Our Teachers Are Leaving — What Now?

A look at the problem and potential solutions

Amanda Beaudoin

You are an elementary school student. You squeeze into your desk in an overcrowded classroom while an adult you have never seen before stands in front of your class — yet another substitute teacher filling in since your teacher left last month.

You are a teacher. You just recovered from your second case of COVID-19 and you can’t wait to see your partner and child again. You dread going back into the classroom, exposing your family to more COVID risk and exposing yourself to the unrelenting stress. You try your best to provide education, mental health support, and a safe space for your students, but it’s getting increasingly difficult and your relationship with your family is strained.

You are a school leader. You are losing teachers at record rates and seeing fewer prospective educators vying for job openings. You have been dealing with teacher shortages in certain subjects for years, but now the issue feels larger and more urgent, and you see the effects on your students.

We are dealing with a teacher shortage. While this concept is not new (there were 100k teacher vacancies in 2018), the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated recruitment and retention issues in education, adding 280k additional vacancies. The pandemic added numerous stressors to the teaching job, from a rapid transition to remote teaching, to health and safety concerns, to student learning loss and mental health difficulties, to escalated pressure from parents sometimes even culminating in physical harm over controversial issues like the mask mandate.

Since the nineteenth century, teacher shortages have loomed to varying degrees. Historically, schools have looked to fill gaps with substitute teachers, increasing the student to teacher ratio, relying on remaining teachers to take on more work, and granting temporary relief from certification requirements in times of particular need. These short-term solutions may have helped ease pressures in the moment, but they have implications for quality of instruction and have left the profession vulnerable to major events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the 1960s and 70s, teacher shortages were eased by the availability of qualified women who had few other middle-class career options. Teaching’s history as a “women’s profession” shaped the reputation of the field in ways that can still be felt to this day. As women were still expected to be the caregiver to their families and homes, relying on a husband to be the primary breadwinner, teaching did not need to offer career progression opportunities or high pay and was not as valued and respected as many other professions requiring a college education. While some of the job dynamics changed when women gained access to other careers during the women’s rights movement and men entered the field — fuller workdays, slightly better working conditions — the reputational challenges of the profession and the at once high workload and low pay still remain.

As a result, teacher shortages have persisted. After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage became larger and more urgent. Now, nearly half of public schools across all 50 states report teaching vacancies, up from 30% pre-pandemic and over half of educators are thinking of leaving the profession earlier than they had planned. The vacancies include educators across ages, years in the profession, and roles within schools. Made worse, a disproportionate percent of Black (62%) and Latinx (59%) educators are looking to leave, a population already underrepresented in the field. Today’s shortages create a vicious circle; according to a National Education Association survey, 80% of educators report that unfilled job openings have led to more work obligations for the educators who remain and 90% of educators say they are experiencing burnout, perpetuating a cycle of overwhelm and attrition. Not only are teachers leaving and thinking of leaving in record numbers, but enrollment in education preparation programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level are declining.

This problem is costly — filling a teacher vacancy costs $21k on average — and leads to learning loss for students with more severe challenges for those in higher poverty schools, according to a study done by the Economic Policy Institute.

Why are teachers leaving? A key thread throughout my research and conversations was that even the teachers leaving the profession love their students. They are passionate about helping young people. However, many of these teachers either do not feel like they can do that as an educator within the public education system and / or they do not feel like they can sustain the personal and professional sacrifices required to do so. The four main reasons I gathered that are driving teachers from the profession and limiting the aspiring teachers are:

While these factors, particularly burnout and lack of support, have been exacerbated by the pandemic stressors, they have persisted for years, are deeply engrained in the US public education system, and largely stem from the field’s historical context. These drivers of teacher turnover have also suppressed interest in entering the profession. The low pay, the emotional difficulty of the job, and the heavy workload make it harder for aspiring teachers to justify the time and financial burden required to become a teacher.

(1) Low pay

Teachers mut incur substantial and often unmanageable costs to complete the higher-ed requirements to become a certified teacher. Almost half of all educators took out student loans to pay for college and still owe an average of $58,700. The student loan burden is worse for Black teachers, with 56% taking out student loans and 20% still owing more than $105,000. Teaching salaries have not kept up with the costs to become a teacher — they have been largely stagnant over time and are on average ~24% lower than the compensation of other college-educated workers. One teacher I spoke with is a first-generation American and did not see a path to building generational wealth for her family if she stayed in education (she is off to be a software engineer after completing a coding bootcamp). Other teachers cited the marriage of wages to school enrollment as limiting wage growth and causing too much uncertainty for them and their families. The pay issue is urgent: many educators emphasized difficulty paying for food, credit card balances, rent or mortgage payments, and medical expenses during the pandemic.

