The Education Epidemic

Plenty of diseases come and go through society as we develop vaccines and immunities, but one epidemic that hasn’t left is the critical understaffing of educators. While infections might have a direct cause identified down to the bacterial level, the reasons for teachers leaving aren’t easy to pinpoint or solve. It is estimated that nearly 20% of teaching professions are vacant across the United States, leading to other teachers filling the gap, taking on more students, and leaving due to their stress. Even though more teachers are being hired every year, almost equal numbers of teachers leave. With less and less students studying education, where are these teachers coming from, and how qualified are they to be dealing with the students? While this problem spans the entire United States, I’ll be taking some time to focus on Texas, a primary state falling victim to a shortage of teachers with a large proportion of students to meet the needs. In this study, we’ll be taking a look at the attrition of teachers, unemployment hires, and job-to-job flow networks to comprehend where teachers are hired from and pinpoint the critical conflicts with the educational field.

To begin analyzing this topic, the job-to-job flow network from the U.S. Census Bureau was utilized. First, overall hires in the Educational Services field were observed in a job-to-job flow format, determining where new hires were coming from when being employed in the Texas education system. Then, the statistics surrounding how many of these total hires in the last few decades were from an unemployment spell were then pulled. This did not provide all of the data needed for this analysis, however, and only indicated a baseline understanding of job-to-job flows in the field and the total unemployment hires.

To intake more information regarding the Texas education system, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) website came in handy. The Texas Education Agency provides a report of the attrition–or the amount of teachers that did not return–as well as new hires in total number and a percentile since 2011. This data was indisputably important in my research as it indicated trends over time and also helped to observe the number of teachers who would not return to the field by year.

An important distinction to make in this research is that the TEA focuses on primary and secondary education, while the findings from job-to-job flows and unemployment hires take all Educational Services, such as postsecondary education. This makes comparing these values potentially inaccurate to real ratios, but still significant enough to each other to emphasize an ongoing crisis in primary and secondary educational staffing. This only amplifies the need for more data surrounding educational services to best meet the needs of students.

This data was compiled together into multiple spreadsheets, one highlighting the intake of employees to Texas, one with unemployment inflow on a national level, and an entire manually compiled sheet of data including attrition, new hires, total teachers, and total unemployment hires to Texas. To compile the network data, RStudio was used to clean and visualize the flow of hires. To observe values on a simpler scale, such as using line graphs and bar plots, the spreadsheet was integrated into Excel to create figures plotting two variables together over time.

In order to analyze the results and findings of this research, we will be putting our observations into two parts, first focusing on job-to-job network flows into Texas to get an idea of where and how teachers are being employed, and then observing short staffing via Census and TEA integration.

Understanding where the bulk of educators are coming from is an integral part of beginning the research process, as this inflow could begin to indicate where the problem sources from. Below is a general representation of the inflow of educational services occupations to Texas based on data in the third quarter of 2023.

This national map scale analysis begins to paint a new picture of our data intake. While California is still highly recognized as a high-inflow state, New England has become more significant. Areas like New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are painted in a new light. These states have a slightly higher amount of hired employees from unemployment in Texas compared to states that are closer in proximity like Kansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Observing where the hires in unemployment are sourced from along with the general job-to-job inflow to California can help single out states that are being focused on for the hiring process, indicating how much a workforce by state could impact the culture created in the educational field.

 By taking this unemployment information and integrating it with statistics from the TEA, we can begin to demonstrate in more detail the extent of the short-staffing crisis in not only Texas but across the United States and potentially even globally. The line graph below indicates the trend of attritions (non-returning teachers) to new hires in primary and secondary school districts in Texas from the school years between 2011 and 2022.

There is a clear trend between increasing unemployment rate hires to Texas educational systems, attrition rates, and flow trends of where educators are hired. All of this information can be compiled into an analysis of where teachers are coming from, why, and how long they remain before leaving the workforce. If I were to analyze this information again, I would want to create a better representation of unemployment data to general educational services data or limit my data pool to exclusively primary and secondary education services to provide a better description of trends in the state.

Many teachers are not satisfied with their workplace conditions, increasing misbehavior in adolescents, and local governments turning schools into political battlegrounds for personal gain. The public education system has been going through a slow-burning crisis for years, similar to diseases that spread through populations and wipe them out over time. This study does not even begin to address student impacts, such as violence in schools, pricing of education, or drop-out rates. This research should only be one stone on a path that leads its way to a better comprehension of educators and their relationships with students, their qualifications, and the needs that must be met to keep the public education system afloat. Without schools, how will children learn? Just as the world came together to swiftly join hands (six feet apart, of course) and work against the COVID-19 pandemic, we should all work to ensure the safety and well-being of teachers and students alike in schools, or we could be facing yet another pandemic through the social realm–which would be much harder to cure.