worked at the target schools, though not exclusively. Some had stopped working and may have been drawn back by the higher pay.

Even so, about two-fifths of Chicago’s substitute teachers who responded to our survey said they wouldn’t work in the targeted schools even with a 25% pay hike. Of those, a third cited the distance from home and a quarter worried about the safety of the neighborhoods surrounding the schools; many are in under-resourced communities with higher crime rates. 

For schools in Chicago and beyond, the pandemic only intensified the challenge of covering classes. Not only were more teachers absent due to illness and quarantine, but fewer substitutes wanted to set foot in schools when COVID transmission levels were high.

Not surprisingly, as a result, 60% of district leaders in a recent Rand Corp. said they have raised pay for substitute teachers since 2020, with the typical district increasing daily compensation by 6 % over pre-pandemic levels. After adjusting for inflation, that pales in comparison to the pay boost in our Chicago study and is only slightly higher than the 4% average hourly wage increase retail workers experienced during the same period. 

Our Chicago study suggests that a 6% pay hike won’t come close to solving the substitute shortage, much less making access to subs more equitable across schools. We found that schools in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods were still filling substitute teaching vacancies at higher rates than the schools offering subs an additional 25% stipend. We estimated that it would take almost a 50% bonus targeted to hard-to-staff schools to fully level the playing field. 

Ultimately, the substitute dilemma points to the way racial and economic segregation degrades the quality of education for many students in the nation’s cities. Residents who have college degrees — required until recently to become certified as a substitute — and flexible schedules are more likely to live in higher-income areas, far from the schools that struggle to attract substitutes. Not surprisingly, they’re reluctant to commute long distances to higher-crime neighborhoods.

Building cadres of local community members to serve as full-time substitutes could help. So would improving training and working conditions. But a more permanent solution requires a vastly larger effort: confronting the causes and consequences of the racial and economic inequality that plague urban centers.

At the , a nonprofit foundation supporting transformative K-12 schools, we have seen educators working on creative solutions to this problem, and the innovations they have come up with are worth paying attention to. 

For example, the , a fund grantee, built a partnership where teachers from across the country work virtually with expert mentor educators to deliver high-quality summer school courses. Teachers meet with their mentors and colleagues via videoconference to discuss lesson plans and the best ways to deliver instruction to their students. The initiative served over 30,000 students this summer, from New York City to Texas, showing a unique way to expand the reach and impact of some truly excellent teachers. Similar approaches could be used during the regular academic year, particularly in hard-to-staff areas like science, math and foreign languages, and in rural settings where specialized teachers are hard to come by, or to broaden the electives a school can offer. is working on such an approach to remotely deliver high-quality classes with pilots in Tulsa, Cleveland and Denver. This allows great teachers to reach more kids and students to have access to more opportunities.

A clear finding has emerged from education research that from a consistent tutor with a proven curriculum offers some of the best results of any intervention studied so far. There is also consensus around the science of reading and how to best teach literacy to young students. (also a fund grantee), and have brought these two practices together by training a cadre of remote tutors to deliver literacy curriculum based on the science of reading to students via Zoom. In Oakland, California, used remote reading tutors from Ignite! to help struggling readers get back on track.  The result? Students gained 2.4 weeks of reading progress for every week they were in the program.

I’ve seen firsthand the relationships tutors develop with kids and the progress on reading that students can make in just 15 minutes per day of one-on-one instruction. This is a strategy that should be greatly expanded. Doing so gives students access to caring tutors using high-quality curriculum, and creates a pathway for remote tutors to enter into the teaching profession.  

In addition, ed tech products have shown they can truly improve classrooms by increasing student learning and lightening the load on teachers. Math software like and , science software like and language arts software like (to name a few) have demonstrated real impact — allowing students to focus their time each day by working on exactly what they need, exactly when they need it. Such blended learning models allow teachers to, in effect, lower their class sizes by having some students working online while others meet in small groups with the teacher. I know that many parents, like me, are reluctant to add more screen time to their children’s lives. But thoughtful use of technology in classrooms can free teachers from lecturing at the front of the room, create new opportunities for one-on-one instruction and increase collaboration and discussion as students spend more time working with their teacher individually or with their classmates.

