America's Teacher Shortage
Overview
Sections
The politics section looks specifically at laws and policies affecting classroom instruction and teachers’ autonomy passed by states around the country, but focuses specifically on Florida and Texas. Speaking to educators, school board members, and a teachers’ union president, we found that these issues are only rising in visibility, notoriety, and severity as time goes on.
The teacher burnout section explores reasons why teachers leave the field, and what other factors contribute to teacher shortages. Many teachers have high levels of stress that leads them to become unable to sustain working in the profession.
Process
Our project began by thinking about different aspects of teacher shortages. We then chose our individual subtopics and began research on those respective topics.
In our research, we came across numerous pieces of primary data from states, legislatures, university studies, national surveys, and prominent think tanks, and individual school districts that we used to show the scale and specificities of the issue at hand. We also used this information to create infographics to give visuals to how massive of a problem the shortage has become and how much bigger it could get going forward.
We interviewed current teachers, former teachers, school administrators, politicians, school nurses, and leaders of teachers’ organizations in the process of formulating our research into narratives of factors affecting teachers around the country.