When I was an assistant principal in Chicago, I would post a job opening for a physics teacher and get 20 applications. A call for an English teacher might yield 150.
That was the late 1990s. By the time I left the district, the same postings were lucky to bring in one or two qualified candidates.
Principals were calling the central office and saying, “Send me whoever you have.”
What happened to all the candidates? That question has never been fully answered in the national conversation about teacher shortages, in part because too much of that conversation has been devoted to arguing over whether a shortage exists at all. It does. And the cost of pretending otherwise falls on students who can least afford it.
The standard rebuttal to teacher shortage claims is a national one: Aggregate supply, measured against aggregate demand, looks roughly balanced. Recent headlines about teacher layoffs may seem to bolster that argument. But most of those layoffs are driven by enrollment declines, expiring pandemic relief funds or district budget cuts, not by a sudden surplus of qualified teachers.
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