All these examples demonstrate solutions that make the teacher’s job more sustainable, expand the number of students great educators can reach and enable students to drive their own learning. In the that our foundation has helped launch over the last 10 years, we are consistently struck by how the combination of excellent teachers plus increased student voice and choice in learning creates the building blocks for a great school culture and positive student outcomes.

After three school years disrupted by the pandemic, making classrooms great is both harder and more important than ever. If we, as a country, don’t help our schools thrive, we will cement the inequality of outcomes in our schools for generations to come. The school staffing dilemma cannot be solved by just spending more money or trying to hire more teachers when there already are not enough high-quality applicants. Instead, this is the time to adopt innovative programs, focus more attention on each student, expand the impact of the best educators and reshape the role of the teacher. Doing so helps both teachers and students, which is the only kind of solution that has a chance to succeed.

Indianapolis Public School officials think so — and are investigating ways to offer teachers a three-hour or even a full-day block of flex time that can be used to plan lessons, meet with colleagues or study student data. 

The move is part of the district’s plan to “make teaching a more attractive profession long term,” said Alex Moseman, Indianapolis’ former director of talent acquisition, who initiated the effort. “The labor market is shifting, and we have an opportunity to create a more sustainable work-life balance for teachers.”

There is little doubt teachers feel stressed and dissatisfied. A recent showed stress was the top reason public school teachers left the profession, even before COVID-19. In a , job satisfaction sank to an all-time low this year, with only 12% of 1,300 educators polled saying they were “very satisfied” with their jobs. That’s down from 62% about 15 years earlier. A from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Learning Technology shows the same trend — more than three-quarters of teachers feel negatively about their profession. 

“Being in a classroom is stressful and difficult,” said Melissa Kay Diliberti, an assistant policy researcher at Rand who has studied how both current and former teachers feel about their work. Teachers who say they are considering quitting, even if they don’t follow through, are indicating job dissatisfaction, she added. “That says something about morale.” 

In Indianapolis, the idea of flex time for teachers came after educators proved over the last 2½ years that they could transition from remote instruction to socially distanced classes to fully in-person learning, Moseman said. District officials thought now was a perfect time to investigate making big changes. The district is working with the national nonprofit to create some plans that can be tested this year. 

Three ideas seem to be early leaders. One would designate a master teacher who would offer “high-quality remote learning” to multiple classes online while the other teachers on the team have flex time. Moseman emphasized that any virtual component would take up only a small portion of a student’s week, as opposed to the all-day, every day remote learning the district used during the early days of the pandemic. 

The second idea would be a day or block of time when students would work online completing teacher assignments on their own. The third concept would change the entire school calendar: Instead of taking classes from August to May, students would attend school for five consecutive weeks and then have one week off. Two-week breaks would occur in the summer and around the winter holidays.

The district expects to test two or more options by January, Moseman said. Several classrooms would pilot each program; the goal is to have an entire school use the new model by the 2023-24 academic year.

Indianapolis already has lots of school choice, including traditional public schools, charters and magnet schools. Any flex time program would have to work in all types of schools, Moseman said. And while the district has some funds to spend creating a plan, ultimately, the flex time arrangement can’t add staff or expenses to the budget, he added. “That’s a tight needle to thread.”

Moseman said the plan is part of a broader effort to make teaching more attractive, as Indianapolis competes for staff not only with neighboring districts, but with private-sector companies seeking talent for white-collar jobs.

The district is vetting its plans with a 10-member advisory group, which includes principals, a teacher and district officials. While Moseman said teacher approval would be vital, the district hasn’t run any of its ideas past the Indianapolis Education Association yet. Union officials did not respond to several inquiries for comment.

The one educator on the advisory panel, Rosiland Jackson, is a second/third grade teacher at the K-8 William Penn School 49. She said she likes the idea of gaining a substantial chunk of flex time but isn’t sure it would bolster recruitment or retention. 

Right now, Jackson said, teachers typically have a 35-minute free period during the school day that can be swallowed up quickly by calls with parents, meetings with students or discussions with other teachers. 

She opposes changing the school calendar, saying she thinks the week off would “not be productive to the classroom” because students need time to re-acclimate after a break. Plus, the change would disrupt family schedules and teachers’ summer vacations. 

