School officials aren’t short of explanations for the difficulty in finding and retaining teachers.
There’s the pandemic and its long-term effects, especially among older workers who took early retirement in what’s now known as the great resignation. This trend impacted the field of education, where teachers who may have been thinking of retiring in five years accelerated that timeline.
There’s teacher pay and how it lags behind other occupations. In Missouri, the compensation for teachers trails not just most other states, but all of them.
There’s the demographic reality of fewer college-age students pursuing a degree in education, which reduces the number of future teachers coming through the pipeline at a time when older educators are leaving the profession.
According to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, there’s even the tendency to view teachers as villains instead of heroes. This is a new observation, one that doesn’t exactly square with opinion surveys that show teaching to be consistently ranked as one of the most admired professions in the United States. What this might mean is that teachers don’t want to get caught up in a culture war and all of the venom that goes with it.
But whatever the cause, schools are having to deal with staff shortages at a time when it’s more important than ever to get a teacher in front of students to make up for pandemic-era learning loss.
It becomes necessary to find long-term solutions as well as more temporary Band-Aids to get teachers in the classrooms.
A short-term fix means getting more substitute teachers to fill the gaps amid these staffing challenges. Missouri took a step in this direction with legislation this year that loosened the requirements for substitute teaching certification from 60 semester hours to 36.
Missouri Senate Bill 681, which was signed into law, allows applicants to be approved to substitute teach if they meet the college credit or state course requirement, complete a background check and have at least a high school diploma or equivalent.
The new law also makes it easier in some cases for retired teachers to sub on a part-time basis without affecting their benefits.
These changes would have been extremely controversial a few years ago but go down easier today because of the immediate staffing concerns.
In our view, the state did what it needed to do to address the immediate staffing crisis, but that shouldn’t absolve lawmakers and local districts from examining the more long-term issues of why so many teachers or leaving or not entering the profession.
