According to a report circulating this week “Indiana is not the only state facing a teacher shortage. It is a national and global issue.” This is said to be proven by a Google search returning blog posts and news stories in which some people claim there is a teacher shortage. But is that true? The claimants could be uninformed, misinformed, or could even have incentives to cry “shortage!” when there isn’t one. For instance, consider this U.S. government program for cancelling teachers’ loans:
34 CFR 674.53(c) enables Federal Perkins Loan borrowers who are full-time teachers of mathematics, science, foreign languages, bilingual education or any other field of expertise where the State educational agency determined there is a shortage of qualified teachers to qualify for cancellation of up to 100 percent of their loan repayment.
Hmm. But let’s not speculate. The federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics compiles data on public school enrollment and teacher employment. To verify the claims of teacher shortages in Indiana and nationally, I charted those data in the figure below.
For the United States as a whole, we see that there are fewer pupils per teacher today than at almost any time in the past 50 years. Put the other way, we currently have more teachers per pupil that we’ve had in the past—with the exception of a brief period last decade.
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