She also questioned the idea of using a master teacher in a grade level or subject, saying, “Teachers are very territorial about classes and students.” Having students learn online part of the time might work if it isn’t too much like the remote learning in 2020, which neither parents nor teachers felt worked for students, she added.

Susan Moore Johnson, a Harvard University professor of education, was skeptical that Indianapolis’s plans would improve teacher retention: “I haven’t heard anyone say flex time would change their career.” And she rejected the notion of remote learning, saying, “Subbing virtual teaching for in-person teaching is a bad idea.” 

Creating more time for teachers to work together sounds more like good scheduling than the overhauls being discussed, she added. 

While Jackson said she liked the idea of flex time, she believes it wouldn’t make a huge difference in attracting or retaining teachers. “Would it help? Some, but not a lot. Teachers have been bashed for so long about what a horrible job we’re doing. … The narrative has to be changed in this country” to make the profession more appealing.

And yet, on a per-student basis, schools today employ more teachers and other staff than they’ve ever had. 

This may sound surprising or counterintuitive, so let’s use on my home state of Virginia as an example. In 2018-19, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Virginia public schools employed just under 87,000 teachers. In 2020-21, those same schools employed about 75 more, a gain of 0.1%. 

That may not sound like much, but Virginia’s public school enrollment declined by 2.9% over the same time period. By dividing the number of students by the number of teachers, it becomes clear that Virginia districts were able to shrink their student-teacher ratio from 14.8 to 14.4. 

These trends continued last year: Virginia schools even as continued to decline. 

Virginia is typical of the rest of the country. Full data isn’t yet available for two states, Illinois and Utah, but of the remaining 48 states and the District of Columbia, almost three-quarters (36) added teachers in the first full year of the pandemic. Only two states, North and South Dakota, and D.C. served more students. As a result, schools in 46 out of 49 states effectively lowered their teacher-student ratios during the height of the pandemic. 

Data isn’t complete for the 2021-22 school year, but I looked at 10 large states and found that all of them increased their teacher counts last year, even as student enrollment behind pre-pandemic levels.

These are statewide figures, and some schools and districts are surely exceptions. These are also large-scale numbers, and it’s possible there are too few teachers in certain areas (like special education or STEM subjects) and too many in others. That mismatch may be especially acute in schools experiencing the most dramatic enrollment losses.

The same trends appear when broadening the approach to count all school district staff, not just teachers. Nationally, districts had slightly fewer employees in the 2020-21 school year, but student enrollment fell faster. That is, the number of school staff per student served continued to rise.  

This continues the long-term trend. When the first Baby Boomers started attending public schools in the 1950s, a typical American school district about 58 workers for every 1,000 students enrolled. By the time Millennials like myself attended school in the 1990s, schools employed twice as many adults to serve the same number of students. 

In the 2020-21 school year, staffing levels hit all-time highs, and the typical public school district employed 135 people for every 1,000 students it served.

Given the current rush to hire, I would not be surprised to see these numbers go even higher in the years to come. 

These findings may raise some eyebrows. After all, as of , local public schools employ about 4% fewer people than they did in February 2020. But those statistics are misleading, because they include part-time staff. suggest that nearly all the job losses in education came from part-time workers. The figures in the chart above use a different calculation known as full-time equivalents. Head count numbers might be germane in certain instances, but the number of equivalents better represents total staff time available. 

My Edunomics Lab colleague Marguerite Roza has called adding staff the main “” public education has pursued over the last 50 years. When , districts haven’t added or . Instead, they’ve always increased staff. 

Schools today employ many per student than they did in prior eras, across all subjects and grade levels, including art, music and foreign languages. But over the last decade, most of the staffing increases have come from non-teaching roles. Schools employ more counselors and specialists, like reading coaches; more instructional aides, to work with English learners and students with disabilities; and more vice principals and administrators, to oversee new regulatory and managerial tasks. 

The investments in staffing increases have also come at the expense of investing in dedicated tutoring for students who are behind, or new ways to within schools. Those strategies might have helped with disruptions like COVID-19, but schools haven’t pursued those ideas at scale either.

Now that districts are flush with cash thanks to the infusion of federal dollars, they’re once again making a big bet on staffing. Unfortunately, old habits die hard.

This article was written and published while the author was with Edunomics Lab at McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.