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Indiana struggles with ongoing teacher shortage

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

As this school year is well underway, Indiana is part of the national trend of school districts wrestling with a teacher shortage made worse by COVID.

The Indiana Department of Education currently lists more than 1,500 teacher job vacancies and another 700 support positions vacant statewide.

Economists point to the gap between what teachers are paid compared to their peers with similar education. Economic Policy Institute research said in 1979, teachers made 7% less than those peers, but this year, the pay gap has grown to 23%, a record high.

Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, citing 300,000 public education vacancies nationwide, said the issue boils down to two factors.

“What’s happening is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to find teachers, and other education personnel, who will take those jobs under current working conditions and at current wages,” Shierholz observed.

According to the National Education Association, Indiana teacher pay ranked 42nd in the nation in the last school year, and since 2011, pay has declined by 10% in constant dollar terms.

The American Federation of Teachers released a report in July with recommendations to fix the teacher shortage. They include reducing the focus on standardized testing, reducing paperwork, lowering class size, and providing living wages for teachers and paraprofessionals.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said while the profession was never especially well paid, the joys of teaching once outweighed the negatives.

“What we used to have is a lot more intrinsic joy about teaching and learning,” Weingarten recounted. “A lot of that changed in the No Child Left Behind, ‘no test was bad’ kind of process, that made us fixate on tests as opposed to fixating on children.”

The Learning Policy Institute reported in Finland and Singapore, around 4% of teachers leave the profession annually, mainly to retire. In the U.S., the teacher attrition rate is about 8% a year, with two-thirds leaving for reasons other than retirement, up from about 5% in the 1990s.

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5 comments

DAVID A KRIEGEL October 15, 2022 at 8:19 am

Indiana was one of only TWO out of 50 States to forbid the national Soldiers to teachers program to be implemented in Indiana when I retired from the military. This program provided funds to allow schools to help mentor and transition experienced military veteran instructors to become certified teachers. This was due to strong Teacher Union opposition to protect teachers jobs and the teaching colleges iron grip on certification. We lost how many thousand potential teachers

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Cathy October 15, 2022 at 8:15 pm

What year? Last year? 20 years ago?

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Cathy October 15, 2022 at 8:17 pm

Now include information about how many are entering the profession compared to 5-10-20 years ago. The situation becomes markedly worse.

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Nick MichaelS October 15, 2022 at 9:30 pm

Scroll up and read again. His comments dive deeper than “lack of teachers”.

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Charles U Farley October 16, 2022 at 9:34 pm

Randi Weingarten just traveled to Ukraine on “business”. Maybe she was there to pick up her share of the laundered aid we’ve been sending? Regardless, she doesn’t care about education, only union power. Her “input” can be safely ignored. Teacher salaries have always been low, until you remember the 3 months off and the fact that it is an insanely popular profession. Teachers still go into teaching because they want to work with kids, if they wanted more money there are a lot of less pleasant jobs that pay it. Mike Rowe showed a lot of them on his show.

The real cause here is that most teachers lean left, and Hoosier parents tend to push back against that sort of idiocy, so most teachers tend to go elsewhere. It’s not a big loss.

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