Today is World Teachers’ Day. With teacher vacancies jumping 51%, how can we meaningfully support struggling educators?
The unrelenting stress faced by educators on a daily basis has become so widespread that it can be easy to gloss over the latest data—but I believe it’s important to keep reporting on these stories.
According to a recent report, schools nationwide have, at minimum, 55,000 vacant teacher positions that they’re struggling to fill. Last year, that number was closer to 36,000 vacant positions. This shift represents a 51% increase in estimated teacher vacancies from 2022 to 2023.
Additionally, it is estimated that somewhere around 270,000 positions are currently being filled by underqualified individuals.
Everyone in the education ecosystem—administrators, teachers, support staff, counselors, paraprofessionals, special needs teachers and aides and more—will feel the fallout of these shortages. And ultimately, it’s the students who will reap the worst consequences of a deteriorating system.
This World Teachers’ Day, let’s take a moment to think about what’s happening in education—and how we might help.
The student impact
I’ve written before about the huge impact that the education crisis will have on students. The quality of education will drop if there aren’t enough qualified teachers. With dwindling numbers of young people entering the profession, paired with increasing teacher turnover, classroom sizes will increase, further weakening the teacher-student ratio.
The teachers who remain (qualified or otherwise) will have less and less time to engage directly with individual students—cementing the impression many students already have that they’re just a number in an impersonal system.
If students feel the system doesn’t care about them, they will reciprocate by not caring about the system. For many young people, school has already become something they have to simply endure until they can escape.
This is a problem not just for education, but for the larger realms of the economy and labor force. Under-educated young people will not be equipped to power America’s increasingly technological workforce. Employers will have to pick up the slack (if they can) and teach their young workers what they need to know.
Just as students won’t care about a system they feel doesn’t care about them, teachers won’t dig in and keep giving to a system that takes and never gives back. Everything that students need to stay engaged in their education, teachers also need to stay engaged in their work. And chief among these needs, for both students and educators, is a sense of human connection.
Human connection: what we all need
Having a human connection with someone can be described in three questions: Do you see me? Do you hear me? And do I, in fact, matter? The minute a student (or teacher) feels that the answer to any one of these questions is no, they’re going to check out.
Oh sure, maybe they can’t physically leave the education scene. Students are required to go to school and teachers make their living by teaching. But there are ways and ways of leaving. Mentally and emotionally checking out is one, leading to poorer performance on both sides of the desk.
Checked-out students and teachers spend most of their time in survival mode. When you’re struggling to do the bare minimum every day, investing time and energy in forging a human connection is usually one of the first things to go.
The problem is, today’s Gen Z students require a human connection with the authority figures in their lives, or they just won’t cooperate with what they’re being asked to do. Maybe it’s a byproduct of our technological age, that this digital-native generation would prioritize the human connection so highly. They don’t want an AI teacher; they want a person. The human touch means more than ever for everyone in education.
Why self-care is a no
So what can we do? First, let’s talk about what we shouldn’t do. Teachers are heartily sick of being told to practice self-care. I hear it from stressed educators all the time: they need others to provide care. Telling teachers to add more self-care to their day is like telling a drowning man to make time for some swimming lessons.
These burned-out teachers don’t need to be told to relax and recharge with wine and a bubble bath once they get home (don’t forget, teachers also have families that require their time and energy, too). They don’t want to be told to meditate or do yoga or practice mindfulness or whatever the latest self-help technique may be. I’m not saying these things aren’t beneficial, but they are not the answer. They constitute just another item on a teacher’s to-do list—a list that just seems to get longer every day.
Instead of adding to their list, why don’t we take things off teachers’ plates? How can we lighten their load so they actually have the bandwidth to care for their students—and enjoy life outside of work?
Teacher-care > self-care
If we care about education and employment in this country, we need to make a concerted effort to understand why teachers are leaving the profession. And once we do understand the pressures and pain points educators experience, we need to come up with a better solution than the tired old mantra of “just practice self-care.”
This World Teachers’ Day, we can do more than just acknowledge how great teachers are and then move on. It’s not fair or sustainable to expect them to care for everyone else and themselves, too. As one of the greatest influences on the next generation, teachers deserve to do this work with real support from their leadership and communities.
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