Policy Brief - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Policy Brief

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE K–12 EDUCATION

LABOR MARKET DURING COVID? THE ACUTE

NEED FOR BETTER DATA SYSTEMS

Joshua F. Bleiberg

Department of Educational

Foundations, Organizations,

and Policy

University of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, PA 15217

jbleiber@pitt.edu

Matthew A. Kraft

(corresponding author)

Department of Education

Brown University

Providence, RI 02906

mkraft@brown.edu

Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic upended the U.S. education system in
ways that dramatically aﬀected the jobs of K–12 employees. How-
ever, there remains considerable uncertainty about the nature and
degree of staﬃng challenges during the pandemic. We draw on
data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and State Education
Agencies (SEA) to describe patterns in K–12 education employ-
ment and to highlight the limitations of available data. Data from
the BLS suggest overall employment in the K–12 labor market de-
clined by 9 percent at the onset of the pandemic and remained
well below pre-pandemic levels more than two years later. SEA
data suggest that teachers did not leave the profession en masse
as many predicted, with turnover decreasing in the summer of
2020 and then increasing modestly in 2021 back to pre-pandemic
levels. We explore possible explanations for these patterns in-
cluding weak hiring through the summer of 2020 and high at-
trition among K–12 instructional support and noninstructional
staﬀ. State vacancy data also suggest that schools faced substan-
tial challenges ﬁlling open positions during the 2021–22 academic
year. Our analyses illustrate the imperative to build nationally rep-
resentative, detailed, and timely data systems on the K–12 educa-
tion labor market to better inform policy.

https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00391

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Joshua F. Bleiberg and Matthew A. Kraft

I N T RO D U C T I O N
In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the country, shuttering
schools and shifting classes online. This rapid change introduced major new operating
costs for schools in the form of facilities upgrades, new supplies required for operating
schools safely, and new technology for supporting remote instruction. Districts were
forced to rethink staﬃng roles and make employment decisions with considerable un-
certainty about the future outlook of education funding. Initial fears led to sobering
predictions about huge budget shortfalls in state and local funding for public educa-
tion, with projections of job losses that would exceed the Great Recession and linger
for many years (Griﬃth 2020; Page 2020).

In addition to the immediate ﬁnancial consequences, the pandemic also altered
teachers’ work dramatically, exposing them to potential health risks, increasing their
workloads, and inducing considerable stress (Diliberti, Schwartz, and Grant 2021; Dilib-
erti and Kaufman 2020; Kraft, Simon, and Lyon 2021; Zamarro et al. 2022; Steiner and
Woo 2021). Policy makers, administrators, and pundits all warned of a massive exodus
from the teaching profession (French 2020; Griﬃth 2020; Page 2020)—with teach-
ers expressing serious concerns about the lack of child care, low pay relative to the
increased job stress and health risks, and the transition to online learning (Diliberti,
Schwartz, and Grant 2021; Diliberti and Schwartz 2022). By the end of the 2019–20
school year, one in three teachers reported they were likely to leave their job (EdWeek
Research Center 2020). More recent surveys conducted by RAND in 2021 and the Na-
tional Education Association in 2022 ﬁnd that teachers continue to report high rates
of burnout and intentions to leave the profession (Zamarro et al. 2021; Jotkoﬀ 2022).
Two years into the pandemic, district leaders remain concerned about a new wave of
teachers exiting the profession (Diliberti and Schwartz 2022; Kaufman, Diliberti, and
Hamilton 2022). Still, there remains considerable uncertainty about what happened to
the education labor market during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Much of the debate about teacher turnover and shortages stems from a lack of data
on the U.S. K–12 labor market that is (1) nationally representative, (2) detailed, and
(3) timely. Here, we endeavor to leverage a range of available national and state datasets
while simultaneously highlighting the limitations of each data source. Several datasets
from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) describe national employment trends
and are updated monthly. However, the data available from the BLS are limited because
they do not always allow researchers to disentangle trends in higher education and
private schools from those in the K–12 public education sector. Additionally, BLS data
are often revised many months after the release of preliminary estimates and may not
have accurately measured employment for educators during the unique transition to
virtual schooling in the ﬁrst months of the pandemic.

The National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD)
collects nationally representative data that would be useful for examining changes in the
K–12 public education labor market across speciﬁc job categories. Unfortunately, these
full-time equivalent (FTE) employment data collected by NCES are released with delays
that are frequently a year or more, limiting their utility to inform policy in real time.
Thus, we turn to data from selected State Education Agencies (SEAs), which provide
more detailed and timely employment data. The challenge here is that SEAs’ disparate

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157

K–12 COVID Labor Market

and sometimes opaque approaches to reporting employment data oﬀer an incomplete
view of the national education labor market.