(2) Limited career progression

In many career fields, especially those that require higher education, there are clear opportunities for career mobility. These promotion paths involve additional pay and additional responsibilities, allowing employees to grow and learn and be recognized for their work. In education, the career progression opportunities for good teachers are limited and come with different skill sets than teaching does and / or require additional credentialing requirements, as administrator positions do.

Due to the limitations of official leadership roles, some teachers I spoke with looked for growth opportunities that they could pursue while maintaining their classroom teaching roles: working in instructional design, coaching new teachers, leading the school’s data and curriculum efforts, and working to identify learning interventions needed. While these roles allowed the teachers to learn and develop in their careers in the ways they were hoping, they were expected to maintain an ample teaching schedule, creating an unsustainable workload, and were not compensated adequately for the additional time commitment.

(3) Burnout

Teachers cite a variety of factors contributing to burnout, including growing workloads, long hours, and high stress heightened by the collective trauma of the pandemic forcing teachers to take on roles beyond their subject matter without added supports. The difficulty of building connections with students remotely has added to the stressors on teachers as well.

Another factor that has recently added to workload and burnout is the increase in the number of students that need intensive interventions. As many as 40% of students now require Tier 2 or 3 interventions versus 13–20% prior to the pandemic. These interventions require specialized teacher time, training, and resources to implement.

Given the heightened workloads from teachers leaving, illness, pandemic protocols, and increased interventions, teachers are being asked to do more than ever. One teacher I spoke with emphasized the need in this environment to prioritize quantity of work over quality, a tradeoff that took a toll on her mental health, constantly feeling like a failure.

Many teachers emphasized the gravity of the decision they made to leave teaching, phrasing it as less of a decision and more of a necessity after living in a state of perpetual stress with limited personal time and a strain on family and friends.

(4) Lack of supports

Input from parents on curriculum, teaching style, and health & safety protocols has increased in the past year, from resistance to mask mandates to opposition to “critical race theory,” a nebulous concept that sometimes seems to involve anything that mentions race at all. Education is a unique career field in that everyone has the experience of being a student in the education system, and as a result, individuals often feel empowered to voice their opinions on what teachers should be doing and how they should be doing it. This can be draining for teachers and can make them feel as if their voices and expertise don’t matter. School leadership can play a large role in empowering teachers and making them feel professional and valued. Many of the teachers I spoke with struggled with a lack of support from school leaders, citing actions misaligned with the teacher’s viewpoints, a disregard for the teachers’ strengths, and a lack of closeness with the students and their needs. Teachers want and need to be included in the leadership conversations and given support systems even before they begin teaching. Teaching should be a team sport but can often feel isolating to the detriment of both teachers and students.

Now let’s talk solutions.

While as a venture capitalist I would love to tell you that technology can solve all of these problems, it is impossible to ignore how multifaceted and complex this issue is, much of it stemming from practices deeply ingrained in a system historically resistant to change. Policy change is needed if we ever want to stop losing teachers. However, there is room for tech innovation to challenge the way we train teachers and educate students. We need to lower the time and financial barriers to becoming a teacher without sacrificing quality, make teaching a more sustainable career, and increase interest in the profession. While I don’t think tech can achieve these goals alone, I do think it can help.

Lower Unnecessary Barriers to Becoming a Teacher

The financial and time costs of becoming a teacher followed by insufficient pay, make teaching an unsustainable or unrealistic career for many. In preparing students for the profession, quality and efficiency of the preparation are highly important.

Solution 1: Earn While You Learn. Instead of requiring aspiring teachers to delay income and take on debt to pursue a college degree, we should be training teachers on the job. Teaching experience is associated with student achievement gains, yet traditional educator preparation programs (EPPs) rely heavily on coursework with limited classroom hours as part of the training. An apprenticeship-style program consisting of on the job training coupled with essential coursework on nights and weekends instead of a traditional college degree can allow aspiring teachers to earn while learning, to avoid student loans, and to enter the teaching profession with more classroom experience than through traditional pathways. Schools can leverage trainees as teaching assistants, providing extra classroom support for certified teachers while building a pipeline of workers.

Example: Craft Education System is facilitating this type of teacher apprenticeship program through its data platform which automates the process to apply for government funding, like WIOA funds, for teaching apprenticeship programs. Craft’s tech platform eases the burden on schools of implementing registered apprenticeship programs, and provides the incentive of access to funding. Craft’s data is also valuable in understanding the gaps and shortage areas within districts and states to better target solutions to the teacher shortage.

Solution 2: Ease Certificate Reciprocity. State-by-state teacher certification requirements create a barrier for teachers to work in multiple states in their careers. Teachers must apply for a teaching license when moving to a new state or request reciprocity, a resource burden on teachers. If teachers could move more freely between states, they could fill key gaps in the country and find the best fit program for them and their families.

