The Teacher Shortage Could Become a Vicious Cycle

The fact that Florida is 9,000 teachers short this year has gone viral. The Florida Department of Education released a report this week listing more than 9,000 projected vacancies for teaching positions. This is just the most recent alarm bell ringing about the sorry state of the teaching profession, but also likely represents some especially aggressive attempts by the state to muzzle what teachers can say. 

But the problem is bigger than the sunshine state, 2021-22 was one of, if not the hardest year for teachers ever. But Bryan Hogan on twitter has an insight that seems especially apt at this moment.

Good teachers are leaving. The teachers who are able to leave, to find jobs that compensate them appropriately for their skills, are leaving. Their roles will be filled with the teachers who are left and with new teachers, which is already an incredibly hard year of teaching, and then poor student behavior is likely to become even worse, which will only increase the rate of burnout, and the teachers left will become even more desperate to leave the profession.

Michelle Cummings broke down the areas that she sees which need to be fixed in our interview, but is it possible to do that quickly enough to stem the bleeding? If our current political progress is anything to go by, it seems unlikely, and that could lead to a slow spiral downward in an area which has already experienced a lot of trouble.