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One of the most difficult things a teacher can achieve is their ability to reach each and every student. It is far easier to teach the accelerated learners than it is to bring up the struggling masses.

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Most American students are still performing below their pre-pandemic counterparts in reading and math, while the yawning gap between high-achieving and low-performing students got even wider, data from "the nation's report card" shows.

Results released Wednesday from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, paint a sobering picture of academic haves and have-nots. Scores are increasing for many students who already do well, while struggling students stagnated or fell even further behind their peers. That's making a trend that began about a decade ago even more pronounced.

In some cases that divide was historic: Lower-performing fourth and eighth graders posted the worst reading scores in over 30 years. In eighth grade math, the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students was the widest in the test's history.

"The news is not good," Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters on Tuesday. "Student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, reading scores continue to decline, and our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels."

Scores saw a dramatic decline in 2022 after students endured two disrupted pandemic school years marked by closures, quarantines, and remote learning. But in 2024, reading scores declined even more for both fourth and eighth graders.

"This is a major concern - a concern that can't be blamed solely on the pandemic," Carr said. "Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading."

Fourth grade math was the lone bright spot, with average student scores ticking up two points on the 500-point scale. But much of that increase was driven by improvement among top performers.

Eighth grade math scores held steady, with gains among higher-performing students canceling out declines among lower-performers.

All of the children who took the NAEP last year had at least some of their education affected by the pandemic. The fourth graders were in kindergarten when schools closed in March 2020, while eighth graders were in fourth grade.

The results are sure to fuel ongoing debate about whether schools are doing enough to help struggling students, especially those who are the farthest behind, the role that school closures played in exacerbating learning gaps, and whether schools effectively spent the nearly $190 billion they received in federal COVID relief dollars.

The new NAEP scores have landed as conservatives push to expand private school choice, public schools grapple with budget cuts, culture war skirmishes persist, and chronic absenteeism remains at historically high levels. Students who performed the worst on the NAEP test were more likely to be frequently absent from school, Carr noted.

"We have a larger-than-in-recent-memory share of American students who are failing to demonstrate even partial mastery of the types of skills educators have defined as important," said Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the vice chair of the NAEP Governing Board, which decides the test's content and approves questions. "That doesn't bode well for their futures or for our collective futures."

The new data come from tests taken in early 2024 by nearly half a million students across thousands of U.S. schools.

Worrying decline in NAEP reading scores continues

On average, fourth and eighth grade students scored two points lower in reading than their counterparts in 2022 and five points lower than students in 2019. Only in Louisiana, where the state superintendent has put a major focus on reading, did fourth grade reading scores rise above 2019 levels.

The share of fourth graders who scored at the very bottom of the NAEP scale was at its highest point in 20 years. The share of eighth graders scoring at the lowest level was the highest ever. And in both grades, students who did not reach the NAEP Basic level - relatively low performers at the 25th percentile and under - had lower scores than in 1992, when the first NAEP test was given.

When a fourth grader can't meet the NAEP Basic level, it doesn't mean they cannot read. But it likely means they would struggle with easier skills, such as sequencing events in a story or stating an opinion using supporting evidence from a text. Eighth graders who fall below NAEP Basic would have trouble identifying basic literary elements, such as character motivation and the main idea.

NAEP results show how many students score below, at, or above two thresholds: NAEP Basic and NAEP Proficient. Proficient is considered a high bar, above what most states set as grade level expectations. Reaching the NAEP Basic threshold indicates students have achieved partial mastery of fundamental skills and knowledge for that grade level.

The rise in students who don't meet that mark is of particular concern.

The dips in reading come as dozens of states overhaul their reading instruction with materials that better align with the science of reading. And while federal education officials are usually reticent to explain what caused a particular increase or decrease in scores, Carr cautioned that the near-universal dips in reading should not be taken as evidence that reading reforms have not worked.

She pointed to the example of Louisiana, where fourth graders are scoring better in reading than they did in 2019, bucking the national trend. That state has focused heavily on the science of reading "but they didn't start yesterday," Carr said.

"They were able to pull this off, and not only improve to pre-pandemic levels, but exceed them, and bring their lower-performers along," she said. "I would not say that hope is lost."

Still, Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the NAEP Governing Board, said the growing share of children who cannot read at the NAEP Basic level, which generally corresponds with state proficiency standards, is concerning.

If a fourth grader can't meet that in reading, "we're saying that they're unlikely to determine the meaning of a familiar word using context from the text," Muldoon said. "That is a crucial skill that students really need for entering middle school."

NAEP math scores show recovery - but also stagnation

In fourth grade math, average scores increased two points from 2022 but were still three points lower than pre-pandemic levels. Only in Alabama did fourth graders have higher scores than their 2019 counterparts. The average score was lifted by high-performing students who saw greater gains, while lower-performing students did about the same as in 2022.

Fifteen states and 14 urban districts saw improvements compared with 2022. District of Columbia Public Schools posted 10-point gains, well above the national average. D.C. schools also showed improvements for both low- and high-performing students, as did schools in Atlanta, Baltimore, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami-Dade County, and Guilford County, North Carolina.

Eighth grade math was a different story. There was no change in average scores because while high performers did better than their counterparts in 2022, low performers did worse.

Middle school math has been a problem area in the pandemic's wake. Some students struggled to learn key concepts virtually, such as how to divide fractions or graph a line. That lack of knowledge followed them. Others may have had content repeated often because their classmates were absent a lot, which put them behind in their lessons.

West, the NAEP Governing Board member, said it appeared the pandemic accelerated the decline among low-performing eighth graders in math, but it was even more striking that "the bottom continued to fall out" from 2022 to 2024.

"The main takeaway is that: What we've done as a nation, including the federal recovery dollars, has been insufficient," he said.

Students who struggle in middle school often end up locked out of more advanced math in high school that can open doors to higher-paid careers in STEM fields.

Mark Miller, who teaches eighth grade math in Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain School District, said declining student motivation and "stick-to-it-ness" might be contributing. In recent years, struggling students in his classroom have needed a bigger nudge to dig in on difficult problems than when he started teaching nearly two decades ago.

"The coach in me has had to reach into my coaching motivational speeches in my classroom just as much as I have had to on the court or on the field," said Miller, who is also a former NAEP Governing Board member. Many students think: "If I want to know something, I can look it up in two seconds, why do I need to persevere through learning how to solve systems of equations or learning how to solve a word problem?"

One thing his school is trying: Keeping kids who did not meet certain math standards in the same classes as their peers while providing extra support, instead of moving them to remedial math. The hope is that teachers can fill in gaps with mini lessons along the way, and that struggling students will feel more confident in their math abilities if they're learning alongside their peers.