Example: GlobalEd is working to create a universal, accredited certification system to allow learners’ credits to transfer with ease.

Solution 3: Illuminate Pathways to Teaching. Too often, high schoolers graduate without a clear sense of the career pathways available to them to achieve their goals. We need a system to help aspiring teachers understand and weigh their pathway options; receive custom recommendations based on interests, skills, location, finances, etc.; see what credits can transfer; and access financial aid. Too often, teaching careers are left out of the career exploration conversation.

Make Teaching a More Sustainable Profession

Increasing the number of people entering the teaching profession is important, but we will face a teacher shortage forever if teachers don’t stay in the field. Increasing the quality of life for teachers will not only help with retention, but also recruitment. In order to do that, we need to change the shape of education, challenging the notion that teaching must be done in a physical classroom with one teacher in front of many students.

Solution 1: Offer Tutoring in Schools. Tutoring has historically been accessible only by the wealthy few, with sessions ranging from $25–80+ per hour. Recently, there has been an influx of K-12 public school and district funding going towards tutoring with startup companies launching technology-based solutions to bring tutoring to the masses through K-12 schools, increasing the ways students can receive instruction.

The key question when evaluating tutoring options is efficacy. Tutoring is fantastic because it is proven to be effective when delivered in high doses. If you spend time in K-12 education, you are probably hearing the phrase “high-dosage tutoring” quite often. In edtech investing, “high-dosage tutoring” has become the new “AI.” Most tutoring companies say they are implementing high-dosage tutoring, but not all have incentives in place to ensure the student attendance and session frequency needed for success. An article from The Hechinger Report reveals attendance is often low; apparently sessions during the school day perform best. To successfully increase learning outcomes, investors and educators alike must prioritize efficacy and ease of implementation and integration into the school day when selecting a tutoring platform.

Examples: BookNook, BrainTrust, Cignition, Littera, Tutored by Teachers

Solution 2: Outsourcing Courses. Schools unable to fill teaching positions in certain subject areas or looking to provide more elective courses for students can turn to edtech for help. A few companies like Stepmojo are offering full-service, online courses complete with curriculum, certified-teachers, and data collection. While these platforms may not directly help retain in-school teachers, they allow students to continue to access rigorous courses and quality teachers. In addition, they offer teachers the opportunity to take on a flexible teaching role from their home instead of or in addition to their in-school careers.

Solution 3: Learning Outside the Classroom. In challenging the idea that teaching requires a classroom, we open up the possible methods and formats for students to learn. While spending the day in a classroom with an adult is an important component of education for younger students, it may not be necessary for high-schoolers. By the time students look to make decisions about their careers, they often have not spent time with or learned from industry professionals in industries outside of teaching and have limited views of what careers are possible, how to achieve them, and what they entail. Spending a portion of the high school day in a company and learning about the career field in an apprenticeship-type model could accelerate learning and help students make informed career decisions. While this may be difficult to implement, a technology platform, like Spark Mindset for cybersecurity, could help by matching students to open apprenticeship opportunities and coordinating with schools for scheduling, student data, and feedback. A simpler way to expose students to careers could involve inviting industry professionals to present to students, freeing up teachers’ time for an occasional class period and providing students with new perspectives.

Solution 4: Learning Through Community Engagement. Similar to the apprenticeship model, community engagement not only improves student outcomes but allows them to learn outside the traditional classroom environment. Local Civics, for example, offers an online civics education and learning platform for schools. Teachers can assign students activities in their local communities that create valuable real-world learning opportunities.

Increase Interest in Teaching

While improving teacher quality of life and easing the pathways to the career are essential to increase interest in the profession, increasing awareness of teaching as a career option and improving the public reputation of the career are important pieces of the puzzle to expand the pool of professionals entering the teaching workforce.

Solution 1: High-School Exposure to Teaching Careers. Students see teachers in action throughout their education journeys and likely make some assumptions about what a teaching career looks like. However, there are few opportunities for middle and high schoolers to truly explore what a career as a teacher entails. A tech-based matching platform to place high schoolers or recent graduates in local schools that are looking for part-time teaching assistants could help provide students with teaching assistant and shadowing opportunities that are mutually beneficial to the student and the school. As this may exclude students who could be talented teachers but have not considered it as a career option, I would like to see a CTE platform work to identify student skills through student activities and teacher comments to help students understand if teaching is right for them (a team captain or activity leader may be a great teacher, for example). I’d also like to see technology used to to translate a high schooler’s work experience in teaching (and other fields) into college credits to reduce the burden of teacher training.