In this brief, we draw on the education employment data available from the BLS,
NCES, and SEAs to inform our understanding of the past, present, and future of the
education workforce in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We document patterns
over time from 2000 to 2022 while highlighting speciﬁc changes in the labor market
from March 2020 to May 2022—the period from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic
through the 2021–22 school year. Our exploratory analyses serve to illustrate the un-
precedented changes in the K–12 education labor market during the COVID-19 pan-
demic. We ﬁnd that the K–12 education labor market shrank rapidly by about 9 percent
from March to May 2020. Employment levels two years later in March 2022 remained
4 percent below pre-pandemic levels. At the outset of the pandemic, more K–12 instruc-
tional support staﬀ appear to have left their positions than teachers during the same
period in previous years.

Data from across 16 SEAs show that teachers did not leave their jobs en masse
in the summer of 2020 as many people feared. However, data on teacher depar-
tures in the summer of 2021 was limited, causing policy makers and journalists to
rely on anecdotal cases on social media and incomplete data from sources such as
LinkedIn (Anders 2022), leading to a narrative that the pandemic caused historically
high turnover. We show across nine states that turnover (typically deﬁned as leav-
ing a school or district) increased modestly in the summer of 2021, returning to pre-
pandemic levels. Possible explanations for the large decline in overall employment
but limited changes in teacher turnover include weak hiring through the summer
of 2020 and high attrition among K–12 instructional support and noninstructional
staﬀ. A range of data sources also suggest that schools faced substantial challenges
ﬁlling open positions during the 2021–22 academic year. However, the lack of high-
quality data makes it diﬃcult to study the teacher labor market, and K–12 education
jobs more broadly, at a time when this information is critically important for policy
makers.

Our brief makes several contributions to the literature. First, we introduce read-
ers to the full range of national data available to study K–12 employee labor markets
and point out the strengths and weakness of these datasets. We then use these data
to provide a comprehensive overview of employment patterns before and during the
pandemic across existing datasets. We build on state- and district-speciﬁc analyses
of teacher turnover (Goldhaber and Theobald 2021; Rosenberg and Anderson 2021;
Bacher-Hicks, Chi, and Orellana 2022; Camp, Zamarro, and McGee 2022; Donohue
et al. 2022) to provide a national picture of teacher turnover using publicly available
data from SEAs. We also shine a light on the incongruous trends of declining overall
employment but relatively stable teacher turnover and provide data in support of two
hypotheses for reconciling these patterns. Finally, we describe how the federal govern-
ment might expand the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems Grant Program to build a
detailed national picture of the K–12 employee labor market from individual-level state
data systems. The ability to complement more localized analyses with a national-level
dataset would allow us to track macro-level trends in our nation’s K–12 education work-
force both accurately and in real time.

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Joshua F. Bleiberg and Matthew A. Kraft

Table 1. Datasets Capturing K—12 Education Employment Statistics

Source

Data Collection Method

K Public

G1—G12 Public

K—G12 Private

Postsecondary

CES

QCEW

JOLTS

CPS

CCD

Businesses & organizations survey

Unemployment insurance records

Businesses & organizations survey

Household survey

School survey

Notes: G = grade; CCD = Common Core of Data; CES = Current Employment Survey; QCEW = Quarterly Census of
Employment and Wages; JOLTS = Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey; CPS = Current Population Survey.

E D U C ATO R L A BO R M A R K E T DATA
To explore changes in the educator labor market during the pandemic, we ﬁrst draw
on four surveys from the BLS: the Current Employment Statistics (CES), the Quarterly
Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), the Job Openings and Labor Turnover
Survey (JOLTS), and the Current Population Survey (CPS). Each BLS survey captures
similar but not fully overlapping populations of education employees given distinct
sampling targets and survey designs. Table 1 provides a quick summary of the unit and
population captured by each BLS survey. The CES surveys approximately 144,000 busi-
nesses and government organizations including school districts each month. These
data allow us to estimate the number of primary and secondary jobs in the U.S. K–12
public education sector. The QCEW uses unemployment records from the Quarterly
Contributions Reports (QCR) that all private companies and government organization
(i.e., local, state) ﬁle as a part of the federal unemployment insurance program. These
data include a near census of public and private organizations to estimate employment
and wages in elementary and secondary schools. Kindergarten teachers are included in
the CES estimate but not the QCEW (BLS 2021a, 2021e). The JOLTS surveys roughly
16,000 organizations including public and private sector primary, secondary, and post-
secondary schools on hiring, layoﬀs, and quits each month. These data provide insights
into the circumstances under which education employees left their positions. We ob-
serve the number of hires and job separations for state and local government education
employees, which includes K–12 school districts and higher education institutions, but
excludes private schools.

