This week, the Florida State Board of Education approved a list of seven teacher certification fields as the Critical Teacher Shortage Areas for the 2022-23 school year. The seven are familiar to teacher shortage aficionados – English, Exceptional Student Education (ESE), Science – General, Reading, English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), Math, and Science – Physical (chemistry and physics).
But the state’s teacher shortage problems go far beyond those seven areas. During the academic year used by FLDOE staff for this year’s critical teacher shortage area analysis (2019-20), not a single teacher of Spanish graduated from any of the state’s approved teacher preparation programs. The number of elementary education teachers graduated from those programs was 674 fewer than the number of openings for elementary teachers estimated for this year, a shortfall of 30%.
The only field in which the teacher preparation programs graduated enough new teachers to meet the demand was music.
Of course, many districts raised their starting salaries substantially with financial help from the state starting in the fall of 2020 – and that hadn’t kicked in during the 2019-20 academic year examined for the new teacher shortage report.
Nevertheless, the report documents a profession in desperate trouble, and not just in the “usual” teacher shortage fields of math, science and ESE.
Bridge to Tomorrow 