NAEP score gaps have consequences for 'equitable society'

While the pandemic surely has had a lasting impact on students, the gap between high- and low-performers appears to have started growing about a decade ago. Similar gaps have appeared on international tests and are more stark for American students than for those in other countries that also experienced pandemic disruptions.

Theories abound: The federal government eased up on school accountability measures, and school leaders took their eyes off the lowest performers. The Great Recession, with its economic traumas followed by deep spending cuts, left a lasting scar on American education. Phones are sapping our attention span and cognitive abilities.

Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, highlighted the trend in an analysis posted last week in advance of the NAEP release. He noted that the growing divide between high and low performers even shows up on a recent skills test for adults who haven't been in school in years, complicating the idea that something school-related is the main driver.

The trends defy easy explanations and likely have multiple causes, he said.

Tests such as NAEP can't answer the why. But Malkus hopes that researchers with access to student-level data can start digging in more. Are low-performing students concentrated at certain schools? Do they share certain characteristics? Or are they enrolled in schools with both high and low test scores?

He also hopes that superintendents and principals seek out this data about their own schools and find ways to support low-performing students even when average test scores look good.

"What this means for the story for an equitable society is enormous," he said.

Yet there doesn't seem to be enough urgency to get to the bottom of the problem, said Dan Goldhaber, who directs the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research.
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat's national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org. emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
While his research and others found that federal pandemic aid helped academic recovery, Goldhaber said it's reasonable to ask if it could have done more. In the rush to get money out the door, a real opportunity was missed to collect data that would have shown which interventions really move the needle for struggling students, he said.

"I think we will look back in 25 years, and we will see all these kids have these outcomes in life that were predicted by this major decline," he said. "The message is everywhere, but I don't see much appetite to address it."

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Struggling students just posted their worst NAEP reading scores in 32 years

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The National Assessment for Educational Progress results show a dispiriting and growing gap between students who are academic stand-outs and those who struggle. Reading scores also fell. But fourth grade math was a bright spot.

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It breaks my heart when I hear students talk about the lack of attention parents and guardans give their education and attendance. There is notenough emphasis towards parents and guardians on the importance of supporting your child's education efforts and the importance of being in class.

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Ed Dept: Districts should start now to improve 2024-25 attendance

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Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote in a Dear Colleague letter that "there is still more work to do" to tackle chronic absenteeism.

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This is a struggle I feel deeply connected to. When we attempt to support our children with their studying and learning are we being too hard on them and turning them away from us? It seems so much easier to be patient with other students more than our own children.

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Nora Painten worked for years as a preschool teacher, but for some reason, teaching her own kids feels impossible. Her younger son, a kindergartener, had been struggling to learn to read when the pandemic forced schools in New York State to shutter last March. As Painten joined millions of other parents in the daunting task of supervising her kids' education from home, she was frustrated to find that every time she and her son picked up a new book, it felt like starting from scratch. Despite the countless flashcards and literacy exercises they went through together, her son didn't seem to be improving. "It was becoming a really negative experience for both of us," said Painten.

Normally even-tempered, Painten found herself raising her voice and getting frustrated more easily. "In my regular classroom if someone interrupted me, I would be very calm and positive - explaining the rules firmly, but also with an eye towards building rapport," she adds. "But with my own kids, I'm just like: are you kidding me? What the hell, dude? "

Teachers undergo years of education to do their jobs, and it's obvious that kids are going to suffer without in-person instruction from trained educators. But even for those like Painten who have teaching degrees under their belts, the transition to home-learning has presented unexpected challenges.While an estimated 1.7 million kids were being homeschooled in the U.S. as of 2016, homeschooling experts emphasize that suddenly being thrust into distance learning is a much different situation. "Homeschooling is hard enough to do when you're totally committed to it," says Dr Robert Kunzman, the managing director of the International Center for Home Education Research and a professor at Indiana University.

The child psychologists I spoke to widely agreed that the intimate relationship between parent and child can create a challenging educational environment. "There's just so much more emotional weight that goes into teaching your own kids," says Dr. Vasco Lopes, a school psychologist and Columbia professor. One of the biggest challenges for parents is managing their own anxiety, and the tendency to wrap up their childrens' accomplishments and failures with their own self-worth. "If you're noticing your kids struggling with something, Parents start to think, Oh my god, are they not able to do math, are they going to get C's and D's in math class and then struggle to get into a good college? They take it to an emotional level where they catastrophize what it means."

Kids are also more likely to take criticisms from their parents as personal slights. "If your parent is telling you no, you're doing this wrong, kids can take it in an overly emotional way as well, where they're interpreting it as not just that they're struggling with this particular assignment, but that their parent is disappointed or unhappy with them," says Lopes.

Even for kids and parents who generally have healthy communication styles, adding six hours of schoolwork into the equation can exacerbate stress, which numerous studies have shown is a hindrance to effective learning. "In stressful situations, the information can bypass the learning centers in your brain and go straight to an emotional response, of feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, giving up," says Dr. Jennifer Cruz, the clinical director of the pediatric psychiatry program at New York Presbyterian.

Cruz acknowledges that some children may be thriving at home - particularly those with family resources to be able to dedicate time and attention to education. But it's been well documented that remote learning presents a particular challenge to families from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, where money is a struggle and resources and physical space are limited, as well as for parents of children with disabilities. "If your child has a learning disability, they really do need that expert assistance. And that can really lead to a lot of stress," she says.

Dr. Richard Gallagher, Associate Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU, says that in most cases, children with behavioral issues tend to act out moreat home, in the absence of the social pressures of school. "They know what to do to get their parents to be sympathetic. They know what to do to get their parents frustrated. They also kind of know what their parents will do if they misbehave. But when they're in school, they don't necessarily know exactly what a teacher would do, and there's also a whole structure of authority," he says.

Especially nowadays, as more permissive parenting styles tend to be the norm, it can be harder for parents to set limits for their kids, and for kids to respect them. "We're trying to listen to their point of view and not be so authoritative," says Allison Hinojosa, a teacher in Austin, Texas who has been helping her 11-year-old son Victor with distance-learning. Hinojosa struggled to learn her way around the digital technology Victor used to complete his classroom assignments, which often left him impatient. "He got frustrated having to show me what it is they do every day. He would say: I don't want to have to explain it to you. "

"Somehow, when I teach my students they just receive the information easier," she adds. "It's like they accept that I'm a role model or an authority figure. Whereas with my own child who's very strong willed, we can butt heads very quickly," she adds.

"Since I've known her my whole life, it's kind of hard," adds Victor.

The child psychologists I spoke to emphasized the importance of patience and structure. But some of them are alsoencouraging parents to cut themselves some slack and prioritize the relationship. "We have these sort of artificial benchmarks of where we think children should be academically, and I'm not sure that those are really going to apply in the next year or so," says Kathleen Minke, director of the National Association of School Psychologists. "Maintaining positive, productive relationships within the family is really important, and that that should precede any worry about whether or not you're doing X number of hours of schooling every day."