An important limitation of the CES, QCEW, and JOLTS data is that they do not
allow researchers to disaggregate estimates for speciﬁc occupations within the K–12
education sector using publicly available data (e.g., classroom teachers versus instruc-
tional support staﬀ versus bus drivers). At the national level, we turn to the CPS data,
which allow for a more detailed view into employment trends for U.S. K–12 public-
and private-sector workers. CPS provides more granular occupation information to es-
timate separate employment trends for teachers and other instructional support and
noninstructional staﬀ. The CPS surveys a representative sample of American house-
holds on a monthly basis. However, the design of the CPS survey may have limited
the reliability of data collected about the K–12 education sector during the initial tran-
sition to virtual schooling. In particular, many currently employed K–12 teachers may
not have reported working full time as schools transitioned to remote instruction at the
beginning of the pandemic (Gicheva 2022). Relatedly, the response rate for the CPS

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K–12 COVID Labor Market

survey declined sharply by 17.4 percentage points from February 2020 to March 2020
(BLS 2022). We provide a detailed discussion of the issues with using the CPS for un-
derstanding the K–12 labor market during the pandemic in appendix B, available in a
separate online appendix.1 We consider the weaknesses of the CPS to be serious enough
that we only describe general patterns from our analyses.

We also use data on budgeted teaching and staﬀ positions (i.e., FTEs) from the CCD.
An advantage of the CCD staﬀ counts is that they capture the full population of public-
school employees to provide a comprehensive national view. Additionally, they include
the number of speciﬁc education employees (e.g., teachers, school support staﬀ, district
administrators). However, the CCD data, which are collected in October of each school
year, provide only a snap shot of current staﬃng levels at one time annually and are
released with a considerable delay of a year or more. Another limitation is that annual
reports of total FTEs do not provide suﬃcient information to track turnover in the K–12
public education sector given the lack of individual-level longitudinal data.

Finally, we draw on SEA data to examine teacher turnover and hiring trends using
all publicly available data reported by states. We began by collecting employment data
from states that publish teacher hiring data and then focused on a subset that also pro-
vide teacher turnover data (Saenz-Armstrong 2021). We identiﬁed 16 states that provide
estimates of teacher turnover for pre-pandemic years and at least the ﬁrst year of the
pandemic, the 2019–20 school year (see online appendix table C.1 for full details). Dif-
ferences in turnover deﬁnitions and data reporting approaches across states present
substantial challenges and make it diﬃcult to compare patterns across states.2 We de-
ﬁne teacher turnover as the percent of employed public teachers in the base school year
that do not return (however deﬁned) in the subsequent school year. For example, the
turnover rate for 2018–19 is the percent of teachers in 2018–19 that did not return to the
school (or district in some cases) they taught in during the 2019–20 school year. Despite
these limitations, data from SEAs do provide important insights about how turnover
has changed within individual states over time.

F I N D I N G S
How Many K–12 Education Jobs Were Lost During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
The CES and QCEW provides timely national data on primary and secondary education
employment. Figures 1 and 2 display K–12 employment trends in the CES and QCEW,
respectively. The estimates from both the CES and QCEW are quite similar despite the
diﬀerences in data collection procedures and samples. The CES estimates in ﬁgure 1
show the K–12 public education labor market grew steadily over the ﬁrst decade of the
twenty-ﬁrst century, rising from 7.2 million employees to over 8.1 million at its height
in 2008. Education employment then declined steadily from 2009 to 2012 in the wake

1. The online appendix can be accessed on Education Finance and Policy’s Web site at https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_

a_00391.

2. For example, some states count within-district moves in their measures of teacher turnover whereas other states
only count moves between-districts (see online appendix table C1 for more details). States also measure turnover
at diﬀerent times during the school year (e.g., October 2020 to October 2021). Even the years (previous versus
current) that are used to label a similar estimate of turnover are inconsistent across states. We standardize state
deﬁnitions of teacher turnover to the degree that is possible.

