Which States Are Having The Most Trouble Filling Teaching Positions
From Forbes.com
But what does the national picture really look like?
Tuan Nguyen, an assistant professor at Kansas State University, Chanh Lam, a data analyst and Ph.D. graduate student at Kansas State, and Paul Bruno, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign set out to find out, and in the process discovered that they would have to build their own data base, state by state.
Which states are having trouble filing positions, and which are solving the problem by hiring under-qualified personnel?
“What Do We Know About the Extent of Teacher Shortages Nationwide? A Systematic Examination of Reports of U.S. Teacher Shortages”, first published in August as a working paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, provides a state-specific picture, with data crunched two main ways and made available through interactive graphics on a website dedicated to making the findings available.
Looking strictly at vacancies, some patterns immediately emerge. The southeast quarter of the country has by far the greatest number of vacancies. While the national total is over 55,000, the South Atlantic region accounts for almost 20,000 of those, while the Mid-Atlantic states come in at just 539. Top states for vacancies are Florida, North Carolina and Georgia.
For some states the researchers have computed a leaving rate (Pennsylvania’s is 6%, while North Carolina’s is 15%). All of the figures come with some caveats; not all states have data and some state data are less recent than other.