Still, many parents may feel like it's an impossible choice: research suggests that missing out on fundamental concepts could have lasting ramifications for kids' academic achievement and career prospects, and threatens to increase future high-school dropout rates.Black and Hispanic students and those from low-income backgrounds are likely to struggle the most; a study out of Brown and Harvard found that from March through late April, students in low-income zip codes saw a 50 percent decrease in progress in their math learning, while those in high-income zip codes saw none.

Painten, for her part, has given up on trying to teach her younger son reading this school year. She and her husband are encouraging their kids to spend time together outside, and to take on self-directed projects that appeal to their interests. Her older son wanted to get into whittling, so they bought him some softwood and knives to work with.

She says that if schools remain closed for in-person learning in the fall, they're planning to get some animals for their property - chickens and ducks and goats and dogs - and let the boys be in charge of caring for them, instead of plugging ahead with the math and reading curriculum. "It's gonna be sort of like a farm school situation," she laughs.

"But," she adds, "this is all wishful thinking. I hope they have school."

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Why Are Parents So Bad At Teaching Their Own Kids?

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Nora Painten worked for years as a preschool teacher, but for some reason, teaching her own kids feels impossible. Her younger son, a kindergartener, had been struggling to learn to read when the pandemic forced schools in New York State to shutter last March.

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It is hard for teachers to challenge the high achievers and motivate those who struggle. It is even more difficult when our education systems and laws lose focus on our high achievers, leaving them in the dark.

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High Stakes for High Achievers: State Accountability in the Age of ESSA (Part I)

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No Child Left Behind meant well, but it had a pernicious flaw: It created strong incentives for schools to focus all their energy on helping low-performing students get over a modest “proficiency” bar. Meanwhile, it ignored the educational needs of high achievers, who were likely to pass state reading and math tests regardless of what happened in the classroom. Those most hurt by this approach were high-achieving, low-income students.

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Is a teachers salary the real reason we have such a shortage of qualified teachers in our schools? This may just be a small reason among many others to include a quality support staff and safety. We need to do better to retain the great teachers that we already have.

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The below article, originally published on April 18, 2023, was last updated on Dec. 9, 2024, to include updated statistics and new strategies schools have explored to improve teacher recruitment and retention.
A survey released last year by the National Education Association (NEA) found 55% of educators want to leave teaching earlier than they originally planned. The main reason? Burnout from massive labor shortages.

About one in six teachers expressed they would likely leave their job pre-pandemic. This increased to one in four by the 2020-21 school year. In 2021 and 2022, teachers were twice as likely to report experiencing frequent job-related stress and difficulty coping with their job-related stress than the general population of working adults, according to the 2023 State of the American Teacher survey, released by RAND in June.

At one elementary school within the Fort Worth Independent School District, there was a whopping 88% teacher turnover rate for the 2022-23 school year. The year prior, there was a 42% turnover rate.

"More than half of our teachers are reporting frequent job-related stress and burnout, and that number is even higher for our Black educators and our female educators," said NEA President Becky Pringle. "Teacher well-being continues to remain worse than that of other working adults, and this crisis is hurting our students and our communities."

In March 2024, Education Resources Strategy (ERS), a national nonprofit that partners with school system leaders, released an analysis of teacher turnover trends from 2021 to 2023. Using data from nine large, unnamed urban and suburban school districts, 23% of teachers left their school or teaching role during the 2022-23 school year. While it is higher than pre-pandemic turnover in the sample, which was around 18% during the 2019-20 school year, it is lower than the 2021-2022 school year's peak of 26%, Education Week reports.

Most impacted by the shortage are higher-poverty schools. The ERS analysis determined schools serving the greatest proportion of students from low-income families lost 29% of their teachers between Oct. 2022 and Oct. 2023. Schools with the lowest concentration of poverty lost 19%. When teachers change schools within their district, they are much more likely to move to a more affluent school.

K-12 Teachers Have Highest Burnout Rate of All Industries

A 2022 survey from Gallup found K-12 school employees have the highest burnout rate of all industries nationally with 44% reporting they "always" or "very often" feel burned out at work. Female K-12 employees are also more likely to report feeling burned out. College and university workers have the next-highest burnout rate at 35%. Here are some additional findings on college faculty burnout. ( See charts from the Gallup study that compare burnout rates by industry and gender.)

While teacher shortages predate the pandemic, particularly for substitute teachers and in hard-to-staff subjects such as math, science, special education, and bilingual education, these shortages have grown in the past two years and expanded to encompass other positions such as bus drivers, school nurses, and food service workers, Campus Safety previously reported.

The pandemic kicked off the largest drop in education employment ever. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in public schools - not just teachers - dropped from almost 8.1 million in March 2020 to 7.3 million in May. Employment has grown back to 7.7 million since then, but schools are still short nearly 360,000 positions, according to The Hechinger Report.

There are currently 567,000 fewer educators in America's public schools today than there were before the pandemic. Nationally, the ratio of hires to job openings in the education sector has reached new lows as the 2021-22 school year started. It currently stands at 0.57 hires for every open position, according to BLS' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS).

While Teacher Demand Is High, Wages Remain the Same

Perhaps also contributing to the educator shortage is the addition of specialized positions and/or job requirements created following the pandemic. According to data released in Feb. 2024 by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 39% of schools now have an Indoor Air Quality coordinator on campus. This position is responsible for monitoring air quality conditions at the school and reporting air quality issues and complaints.

Furthermore, 42% of public schools with one or more instructional coaches working at their school (i.e. literacy coaches and math coaches) reported they have added more instructional coach positions since the 2019-2020 school year. Another 42% have a parent/family engagement specialist or outreach worker at their school. Among all public schools, 17% reported adding this type of position since the 2019-2020 school year.

Within the same NCES data set, nearly 80% of public schools said hiring general elementary and special education teachers for vacant spots remains a challenge. Two-thirds reported their biggest challenge in hiring teachers was a lack of qualified candidates while 70% said there are too few candidates applying for open teaching positions.

According to a March 2024 analysis by the ADP Research Institute, the imbalance between high demand and short supply should have led to higher wages but it hasn't. The analysis determined teacher salaries are growing more slowly than average wages for all employees. The national average teacher salary is around $68,000 which is 8% less than the average U.S. worker's salary. The pay gap is greater among teachers 30 and younger, the study found.

Research from study.com, released in Nov. 2024, found that among teachers considering leaving their jobs within the next five years, addressing the following support needs would make them reconsider:

Improved salary and compensation (75%)

Better work-life balance, such as more planning time, reduced workload (43%)

Better support for managing student behavior and classroom challenges (34%)

Survey: Teachers Value School Support Staff More Than Pay

While low wages continue to factor into the teacher shortage, new findings suggest many teachers would trade an increase in salary for additional school support staff, such as special education co-teachers, paraprofessionals, school counselors, and nurses.