160

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Joshua F. Bleiberg and Matthew A. Kraft

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Notes: Adapted from Gould (2020). Estimates are seasonally adjusted.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics.

Figure 1. Total Employment in U.S. Local Government Education Industry

of the Great Recession and has never fully recovered. The total number of primary
and secondary education employees began to increase slowly starting in 2014, reaching
about eight million employees before the start of the pandemic. Figure 2, depicting
employment trends in the elementary and secondary education sector using the QCEW,
shows a very similar pattern.

Both the CES and QCEW data also illustrate the sudden and steep decline in em-
ployment in the K–12 public education sector with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data from the CES suggest that between March and May 2020, K–12 public education
employment decreased by about 9.3 percent. Data from the QCEW show a similar 8.7
percent decrease in the employment of elementary and secondary education teachers
from March to May 2020. The rapid decline in jobs at the beginning of the COVID-19
recession was unprecedented in its magnitude, more than twice the number of jobs dur-
ing the four-year contraction following the Great Recession. This steep decline erased
twenty years of labor market expansion in the span of two months. In the months since,
total employment has been volatile, given high levels of uncertainty as the pandemic
persists but appears to be recovering.

Which Type of K–12 Education Jobs Were Hardest Hit?
The lack of timely employment data for teachers and instructional support staﬀ limits
our capacity to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic inﬂuenced employment for
speciﬁc education occupations. Cooper and Hickey (2022) use the CPS data to show the

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161

K–12 COVID Labor Market

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Notes: Employment estimates are seasonally adjusted. Employment describes the average number of elementary and secondary
school employees in a quarter.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

Figure 2. Elementary and Secondary School Employment

immediate job losses were relatively larger among school support staﬀ, with meaning-
ful declines among teachers as well.3 In auxiliary analyses, we replicate these ﬁndings
using recently updated CPS data and ﬁnd that job losses for instructional support and
noninstructional staﬀ were more pronounced than for teachers but recovered quickly
and varied widely across speciﬁc occupations.

This general pattern of results is consistent with occupation speciﬁc data from Col-
orado and Illinois (Colorado Department of Education 2021; Illinois State Board of Ed-
ucation 2021). At the end of the 2020–21 school year, there were 3 percent fewer oﬃce
and administrative support staﬀ, 5 percent fewer people in crafts, trades, and services,
and 4 percent fewer paraprofessionals compared with the 2018–19 school year. In Illi-
nois, there were 1 percent fewer nurses and 6 percent fewer guidance counselors in the
in 2019–20 school year compared with the previous school year.

Data on total FTE positions for the 2020–21 academic year collected by the CCD
also support the conclusion that turnover was relatively higher for nonteaching pro-
fessions. Figure 3 shows the number of FTE teachers, school staﬀ, and district admin-
istrators/principals (NCES 2022a) measured in October from 2014 to 2020. Between
October 2019 and October 2020, the number of public school teachers declined by
about 166,000 while the combined total number of school staﬀ and administrators

3. We ﬁnd that estimates of total employment in speciﬁc education occupations vary considerably from month
to month in the CPS, limiting researchers’ ability to make precise inferences about employment changes in
speciﬁc occupational sectors.

162

Joshua F. Bleiberg and Matthew A. Kraft

Source: Common Core of Data nonfiscal file.

Figure 3. Budgeted Teaching and Staff Positions

declined by about 173,000. However, these annual FTE measures provide an incom-
plete picture of the dynamic turnover that happened during the pandemic because they
do not capture any exits or job losses that occur during the school year after October
if these jobs were ﬁlled by the following October. Data from the CES and QCEW both
suggest that many K–12 education sector jobs were lost in March and April of 2020 but
had been recovered prior to October 2020.

Were Predictions of Unprecedented Turnover True?
The BLS and NCES data do not allow us to observe K–12 teacher turnover information.
Data reported by SEAs suggest that the high rates of teacher turnover that many feared
have not yet materialized in practice. Figure 4 displays average teacher turnover across
16 states for the two school years prior to the pandemic and two post-pandemic school
years (i.e., 2019–20, 2020–21). We encourage readers to focus on the relative changes
over time shown in ﬁgure 4 rather than any state-speciﬁc diﬀerences in absolute levels
given diﬀerent data reporting practices used across SEAs. We ﬁnd clear and consistent
evidence that there was no increase in teacher turnover after the start of the pandemic.
In fact, we estimate that turnover declined by 1.04 percentage points, on average, in the
summer of 2020 across the 16 states that publicly report data.

