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State Teacher Shortages 2024 Update

Teaching Positions Left Vacant or Filled by Teachers Without Full Certification

Published

July 31, 2024

By Tiffany S. Tan Ivett Arellano Susan Kemper Patrick

Empty classroom with a chalkboard and teacher's desk.

STATE DATA

State-level data and a full description of their sources can be found in the PDF.

To understand how states are experiencing teacher shortages around the country, the Learning Policy Institute reviewed teacher workforce reports and state agency documents covering the most recent school years. These state-specific data sources are used to estimate the number of teachers not fully certified for their teaching assignments as well as count the number of unfilled teaching positions reported by each state. State laws typically specify that teachers who are not fully certified can be hired or assigned only if a fully certified teacher is not available. Therefore, both data points provide a strong indicator of the severity of shortages, but not all states report these data.

Based on the latest available data from the states with published information, 49 states plus the District of Columbia employed an estimated 365,044 teachers who were not fully certified for their teaching assignments. Thirty states plus the District of Columbia had published data on vacancies, with 41,920 unfilled teacher positions. (See Table 1.) These estimates indicate that, at a minimum, 406,964 positions were either unfilled or filled by teachers not fully certified for their assignments, representing about 1 in 8 of all teaching positions nationally.

Table 1. Teachers Without Full Certification and Unfilled Positions for All Reporting States — Source: Learning Policy Institute analysis of state-reported data sources (see Table 2). Total number of teachers drawn from U.S. Department of Education. (2023). Full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers. The data source is the National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, “State Nonfiscal Public Elementary/Secondary Education Survey,” 2022–23 v.1a.

State Teacher Shortages 2024 Update: Teaching Positions Left Vacant or Filled by Teachers Without Full Certification by Tiffany S. Tan, Ivett Arellano, and Susan Kemper Patrick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Core operating support for the Learning Policy Institute is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.