The survey, published Nov. 12, 2024, and conducted by Virginia Lovison, associate director at Deloitte Access Economics, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, associate professor of political science and public policy at University of California, Berkeley, suggests investing in specialized support roles may be as crucial as offering competitive pay.

"Our study reveals that teachers would rather trade pay raises for the assurance of support staff like full-time special education co-teachers, who help alleviate classroom burdens," Lovison and Mo wrote. "It's surprising just how much teachers value this kind of in-school support over additional income."

The survey found teachers are willing to trade a 21% pay raise for a full-time special education co-teacher and 18% for a paraprofessional aide. The presence of a full-time school counselor is also worth $6,734 in trade-off value to teachers, more than double the cost per teacher of $2,475.

"These insights suggest that school and district leaders should prioritize the hiring and retention of support staff that make classroom jobs more attractive and should consider benefits beyond pay raises to attract and retain teachers," the researchers wrote. "Union leaders and policymakers should consider broadening their efforts to enable teachers to work alongside more school counselors, nurses, and special-education specialists."

Majority of Schools Have Special Education Teacher Vacancies

While most teachers value special education teachers over a pay raise, a National Center for Education Statistics report found 70% of schools had special education teacher vacancies in the 2023-24 school year. The Council for Exceptional Children and the Council of Administrators of Special Education also say about half of special education teachers leave the profession within the first five years of teaching.

During a Nov. 15 meeting with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, educators, researchers, advocates, parents, and attorneys said the shortage of special education teachers is hurting the academic growth and due process rights of students with disabilities, K-12 Dive reports.

Jessica Tang, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said the shortage of special education teachers, as well as special education professionals and support staff such as speech language pathologists, behavior specialists, and paraprofessionals, means "students are not able to access critical services in a timely way, directly affecting their educational and social development."

Twenty-two panelists spoke during the meeting, offering a wide variety of solutions such as raising teacher salaries, increasing class sizes, reducing compliance tasks, offering more school choice, and investing in teacher career pipelines. Several panelists recommended more funding under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to support higher wages for special educators.

"We need to recognize that teaching is a profession and not just a job, and it should be created and treated with the respect and compensation that it deserves," said Terita Gusby, CEO and founder of Education Prescriptions, a virtual tutoring company for students with disabilities.

The commission is studying the issue and plans to publish an Annual Statutory Enforcement Report on it in the second half of 2025. The findings and recommendations will be shared with the president and Congress.

Number of Employed Teachers by State

To see where each state stands regarding teacher staffing, Scholaroo, a scholarship search platform, compared the number of currently employed teachers in each state to the state population.

Please note these findings don't take into account what percentage of each state's population is school-aged or what the enrollment numbers are. For instance, only 18.8% of Vermont's population is under the age of 18 while 29% of Utah's population is under 18, according to PRB. Florida, which ranks the lowest in teacher-to-state population ratio, has the second-highest percentage of homeschooled children at 22.5%, says a study conducted by Q for Quinn.

The researchers created four categories. Here's the breakdown and also the number of states that fall under each category:

7-10 teachers per 1,000 population: 25 states

10-11 teachers per 1,000 population: 13 states

11-12 teachers per 1,000 population: 4 states

12-13 teachers per 1,000 population: 8 states

Below are both the 10 best and the 10 worst states when it comes to teacher-to-state population ratio. The full list and a more detailed breakdown, including an interactive map, can be found here.

10 States with Highest Teacher-to-State Population Ratio

Scholaroo also recently conducted another study on student safety, taking into consideration school security measures, bullying prevention programs, and other initiatives designed to ensure students feel safe at school. New Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire - all in the above list - ranked in the top 10.

10 States with Lowest Teacher-to-State Population Ratio

Nevada, California, and Arizona ranked in the bottom 10 states in Scholaroo's student safety survey.

Teacher Shortages by State

Perhaps a more accurate way to assess the current teacher shortage is by looking at teacher job vacancies by state. An Aug. 2022 study released by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found there are at least 36,000 vacant full-time teaching positions in the United States with the number potentially as high as 52,800 (some states have not provided figures). The breakdown by state can be seen in the graphic below.

The highest number of open teaching positions are concentrated in the south and lower Atlantic where around 22,000 positions are vacant - almost three times higher than in the Midwest. Georgia had the highest number of vacancies (3,112) for the 2019-2020 school year. More recently, during the 2021-2022 school year, Florida had the most vacancies with 3,911 positions unfulfilled. That same school year, Mississippi and Alabama had over 3,000 vacancies. Sixteen states reported under 1,000 vacancies during the 2021-2022 school year. The states with the fewest vacant teacher positions were Utah (37), Missouri (38), and Nebraska (42).

The researchers also broke down vacancies by 10,000 students, noting, "When student population is taken into consideration, the distribution changes substantially, and there is less of a geographical concentration of vacancy." For instance, in the graphic below, there is no longer a cluster of high vacancy states in the southeast. However, Mississippi and Alabama are still among the states with the highest number of teachers needed for every 10,000 students.

Increased Mental Health Issues, School Violence Continue to Impact the Teacher Shortage

In addition to teachers, there are also significant shortages of mental health professionals in schools. The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) recommends at least one counselor for every 250 students. The national average is currently around 444 students per counselor. Compounding this shortage, child mental health concerns and school violence have skyrocketed since the pandemic.

A survey of 15,000 educators found a growing trend of students verbally and physically harassing teachers, as well as parents engaging in online harassment and unprovoked retaliatory behaviors against teachers. One-third of surveyed teachers reported experiencing at least one incident of verbal or threatening violence from students during the pandemic, and over 40% of school administrators reported verbal or threatening violence from parents. All respondents reported significant verbal or threatening victimization from students, parents, colleagues, or administrators.

As for physical violence, school staff (i.e., paraprofessionals, school counselors, instructional aides, and school resource officers) reported the highest rates with 22% reporting at least one incident of physical violence by a student during the pandemic. The RAND survey found 26% of teachers indicated they feared for their physical safety at school. Students misbehaving or having verbal altercations and fear of an active shooter were the top reasons teachers feared for their safety.

While many factors come into play regarding an increase in school violence, most who work in the education industry will agree that the ongoing staffing shortage is unequivocally one of those factors. It is a complete Catch-22 situation. With violence in schools on the rise, more teachers are leaving the profession and many who were once interested in becoming teachers have now changed their career paths due to safety concerns. Each issue fuels the other, and various entities are trying to come up with ways to combat the shortage.

Teachers Frustrated by Administrative Approaches to Education

Many who have a teacher or educator in their lives have likely heard about the hardships and qualms that often come with working in education. Students can be challenging, as can parents, and as a whole, society agrees that educators are underpaid for how important their job is. Some educators are also becoming increasingly frustrated with administrative approaches to education.