Solution 2: Building Community Among Teachers. Teaching can often feel like a solitary career. Teachers need a community of current and aspiring teachers to ask and answer questions, mentor each other, discuss challenges and wins, and learn more about how to be a successful teacher. Ribbit Learning is building an online professional development platform for teachers, providing each one with a trained mentor / instructional coach, personalized PD resources, and professional learning networks made up of fellow teachers. A platform like this can help teachers feel heard and motivated. Aspiring teachers could benefit greatly from this platform as well to understand more deeply if the profession is right for them.

Solution 3: Improve Teaching’s Reputation. While exposure and awareness is a great way to create more interest in the profession, the way society as well as family and friends view the profession will have an impact on students’ interest in teaching. While a collective attitude change takes time, awareness of both the challenges of being a teacher and the expertise it takes to do well in the career could help increase societal respect for the profession. School leaders and edtech companies play a role as well, particularly in including teachers in important conversations. EdTech companies should be working directly with teachers on product testing and design to best serve the needs of teachers and students.

Lately, parents have been challenging teachers on their instruction content and methods. Sometimes lack of awareness can cause misunderstanding and even violence. Tech can offer parents objective insight into what their students are learning and ease that miscommunication.

At this point, I hope we can all agree that issue of teacher retention and recruitment is critical, urgent, and complex. We need systemic change to reach a long-term solution. Stakeholders from both the private and public sectors need to reframe the way we think about teacher training, classroom instruction, and teacher value. If you care about this issue or are building a solution, please reach out (abeaudoin@rethink-capital.com) — I’d love to connect.

For fear of leaving you overwhelmed by what it will take to solve this problem, I’ll leave you with some good news. Teachers care deeply about their students and will be invaluable advocates and facilitators of change even in careers beyond the traditional classroom. Now we just need to start caring more about our teachers.

I’d like to profusely thank all the people that helped me with my research. A particular shout out to Bruna Lee, Craig Jones, Katie Risbrough, Kim Smith, Kimberly Neal-Brannum, Kira Leander, Kris Schmidt, Marjorie Pim, Sandra Caballero, and Taylor Brown.

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APPENDIX: Easing the Burden on Teachers Within the Current System

While I think we need larger-scale change and innovation to put an end to teacher recruitment and retention issues, there are many edtech platforms currently available that can make teachers’ lives easier working within the current system of education. I see the teacher shortage as needing several solutions stacked on top of each other to achieve meaningful change. For evaluating companies in the categories outlined below, the keys to long-term success (both efficacy and traction) will be ease of use for teachers and efficacy.

Curriculum platforms in core and supplemental subjects provide teachers with content, lesson plans, homework and assessments, and data dashboards, simplifying the lesson planning process, saving teachers time and effort that they can spend with their students and with their families and hobbies to reduce burnout.

Supplemental classroom tools. There are several tech companies offering classroom learning tools for students that teachers can use to aid their lessons and as classroom activities. For example, one of Rethink’s portfolio companies, Amira Learning, uses natural language processing to provide feedback to students as they read aloud. This way, students can practice in small groups with Amira while the teacher can focus on helping the students most in need or spend classroom time lesson planning and thus take less work home. Many of the tools in this category similarly free up teachers’ time in class and make it easier to personalize lessons to a wide variety of levels and serve the most students.

Grading and assessing are other responsibilities that many teachers dread and that seep into personal time, often contributing to burnout. There are several tech-based tools that automate and aid feedback making it quicker and easier for teachers to give and for students to understand and learn from.

Communication tools. Teachers often spend extraneous time trying to communicate with parents and share important student information with parents and each other using email, spreadsheets, and long meetings. LMS platforms and edtech communication and classroom tools reduce the burden of information sharing and allow teachers to communicate effectively and efficiently with easily accessible online student information and simple communication channels. Not only do these tools increase the efficacy of school communication, but it also frees up time for teachers through fewer meetings and emails.

Mental Health Support. I’d be remiss to talk about reducing teacher burnout without mentioning mental health. According to a study by the RAND Corporation, 27% of teachers reported experiencing symptoms of depression during the 2020–2021 school year versus 10% of the US adult population. Stress levels are also elevated in teaching with 78% of US teachers reporting frequent job-related stress versus 40% of employed adults nationally. Without supporting teacher mental health, we cannot solve the student mental health crisis either.

Substitute Education: Substitute teachers can relieve the burden of teacher vacancies from full-time teachers. They can also be a pipeline of quality full-time teachers. There are a few tech platforms helping schools more easily manage substitute teachers. Swing Education and Ready2Teach help manage the substitute teacher process from end-to-end including matching teachers with school openings, managing payments and scheduling, etc. Another company in the space, Bench K-12, is focused on simplifying the substitute teacher credentialing process to help increase the supply.