The rural teacher shortage

Abstract

There is much alarm about the current teacher shortage resulting from the pandemic and its aftermath. But teacher shortages have long been a perennial issue in K-12 education. Researchers Richard Ingersoll and Henry Tran analyzed data from the National Center of Education Statistics to compare rural schools to urban and suburban schools to understand their teacher staffing problems. They found that rural teacher shortages are worse than elsewhere and are driven by teacher turnover and hence won’t be solved just by focusing on new teacher recruitment. High-poverty rural schools and rural schools with high levels of students of color face the most extreme teacher turnover of all schools, experiencing departures of between a quarter and a third of teachers annually. Their reasons for leaving include lack of classroom autonomy and the inability to be included in schoolwide decision making.