As one educator said in a recent blog post, "I wanted to teach; my administrators wanted to get the maximum number of students a diploma with the least amount of friction."

In his post, Jeremy Noonan wrote that in 2007, he turned down a high-paying job in engineering to become a public school science teacher.

"I believed that making a difference in the lives of kids and maintaining the tradition of Western civilization would give my life meaning and value that money couldn't measure. But I soon discovered that my ideals were often at odds with the school administration's priorities," he wrote. "The conflict between the bureaucratic, managerial priorities of school administrators and the moral ideals of teachers has characterized my seventeen-year teaching career."

While frustrated with administrators, Noonan notes it's much bigger than who is running a school or a district.

"The public school accountability system, by relying solely on quantitative metrics like graduation rates to gauge educational quality and to evaluate administrators, frustrates teachers' ability to truly teach and care for their students and look out for their long-term well-being," he continued. "While graduation rates have climbed steadily over the past twenty years, indicators of actual student achievement have stagnated or declined, leaving only a minority of graduates prepared for college-level studies and the rest largely unprepared for anything else."

Per Noonan's experience, and likely that of many others, student accountability and expectations seem to be dwindling,

"My school let students skip assignments and miss deadlines until the end of the semester, then let them do the work at the last minute to avoid a failing grade," he described. "When I objected, stressing the importance of personal responsibility, the assistant principal replied, 'Is it your job to teach chemistry or to teach responsibility?' She didn't care to hear my answer: 'Both.'"

Like Noonan, most educators get into the field because they want to help children. When that no longer feels like a priority or even possible in some cases, many will seek employment elsewhere.

How Is the U.S. Trying to Fix the Teacher Shortage?

Entities big and small - from the federal government to individual schools - are trying out different ways to combat the teacher shortage. In Aug. 2022, the Biden Administration unveiled a three-point plan to address teacher shortages:

1. Partner with recruitment firms to find new potential applicants

2. Subsidize prospective teachers' training

3. Pay teachers higher salaries

To fulfill the first part, ZipRecruiter has launched a new online job portal for K-12 jobs. Additionally, Indeed facilitated virtual hiring fairs for educators and Handshake hosted a free virtual event in October to help current undergraduate students learn about careers in education.

To subsidize training, the White House recommended policymakers use federal funding to establish more teacher-apprenticeship programs. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and now former Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said registered apprenticeship programs in Iowa and Tennessee could be replicated across the country. Last year, Iowa launched a grant program that helps high school students earn a paraprofessional certificate and an associate degree. It also helps current paraprofessionals earn their bachelor's degree so they can teach - all while gaining first-hand experience in the classroom. The funding covers candidates' tuition and fees as well as an hourly pay rate of $12 for high school aids and 50% of the wages that districts already pay paraprofessionals.

Walsh said the Labor Department would prioritize the education sector in future apprenticeship funding, including its next round of more than $100 million in grants.

"There's no reason we can't have successful apprenticeships in the United States of America; they do it in Europe all day long," he said.

Education Department Announces 5-Year Plan to Improve Teacher Recruitment, Retention Strategies

More recently, in Sept. 2024, the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education's research wing, announced a newly-funded five-year initiative intended to find more effective teacher recruitment and retention strategies for American schools.

"The Center brings together researchers from 10 institutions to study recruitment and retention policies at varying stages of K-12 teaching pipeline across nine states. Researchers will use state longitudinal data systems and analytic approaches to estimate causal impacts of each policy," the researchers say. "The Center will examine implementation of each policy. The Center will carry out leadership activities designed to bring together key groups involved in K-12 teacher recruitment/retention, to inform the focused program of research as well as supplemental research, share out findings from Center research, and build the field's capacity to conduct K-12 teacher recruitment and retention research."

Those policies include:

Grow-your-own initiatives designed to address shortages of teachers in high-needs districts and increase teacher diversity;

Financial support to teacher candidates in exchange for work commitments;

Provision of labor market information to teacher candidates intended to influence their decisions about specialization and job searching;

Licensure reforms that provide temporary licensure and/or change the cut scores required to pass licensure tests;

Financial incentives, including salary floor policies, pay-for-performance policies, and financial incentives targeted to teachers in low-income schools and/or in specific shortage subject areas; and

Teacher working conditions, including the 4-day school week, Advanced Teaching Roles, and working conditions negotiated in collective bargaining agreements.

The participating states include Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington.

The latest federal data shows 44% of public schools started the 2022-2023 school year with one or more teaching vacancies. That percentage is even higher for high-poverty schools and those that serve mostly students of color.

Schools have subsequently lowered employment standards to get positions filled. As of Dec. 2024, nearly 10% of active teachers were underqualified for their position.

Teacher Pay, Mental Health

To pay teachers more, Cardona and Walsh also urged states and districts to use federal pandemic recovery funds. New data shows that on average, teachers make 33% less than other college-educated workers.

"If we're serious in addressing the teacher-shortage issue, we must first address the teacher-respect issue," said Cardona. "And that means first and foremost paying our teachers a livable and competitive wage."

A recent analysis from FutureEd found nearly a third of the country's 100 largest school districts have increased teachers' paychecks through bonuses, raises, and college loan forgiveness by using federal pandemic relief funds. Other recent research found that raising compensation does help retain teachers. A study of Florida shortage initiatives found a state loan forgiveness program and a bonus program aimed at teachers in shortage subjects reduced teacher turnover, and annual bonuses of $2,500 were enough to lower attrition among special education teachers.

While paying teachers more helps with turnover rates, the education industry has a higher-than-average vacancy rate of roughly 6%, compared to about 5% across all industries, according to data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Employees in the education industry also register the most complaints about pay, according to a new USA Today analysis.

Teacher mental wellness is also being taken more seriously. The recent State of the American Teacher survey found three-quarters of teachers reported having access to at least one type of well-being or mental health support in 2023. However, improvements must continue as only slightly more than half said these supports were sufficient. Similarly, the aforementioned RAND report found only half of teachers believe they have adequate mental health support to deal with the levels of stress they are facing post-pandemic.

Districts Shortening School Weeks, States Easing Teacher Requirements

In Texas, the Jasper Independent School District changed to a four-day school week in 2022 to incentivize more teachers to apply for jobs. Since then, nearly 60 school districts across the state have also made the switch. Districts in Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas have also moved to a shorter school week. The move to four-day weeks is most popular in rural areas, where districts can save on utilities and cut the miles put on their school buses. About 90% of districts that have adopted the four-day week are in rural areas. The total number of districts adopting the four-day schedule has increased more than 30%, from 650 in 2020 to 850 now, reports EdSource.org.