The relatively stable rate of turnover after the 2019–20 school year is likely a con-
sequence of the economic insecurity caused by the pandemic. Research shows that
teachers are less likely to leave their jobs during a recession (Nagler, Piopiunik, and
West 2020; Goldhaber and Theobald 2021; Eagan et al. 2022). The turnover patterns

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K–12 COVID Labor Market

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Notes: Percent teacher turnover is the percent of employed public teachers in the base school year that do not return (however
defined) in the subsequent school year. Percent teacher turnover is averaged across sixteen states except in 2020–21 when it is
a subsample of nine states. Gray lines represent teacher turnover for each of the sixteen states and the black line represents the
sample average.
Source: See online appendix C1 for source information.

Figure 4. State Teacher Turnover across Time

shown in ﬁgure 4 are also consistent with results from a national survey of school
districts (Diliberti and Schwartz 2021), an analysis of detailed individual-level data
from six large schools districts (Rosenberg and Anderson 2021), and teacher turnover
in Arkansas (Camp, Zamarro, and McGee 2022), Massachusetts (Bacher-Hicks, Chi,
and Orellana 2022), Washington State (Goldhaber and Theobald 2021), and Provi-
dence Public Schools (Donohue et al. 2022). Additionally, recent research indicates
that teacher intentions to transfer schools or leave the profession is an imperfect proxy
for actual rates of teacher turnover (Nguyen et al. 2022). This ﬁnding helps to explain
why survey results that forecasted an exodus from classrooms have not (yet) come to
pass.

Questions still remain about whether turnover increased after the 2020–21 school
year as the economy recovered and new COVID-19 variants continued to make work
in schools challenging. Turnover data for the 2020–21 school year is currently avail-
able from nine states: Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina,
South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington. Teacher turnover increased in
the summer of 2021 by 0.8 percentage points among this sample of nine states, re-
turning to levels similar to those observed prior to the onset of the pandemic. However,
increasing rates of teacher turnover remain a distinct possibility as the COVID-19 pan-
demic persists and burnout remains high, making eﬀorts to standardize and expand
data collection eﬀorts even more pressing.

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Joshua F. Bleiberg and Matthew A. Kraft

Notes: Estimates are seasonally adjusted.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey.

Figure 5. State and Local Government Education Separations and Hires

Why Did Jobs Decline?
We turn to the JOLTS data to explore possible explanations for the large decline in over-
all K–12 education employment given that teacher turnover has been relatively stable
through 2021. Data suggest this decline is explained by a range of factors including
weak hiring at the start of the pandemic and an increase in total employee separations
(i.e., retirements, layoﬀs, quits from a school district). The decline in hiring is clearly
evident in ﬁgure 5, which plots the total number of separations and hires in the public
education sectors (i.e., primary, secondary, postsecondary). Hiring plummeted at the
start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools and universities hired an average of 32,000
fewer educators per month in the six months after the pandemic relative to the average
over the ﬁve prior years. Federal stimulus aid supported ephemeral hiring booms in
January and June 2021, but they were not large enough to oﬀset months of anemic hir-
ing. JOLTS data also show that total separations of employees from K–12 public schools
and public colleges/universities also reached an all-time high during the COVID-19
pandemic. At their peak in March 2020, the number of total separations (294,000)
was roughly double the steady rate observed across the prior two decades.

The rise in total separations in the JOLTS data raises a puzzle. How did total sep-
arations (i.e., quits, layoﬀs, retirements) reach historically high levels in the JOLTS if
teacher turnover has remained relatively stable? One possible answer is that these sepa-
rations are largely driven by job losses in the higher education sector. A major weakness
of the JOLTS is that estimates aggregate K–12 and postsecondary workers together, pos-
ing a challenge because of the diﬀerences in how schools and universities responded to

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the COVID-19 pandemic. Universities laid oﬀ large numbers of support staﬀ as build-
ings emptied and classes shifted online (Douglas-Gabriel and Fowers 2020). University
revenues are projected to decline by $17 billion to $30 billion over the period from 2020
to 2025 (Kelchen, Ritter, and Webber 2021). Additionally, 20 percent of universities re-
sponded to the pandemic by not renewing or terminating contracts for at least some
nontenure track faculty (American Association of University Professors 2021). A sec-
ond possible explanation, consistent with patterns in the CPS, is that job reductions in
K–12 education were primarily driven by school and district staﬀ rather than classroom
teachers.

