A version of the following commentary appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
News coverage concerning the teacher shortage in Missouri is evergreen and typically follows a familiar script: We have a teacher shortage because teaching is hard and teacher salaries in Missouri are among the lowest in the nation.
But what if that isn’t exactly the story?
The state has over 4,000 more full-time-equivalent (FTE) teachers than it had during the 2011–12 school year, but there are 30,000 fewer students now than there were then. Rather than a widespread shortage of teachers, there appear to be specific deficiencies in high-need subject areas and schools—a real problem, but one that requires a different policy approach than if the teacher shortage was widespread.
In St. Louis, Riverview Gardens is one of these high-need districts having difficulty filling teacher positions. Between 2018 and 2022, Riverview Gardens reported that 35 percent of its 100+ FTE teaching vacancies were left unfilled. Normandy Schools Collaborative had similar difficulties, with about 30 percent of its vacant positions being left unfilled. The vacancy rate at Jennings was about 14 percent and at Hazelwood it was about 6 percent. St. Louis Public Schools did not report data. The rest of the school districts in the region faced little to no difficulty finding teachers. In fact, 24 other districts in the region reported that they filled all of their vacancies.
More flexibility with regard to teacher pay and development could help alleviate shortage pressure in Riverview Gardens and other districts facing trouble. More specifically, there are two policy solutions Missouri ought to consider.
The first is targeted pay incentives to attract high-quality teachers to schools with the most severe challenges. This is a strategy used in other fields that face similar problems (e.g., it is used in healthcare to draw providers to high-need hospitals).
Of course, identifying high-quality teachers requires an evaluation system that meaningfully and accurately differentiates teacher performance. We lack such a system in Missouri, making it difficult to implement this kind of reform. But other states have such systems Missouri could imitate, including the Tennessee Educator Accelerator Model (TEAM).
Attracting excellent teachers to these schools with pay incentives could help solve several problems. It could fill their vacancies, improve student performance, and provide teachers with an in-classroom pathway to higher pay. For many teachers, the only promotion pathway is into administration. Teachers who excel in the classroom and want to remain there should have other advancement options.
Riverview Gardens and Normandy Schools could be an ideal match for a targeted pay-incentive program. In the period covered by the analysis, these districts had some of the highest percentages of low-income students in the state and were two of the lowest performing districts academically.
Targeted pay incentives have been tried elsewhere. When the Dallas (Texas) Independent School District offered sizable financial incentives to teachers who transferred to high-need elementary schools through its ACE program, there was immediate, significant, and durable improvement in student achievement.
A second policy option would be to ease the pathway for qualified professionals in other fields to switch into teaching careers. This would be particularly useful for filling open positions in hard-to-staff subject areas such as industrial technology or physics. Teachers in these fields are not developed in large numbers by traditional teacher-preparation programs.
Missouri does not appear to be facing a widespread teacher shortage. It has some areas of shortage, but also some areas of abundance. An effective policy response will involve focused solutions like targeted pay incentives and easing the pathway into teaching for career-switchers rather than sweeping measures.