Some states and districts are responding to shortages by reducing the qualifications to enter the classroom. In 2021, California started allowing teacher candidates to skip basic skills and subject matter tests if they have taken approved college courses, reports EdSource. New Mexico's Public Education Department decided to eliminate subject skills tests as a requirement for people earning teaching certifications by 2024, according to The Santa Fe New Mexican. Instead, prospective teachers will be allowed to submit portfolios demonstrating their teaching competency.

Oklahoma eliminated its General Education Test as a certification requirement, and Missouri now only looks at a prospective teacher's grades earned in select courses required to become a teacher. Alabama lowered the cutoff scores for its teacher certification exams. In the state's Black Belt, there were no certified math teachers during the 2021-2022 school year in Bullock County's public middle school.

Arizona now allows people without a college degree to begin teaching so long as they are currently enrolled in college. At the beginning of the current school year, schools in Mesa piloted a team teaching model to combat declining enrollment and teacher shortages. At Westwood High School, four teachers instruct 135 students in one giant classroom.

The aforementioned Brown University study also looked at the number of unqualified hires by state, as depicted in the graphic below. The researchers estimate there are 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers.

The highest quartile includes six states in the South, three each for the Northeast and West, and one in the Midwest. Illinois has the lowest number of underqualified teachers at 1.17 positions per 10,000 students while New Hampshire has the highest at 348.79. Notably, New Hampshire has not reported teacher shortage areas to the U.S. Department of Education since the 2019-2020 school year, according to the report.

School Districts Building Affordable Teacher Housing

A 2022 EdWeek Research Center survey found that 11% of teachers said that subsidized housing would make them more likely to stay in the teaching profession. In California, at least three school districts - Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and Jefferson Union - have educator workforce housing development, according to EdWeek. At least 80 other districts in the state have expressed interest in learning more about the process.

In Colorado Springs, Colo., Harrison School District 2 is in the planning stages of building an affordable duplex complex on an acre parcel of land at one of its schools. New teachers have a starting salary of $47,545.

"They ask, 'Can I live in Colorado Springs?' And I say you can, but you have to have a roommate or two or three in order to make a paycheck go as far as possible," said Mike Claudio, assistant superintendent of personnel support services.

Claudio said the units will be net-zero electrically powered homes and rent for $825 a month. Comparatively, the average rent in Colorado Springs is $1,720 a month and the average home price is $523,456, according to Forbes Advisor.

Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), told EdSurge that the relationship between housing costs and teacher recruitment is clear: When teachers can't afford homes in their school district, it exacerbates teacher staffing challenges. It also hurts retention as teachers who can't afford to buy a home in their district after 15 or 20 years take their veteran talent elsewhere.

"You lose your skill and capacity in a school when you keep bringing in new teachers who don't have experience," Peske said. "When teachers leave, [their] knowledge and skills and the investments districts have made go out the door. The district has to start again with a new crop of teachers."

Colleges and Universities Working to Improve Shortage

Colleges are trying to do their part as well. A March report from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education showed that the number of people completing a teacher-education program declined by almost a third between the 2008-2009 and 2018-2019 academic years. In response, Washington, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Nevada, and New Mexico now offer teacher programs at community colleges.

In Massachusetts, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is offering incentives to colleges and universities by only approving new teacher training programs if they involve fields where there are shortages. The Colorado Department of Higher Education is targeting rural shortages by offering $10,000 stipends to teacher candidates who work in rural communities for a year with half the cost covered by the state and the other half by the candidates' colleges. According to the nonprofit National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), in 2020, Hawaii started paying special education teachers $10,000 more than their peers. In just one year, the initiative drew in 300 new special educators, cutting the shortage by half.

The University of South Carolina is partnering with the Charleston Country School District to use federal COVID-relief aid to train teaching assistants and other school staff to teach math and other subjects with significant job vacancies.

Hope on the Horizon?

Overall, the root causes of teacher burnout and the subsequent nationwide shortage include low pay, increased scrutiny, and poor working conditions. We cannot deny the significant impact these shortcomings are having on educators and therefore the entire education system.

However, there may be some hope as we start to see the impact of federal, state, and local strategies that have been implemented in recent months. The State of the American Teacher survey found a slight improvement in job satisfaction with 23% of teachers saying they were likely to leave their job by the end of the 2023-2023 school year. Of the 77% of teachers who said they were unlikely to leave their job following the 2022-2023 school year, their ability to positively affect students and positive relationships with students and other teachers were the top reasons they intended to stay.

According to NCES' Feb. 2024 findings, 45% of public schools reported feeling that they were understaffed - a decrease from 53% who reported feeling understaffed the year prior.

Although there has been a slight improvement, NEA President Becky Pringle warns educators are still "exhausted and increasingly feeling disrespected."

"I call on our policymakers, again, to value our nation's educators and get serious about solving this problem. That means paying educators like the professionals they are, ensuring that their students can get the mental health supports they need, protecting them from gun violence in schools, and addressing the staff shortages so our educators can do what they do best - help every student thrive," she said. "Through the pandemic, continued attacks on public education, and an educator shortage crisis, our educators have shown how committed they are to helping their students thrive. Educators need and deserve better. Our students deserve better."
Curious about how your state is trying to recruit and retain teachers? News Nation Now compiled an impressive state-by-state deep dive. Check it out here.

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Teacher Shortages by State and How Schools Are Trying to Fix the Problem

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The Institute of Education Sciences launched a new five-year initiative to evaluate policies and identify best practices in recruiting and retaining teachers.

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We cannot take no for an answer. If we want quality teachers to stick it out through the difficult times then we must pay them. We must ensure that those elected to represent us do just that. In my opinion, one great teacher is more effective than 10 mediocre ones.

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Causes of Educator Shortages

For decades, public school educators have worked hard to meet their students' needs with far too few resources and too little planning time.

The educator shortage crisis is real, and it is the result of numerous factors not controlled by educators. It requires immediate and sustained attention to identify and implement long-term solutions to improve educator recruitment and retention.

At the same time, educators have been grossly under-compensated as a profession compared to other professions with comparable education and training requirements; similarly, the wages and benefits for many education support professionals (ESPs) can no longer compete with jobs outside of education.

Elected officials who make funding and policy decisions have too often negated their responsibility to ensure fair and adequate access to public education resources. The result-low pay, lack of professional respect, and a failure to fund the resources that students need to thrive-has caused an unprecedented school staffing crisis across nearly every job category.
6 charts to explain shortages

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Solutions to the Educator Shortage Crisis

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Solving the teacher shortage, along with shortages of support staff like bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and custodians, requires long-term, evidence-based strategies.

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Should our focus still be learning large amounts of knowledge and being able to pass a test on that knowledge? I'm not sure we are preparing students well enough to function properly in an almost exclusively digital age.