Continued Staffing Challenges in the Wake of COVID-19
Districts across the country are still struggling to ﬁll open teaching, instructional sup-
port, and service positions (Heyward 2021; Goldhaber and Gratz 2021; Aldeman 2022).
In September 2021, at the beginning of the 2021–22 school year, 80 percent of schools
reported having at least one full or part-time teacher vacancy, and 38 percent of schools
reported having more total staﬀ vacancies than in previous years (NCES 2021). Teacher
vacancies rose appreciably in the fall of 2021 in eighteen of twenty large U.S. school dis-
tricts (Barnum 2021). In the fall of 2020 the majority of school leaders reported facing
acute shortages of substitutes, bus drivers, special education teachers, and paraprofes-
sionals (Schwartz and Diliberti 2022). Fifty-four percent of undergraduate-level and 42
percent of graduate-level teaching programs reported that the pandemic inﬂuenced the
number of new students entering the program (King 2022). State hiring data show that
the proportion of newly hired teachers declined 0.6 percentage points in 2019–20 and
1.9 percentage points in 2020–21 compared to the three school years prior to the pan-
demic (i.e., Colorado, South Carolina, Texas) (Colorado Department of Education 2021;
Smith 2021; Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, & Advancement 2021).

C O N C L U S I O N
At the outset of the pandemic, school leaders were acutely concerned about a repeat
of the Great Recession, when the housing market collapse led to a prolonged drop in
public education funding and a substantial decline in the education sector workforce.
We ﬁnd that the initial shock of the COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented
decrease in the size of the U.S. K–12 public education labor force, but that this historic
decline was not driven by increased teacher turnover. We read the state hiring/vacancy
data in conjunction with the JOLTS and CCD data to support two potential explanations:
a massive slowdown in hiring coupled with increased separations (e.g., quits, layoﬀs,
retirements) concentrated among instructional support and noninstructional staﬀ.

Our analyses suggest that the data collection infrastructure in the U.S. is largely
inadequate for providing detailed, real-time information about national trends in the
K–12 teacher workforce. This lack of nationally representative, detailed, and timely data
substantially limits the information policy makers have when attempting to make data-
informed decisions during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Our lack of a na-
tional teacher labor market data system leads to conﬂicting and potentially erroneous
conclusions about the current state of the teacher labor market.

We see a central role of the federal government in supporting states to collect and
report teacher turnover statistics. The vast majority of states do not make detailed data

166

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Joshua F. Bleiberg and Matthew A. Kraft

on teacher supply and demand available, which is likely due in part to a lack of a capac-
ity (Saenz-Armstrong 2021). The federal government has successfully supported state
eﬀorts to build student data systems through the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems
(SLDS) Grant Program (NCES 2022b). The NCES could expand the SLDS Grant Pro-
gram to support SEAs to enhance their data systems tracking K–12 education employ-
ees. These data would allow state and federal policy makers to develop more targeted
solutions to staﬃng challenges by helping them to diagnose speciﬁc challenges and
their causes. Which type of K–12 education employees are the most diﬃcult to recruit
and retain? Are staﬃng challenges localized or more broadly distributed? Do shortages
reﬂect limited educator supply or excess demand due to high rates of turnover from
the profession? A national picture of detailed K–12 employment data would also shine
a light on districts and states that have succeeded in attracting and retaining eﬀective
educators.

The future trajectory of the K–12 teacher labor market remains an open question.
Previous recessions had both immediate and delayed eﬀects on education employment
(Kraft and Bleiberg 2021). The U.S. Department of Education has advised states to
spend Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds by 2024 (U.S. De-
partment of Education 2021), creating a potentially large ﬁscal cliﬀ for states and dis-
tricts (National Conference of State Legislators 2021). Concerns about teacher stress
and burnout remain and employee separations appear to be on the rise again. Vaccine
hesitancy and new COVID-19 variants could unexpectedly cause further school closures
and economic slowdowns, tipping the economy back into a recession. We expect that
the COVID-19 recession and prolonged pandemic will continue to shape both prospec-
tive employees’ decisions whether to pursue a career in K–12 education and current
education employees’ decisions whether to remain in the profession. Going forward,
having nationally representative, detailed, and timely data will be essential to building
and sustaining a strong educator workforce.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was generously funded by the William T. Grant Foundation award G1098. We are
grateful to Jay Philbrick, Leo Gordon, and Mary Lau for their research assistance.

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