Idaho's Educator Landscape: How Is the State's Teacher Workforce Responding to Its Students' Needs?

Many school districts in the United States are facing severe teacher shortages (Bordonaro, 2017; Palmer, 2017; Seattle Pacific University, 2017; Whaley, 2017). In several states--including Idaho--the difficulty of hiring qualified candidates has expanded beyond historical high-need content areas such as special education and mathematics to include English language arts and elementary education (Cross, 2017). Several factors are contributing to these shortages, including an aging workforce, decreased enrollment in teacher preparation programs, and persistently high attrition from the profession (Goldring, Taie, & Riddles, 2014). In Idaho, schools struggling to fill vacancies increasingly hire less experienced and unlicensed teachers (Wootton, 2017). Meanwhile, local and state education agencies are exploring policies to support teacher recruitment and retention, such as a four-day school week or more robust salaries and a well-defined career ladder. Understanding how and where Idaho's teacher workforce has changed relative to the size and characteristics of its student population can inform state and local efforts to support teacher recruitment, development, and retention. To that end, this report describes statewide data from the 2011/12 through 2016/17 school years on changes in student enrollment and demographics, teacher preparation, the composition of the teacher workforce, and teacher turnover.