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Professor David Perkins likes to tell this story: Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi was getting on a train. One of his sandals slipped off and fell to the ground. The train was moving, and there was no time to go back. Without hesitation, Gandhi took off his second sandal and threw it toward the first. Asked by his colleague why he did that, he said one sandal wouldn't do him any good, but two would certainly help someone else.

As Perkins writes in his new book, Future Wise, "People cherish the story as a marvelous example of a charitable act. And so it is, on a small scale, seizing a singular moment."

But as he also points out, and as he told an audience at the Future of Learning institute held this past summer at the Ed School, it was more than that: It was also a knowledgeable act. By throwing that sandal, Gandhi had two important insights: He knew what people in the world needed, and he knew what to let go of.

Educators, Perkins says, need to embrace these same insights. They need to start asking themselves what he considers to be one of the most important questions in education: What's worth learning in school?

What's worth learning in school? It's a question that students have been lobbing at teachers for years, in a slightly different form.

"In the back of the class, there's that idly waving hand," Perkins writes. "You've been teaching long enough to be pretty sure that hand is going to go up as soon as you got started on this topic, and so it does, with an annoying indolence. All right. You gesture toward the hand, Let's hear it.

"The student: 'Why do we need to know this?'"

As a teacher, Perkins says he hates that question. Teachers work hard at what they do, and the question is disrespectful. Yet, he admits, the question is actually a good one - an "uppity version" of what's worth learning in school. (It's also one he admits having asked once or twice himself.)

"When that ballistic missile comes from the back of the room, it's a good reminder that the question doesn't just belong to state school boards, authors of textbooks, writers of curriculum standards, and other elite," he says. "It's on the minds of our students."

That's why Perkins decided to devote an entire book, and many lectures and discussions, to how that question gets answered.

These days, he says we teach a lot that isn't going to matter, in a significant way, in students' lives. There's also much we aren't teaching that would be a better return on investment. As a result, as educators, "we have a somewhat quiet crisis of content," Perkins writes, "quiet not for utter lack of voices but because other concerns in education tend to muffle them." These other concerns are what he calls rival learning agendas: information, achievement, and expertise.

INFORMATION

For starters, most education has become a mastery of a very large body of information, even if it's not what Perkins calls lifeworthy - likely to matter, in any meaningful way, in the lives learners are expected to live.

"It's nice to know things. I like to know things. You like to know things," Perkins says. "But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips." Instead, even though most people would say that education should prepare you for life, much of what is offered in schools doesn't work in that direction, Perkins says. Educators are "fixated" on building up students' reservoirs of knowledge, often because we default to what has always been done.

"Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack," he says. "It sits solidly in the minds of parents: 'I learned that. Why aren't my children learning it?' The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out."

As a result, "the lifeworthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty," he says. "It seems not to have been thought through very carefully."

And simply having a vast reservoir of knowledge isn't helpful if it's not being used. "Knowledge is for going somewhere," Perkins says, not just for accumulating. But too often, we tend to focus on short-term successes - scoring well on a quiz, acing a spelling test. Unfortunately all of that test knowledge, all of that accumulated knowledge we thought was worth knowing, becomes useless if not used.

"The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives," Perkins writes. "Overwhelmingly, knowledge unused is forgotten. It's gone."

Here's where, during the Future of Learning session, Perkins asked the audience to think about something they learned during the first dozen years of schooling that really matters in their lives today, beyond basics like learning to read and not including specialty professional skills.

"The frightening thing when I have these conversations is how hard it is for people to answer," he says. "I find that frightening. It also says a lot about the current state of education."

Take mitosis, the process of cell division. During the Future session, he asked everyone in the audience - hundreds of people - to raise their hands if they had studied mitosis in high school. Pretty much every hand went up. He asked how many people remember, basically, what it is. About half went up. He then asked how many have used their knowledge of mitosis in the last 10 years. One hand went up.

Perkins acknowledged that he personally finds mitosis fascinating and stressed that with learning, there should always be room for passion, "but in terms of generalized education and what everyone should learn, something like mitosis doesn't score well."

ACHIEVEMENT

Just as educators are pushing students to build a huge reservoir of knowledge, they are also focused on having students master material, sometimes at the expense of relevance. This happens, for example, with the achievement gap. While Perkins is quick to say that the achievement gap is a highly important problem that should be taken seriously, in general, he says, "achievement" is about mastering a topic and less about providing lifeworthy content. The achievement gap asks if students are achieving X. Instead, it might be more useful to look at the relevance gap, which asks if X is going to matter to the lives students are likely to lead.

"If X is a good mastery of reading and writing, both questions earn a big yes!" Perkins says. "Skilled, fluent, and engaged reading and writing mark both a challenging gap and a high-payoff attainment. That knowledge goes somewhere. However, if X is quadratic equations, the answers don't match. Mastering quadratic equations is challenging, but those equations are not so lifeworthy." Perkins says we can fill in X with thousands of topics that make up the typical curriculum, such as geography. Students are drilled to remember state capitals and major rivers and rewarded as "achieving" when they score well. And while it's nice and sometimes useful to know those things, Perkins argues that instead, knowing how the location of rivers and harbors and other features of the land have been shaped and continue to shape the course of history offers more in terms of lifelong usefulness - more so than "a bag full of facts. All that talk about achievement leaves little room for discussing what's being achieved."

EXPERTISE

And then there's what Perkins calls "the Holy Grail" of learning in school: becoming an expert. The typical math curriculum is a good example of how we want learners to move toward expertise in a subject, with little regard for usefulness. Arithmetic leads to algebra, including many "hardly used twists and turns" of advanced algebra, then to geometry and calculus, "an entire subject that hardly anyone ever uses," Perkins writes.

Unfortunately, if someone questions whether this expertise serves students well and instead suggests more life-relevant topics, Perkins says the common reaction is: "We're sacrificing rigor!" But that doesn't have to be the case. Instead of building during the first 12 years of schooling toward expertise in an advanced topic like calculus that hardly ever comes up in our lives, Perkins says students can instead become "expert amateurs" in something like statistics - a rigorous topic that is also used in daily life. In fact, expert amateurism works great, he says, in most of what we do in our lives - raising children, filing taxes, appreciating art, understanding insurance rates, or dealing with our own health care.

Perkins is very clear that expertise in a specific field is not bad; in fact, he encourages it and assumes it will happen at the college or university level. But he advocates that in today's world, younger students need to first master the fundamentals of key learning and then decide where they want to specialize.

So we come back to the question: What is worth learning? In his book, Perkins promises that he is not going to answer that question, at least not in a tidy way. There's no list of 1,000 things we must know or teach. Perkins says there would be no way to create a definitive list because there are lots of things worth learning at any given time or for a specialized career or even simply because we enjoy learning.

Instead, he does know that the encyclopedic approach to learning that happens in most schools that focuses primarily on achievement and expertise doesn't make sense.

