Florida’s State Board of Education will designate eight fields as “High Demand Teacher Needs” fields today. The problems in the teacher pipeline go far beyond those eight fields.

Today, Florida’s State Board of Education will designate Exceptional Student Education (ESE), English, General Science, English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), Reading, Physical Sciences, Math and Tech Education (CTE) as “High Demand Teacher Needs” for the 2023-24 school year. The High Demand Teacher Needs label replaces the “Critical Teacher Shortage Areas” label used in the annual report on this subject in previous years.

But Florida’s teacher shortage isn’t limited to the eight fields that the SBOE will designate today. Instead, nearly every field is drastically undersupplied by the state’s approved teacher education programs. The only exception to that is Music, for which the number of teacher preparation program completers is almost double the number of available job vacancies in a year.

In every other field, the state’s teacher preparation programs are graduating fewer than three-quarters of the individuals needed to fill anticipated vacancies. The situation is particularly bad in Spanish, General Science, the physical sciences (which include chemistry and physics), Earth/Space science, ESOL, Math, English and Physical Education. But in Florida there is a supply and demand mismatch even in Elementary Education, which historically has been oversupplied.

I will leave it to others to decide what effective remedies to this situation would look like. But as is the case with so much else about Florida’s public K-12 schools, the pipeline of teachers into our state’s public schools is not alright.