Jill Constantine

Nationwide teacher shortages continue to strain schools and present challenges for student learning. Fueled by the rate of retirements continuing to outpace new entrants into the teacher pipeline, 74 percent of public schools across the United States had difficulty filling at least one teaching vacancy with a fully certified teacher before the start of the 2024-2025 school year. In rural districts, hiring certified teachers can be even more challenging.

Teachers make a powerful difference in student learning. However, teacher quality varies widely even within the same school, where the best teachers can contribute up to three times as much to student learning in a year as the worst. Students taught by ineffective teachers for consecutive years can fall well behind their peers, and there is no magic curriculum or school structure that protects students from weak teaching. These facts are well understood in education. So, federal, stat...

Across the country, school districts struggle to maintain a pipeline of well-trained teachers. Traditional preparation programs--which historically pumped out a steady stream of college graduates who had completed many hours of requisite coursework and student taught in their final year--no longer provide enough teachers to replace the large cohorts leaving the profession. The situation has become more acute in the past decade as many districts have increased the number of teachers they hire ...