"The fixation on the heap of information in the textbooks is itself part of the problem because the world we are educating learners for is something of a moving target," he says.

Historically, the first 12 or so years of schooling have focused on educating for the known, "the tried and true, the established canon," he writes. "This made very good sense in the many periods and places where most children's lives were likely to be more or less like their parents' lives. However, wagering that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday does not seem to be a very good bet today. Perhaps we need a different vision of education, a vision that foregrounds educating for the unknown as much as for the known."

And to do that, Perkins says we need to rethink what's worth learning and what's worth letting go of - in a radical way.

"We do kind of need to blow up the system and start fresh," he says. "Well, maybe not blow up the whole thing, but at least some corners."

One of those corners is the drive to educate through high-stakes testing, he says.

"It's clear that NCLB has not worked well," with pressures on teachers and students, sometimes leading to instances of cheating and maneuvering. With high-stakes testing, he says, there's a fixation on "summative" versus "formative" assessment - evaluating students' mastery of material with exams and final projects (achievements) versus providing ongoing feedback that can improve learning. "You end up shooting for the Big contest, the Big test, at the end of the year," he says. "It's a distortion." As a result, "students are asked to learn a great deal for the class and for the test that likely has no role in the lives they will live - that is, a great deal that simply is not likely to come up again for them in a meaningful way."

Perkins stresses that he isn't taking a stance against assessment, which he says is critical for learning. Instead, "it's more about how assessment is made. This is a vote for a richer form of achievement."

To be fair, he says, the assessment "game" as it's usually played in education seems perfectly reasonable - at first. Tests "are socially pretty efficient. You can distribute them widely and score them efficiently," he says. "We give those tests. We evaluate those tests. But that makes for shallow learning and understanding. ... You cram to do well on the test but may not have the understanding. It unravels."

Instead, we should be moving away from an understanding of something - the information on the test, the list of state capitals - to an understanding with something. With the latter, he says, students are able to then make connections to other things. For example, rather than just learning facts about the French Revolution, students should learn about the French Revolution as a way to understand issues like world conflict or poverty or the struggle between church and state. Without those connections, Perkins says he's not surprised that so many people have trouble naming things they learned early on that still have meaning today or that disengaged students are raising their hands, asking why they need to know something.

"And students are completely right," he says. "First-graders are very interested [in school], but over time, engagement slides and slides. There are often multiple reasons why, but one is that they don't see the relevance of what they are learning. They don't see how it serves their lives."

Growing up in Farmington, Maine, a small town with just under 5,000 residents, Perkins remembers it feeling safe and peaceful, a great place to come of age. He also remembers being bored with school through eighth grade.

"I got excited in high school when I encountered a range of topics treated at a higher level," he says. But, he acknowledges, he was probably unique. "I was lucky, I think, in that I'm not so much the kind of person that Future Wise was written for. I like a lot of knowledge for knowledge's sake. Algebra, history - I can really get into those things. I don't have to ask myself how is this going to be enlightening my life."

Still, despite his own experience, he says that in the bigger picture of learning, we need to remember Gandhi.

"As the train started up and Gandhi tossed down his second sandal, he showed wisdom about what to keep and what to let go of," Perkins says. "Those are both central questions for education as we choose for today's learners the sandals they need for tomorrow's journey."
Illustrations by Shaw Nielsen.

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We teach a lot that isn't going to matter, in a significant way, in students' lives, writes Professor David Perkins in his new book, "Future Wise." There's also much we aren't teaching that would be a better return on investment.

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I must say that at first, I was very skeptical about the introduction of AI in the classroom. My original thought was that it would make students lazy. I never considered how helpful it could be to teachers.

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AI Will Transform Teaching and Learning. Let's Get it Right.

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At the recent AI+Education Summit, Stanford researchers, students, and industry leaders discussed both the potential of AI to transform education for the better and the risks at play.

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It is no secret that teachers are worked to the bone both inside and outside of the classroom. AI can definitely help lighten that work load. I do believe though that AI will make great teachers better and poor teachers worse.

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Technology Solutions That Drive Education

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Another driver of AI reluctance may be a lack of familiarity with the technology. In Microsoft's AI in Education report, 68% of educators say they have used AI once or twice, while 22% use it daily. However, only 24% claim a strong familiarity with AI.

Most educators in this survey may be trying to develop a better understanding of how the emerging technology could be applied to their administrative and classroom tasks.

AI Benefits Productivity and Differentiated Learning

Between managing the classroom, grading assignments, planning lessons, communicating with parents and families, and meeting administrative requirements, teachers are stretched thin as they strive to meet all of their occupational demands. Generative AI is well suited to address these pressing teacher needs.

According to Carnegie Learning, teachers who use AI are finding multiple benefits from doing so:

42% found that using AI reduced the time spent on administrative tasks.

25% reported benefits in AI's ability to assist with personalized learning.

18% reported benefits related to improving student engagement.

17% noted AI benefits in enhancing student learning outcomes.

Notably, only 1% of respondents found no benefit to using AI in the classroom.
WATCH NOW: Modern classroom technologies improve K-12 student engagement.
Looking at the particular tasks where AI has been applied, the majority of Carnegie Learning respondents (52%) are using the technology for brainstorming and idea generation. Others use it to create teaching materials, plan lessons or grade assignments.

Overall gains in productivity and personalized learning were reflected in both the CoSN and Microsoft reports. Among Microsoft's respondents, 24% used AI to update lesson plans, supporting materials and assignments.

Biggest Concerns Include Training on AI and Student Cheating

While educators have found valuable upsides to using AI, they are also concerned about the technology. When CoSN asked them about AI's biggest risks, 63% worried about new forms of cyberattacks, and 49% cited a lack of teacher training for integrating AI into instruction. Concerns about training and classroom integration were high among Microsoft respondents as well, with 50% seeing a lack of training and support as the biggest challenge.
REGISTER HERE: Webinar shares steps for leveraging AI for student learning.
The most widespread concerns by far among Microsoft and Carnegie Learning educators, however, were related to student cheating and plagiarism.

This worry is not lost on CoSN educators, with 20% of respondents saying that they worked in districts that use tools to detect AI-generated answers in student work. Clearly, this is a leading concern for educators that includes a thorny patch of ethical considerations with no easy answers.

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AI in Education in 2024: Educators Express Mixed Feelings on the Technology's Future

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There is optimism about artificial intelligence's productivity gains amid worry about inappropriate student use. Here's what you need to know.

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As with everything, it is important to embrace change. Education initiatives have continued to evolve. Is it time for our curriculum to undergo a major change to keep up with advancements in technology and new research developments?

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Improving Our Schools: How Have Standards-Based Reforms Succeeded (and Failed)?

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Petrilli: No Child Left Behind, Every Student Succeeds, Common Core — What has (and hasn’t) made a difference for students?