Mississippi's teacher shortage is evolving
Final thoughts on one of the greatest challenges in Mississippi public schools
This is the first Policy Classroom piece I’ve published in a while and it will also be my last. I recently accepted a job offer to run policy and communications for the Vermont Agency of Education, and I will be returning to my home state in the coming days. I will continue to follow Mississippi politics from afar. But I will also soon have minimal bandwidth to share research and commentate on what it all means for kids in Mississippi. Here’s my last chance. To complement (and expand on) my recent Mississippi Today Ideas essay, I wanted to go into a little more depth on an issue that, as a former educator, is near and dear to my heart.
A few years ago, teachers started quitting the classroom at much higher rates.
According to the Southern Regional Education Board, the average Mississippi school district lost nearly 1 in 4 teachers (23.7%) during the 2021-2022 school year—nearly twice as many as the year before (13.1% in 2020-21). A similarly high rate in 2022-23 (23.3%) suggests this is a distinctly post-pandemic trend.
Not all teacher turnover is bad. There are plenty of situations in which it can be mutually beneficial for an educator and a school to part ways. People also retire. But in the context of a pre-existing critical teacher shortage (even before the spike in turnover, 89 out of 148 Mississippi school districts were classified as “Geographical Critical Shortages Areas” in 2020-2021), an 80% increase in departures means that many school districts increasingly have to rely on a revolving door of relatively inexperienced educators to staff their classrooms (if they can find teachers at all).
Mississippi’s educator pipeline is becoming more transient and less predictable, and policymakers are rapidly accepting this new status quo. They’re even encouraging it: a recent reform to the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi (PERS) will simultaneously boost retirement benefits for teachers (and other public employees) who work for less than 10 years while significantly reducing benefits for those who stick around for at least a decade.
The legislature has also failed to increase the minimum statewide salary schedule for teachers since 2022, and Mississippi is once again ranked 51st nationwide in teacher pay (after passing the largest teacher pay raise in state history in 2022 Mississippi briefly went up to 48th for the 2022-2023 school year).
None of this is a recipe for cultivating lifelong educators.
We should be careful about accepting a less experienced teacher workforce as the status quo. There are plenty of talented rookies out there. But anyone who has led a classroom knows that teaching is not a plug-and-play profession. There is a steep learning curve, and additional experience usually translates to more effectiveness and improved student outcomes. That is not the direction Mississippi is heading in.
Mississippi’s critical teacher shortage is evolving
There is no hard and fast definition of a “critical teacher shortage,” but it’s clear that Mississippi has been facing one for a while. When I moved to the state and began researching the educator pipeline in 2019, the problem was a rapidly declining supply of new teachers entering the classroom—a trend that began in the years following the Great Recession and notably mirrored the sharply declining value of teacher salaries in Mississippi.
That’s not really the issue anymore.
Early in the pandemic, Mississippi loosened requirements to become a licensed teacher. In March 2020, the State Board of Education temporarily waived testing requirements to enter an educator preparation program (EPP) and to earn a license after completing an EPP (the journey to becoming a licensed teacher involves a lot of testing). At the same time, the legislature also passed a law permanently loosening entrance criteria for EPPs by allowing prospective teachers with a 3.0 GPA to bypass testing requirements.
Rates of enrollment and completion at Mississippi EPPs proceeded to skyrocket. So did the number of licenses being issued by the Mississippi Department of Education.
Problem solved? For a moment, it seemed like it.
But just as the number of new teachers entering the classroom went up, the number of experienced teachers leaving the classroom nearly doubled. It may be tempting to look at these simultaneous trends as cancelling each other out and maintaining Mississippi’s educator pipeline. Unfortunately it is not so simple:
Testing requirements for earning a license were only waived temporarily. Any increase in new teachers attributed to waiving testing will therefore also be temporary. (Because licensure data is reported on a lag we do not yet have access to data for after the waivers would have applied). Meanwhile, the factors that appear to be exacerbating teacher turnover are more durable.
A revolving door of inexperienced educators is not a recipe for student success. Even if the influx of new teachers does keep pace with heightened teacher turnover (a big if), this means that students will increasingly be taught by less experienced teachers. Plenty of research demonstrates that experience translates to effectiveness in the classroom.
There is already a critical shortage of teachers in Mississippi. Schools that are already operating without math and science teachers need the influx of new teachers to outpace the teacher turnover rate—keeping up isn’t enough.
Don’t overcomplicate solving the teacher shortage
Basically, my point is that Mississippi public schools are already facing a devastating critical teacher shortage. The critical teacher shortage is also evolving and poised to become even more acute. Not good! So what can we do about it?
I spent the last six years studying Mississippi’s educator pipeline, and one of my biggest takeaways is that the critical teacher shortage is not that complicated.
The fundamental problem is simply that teaching is a difficult and demanding job with a high barrier to entry (remember all the tests?). Normally, when you have a demanding job with a high barrier to entry, you incentivize workers to endure these challenges by offering competitive compensation—think doctors or lawyers, or even someone working on an oil rig. But instead of offering a wage premium to entice teachers, Mississippi requires them to take a pay cut relative to what they could earn in the private sector or teaching in other states. This is known as a pay penalty.
So to recap, teaching is (1) difficult and demanding, (2) has a high barrier to entry, and (3) does not pay very well. That’s a hard sell for most people. To address a resulting shortage of teachers you can therefore:
Make teaching less difficult and demanding,
Lower the barrier to entry for becoming a teacher, and/or
Offer more competitive compensation.
What would this look like in practice?
Making teaching less difficult and demanding may sound a little vague and impractical, but there are concrete policies that can make a difference here. Teaching is a fairly unique profession in that educators of all experience levels have basically the same workload. First-year teachers have no on-ramp to the most difficult aspects of teaching (such as leading classroom instruction), while veteran teachers often spend just as much time on menial tasks (such as grading assessments) as they did at the beginning of their career. This isn’t a great division of labor. Fortunately, initiatives like Opportunity Culture are encouraging some districts to fundamentally rethink staffing structures within schools, both to support novice teachers as well as provide career advancement opportunities for veterans of the classroom.
Mississippi public schools have a lot to gain from this approach, and I’ve heard rumors that a large district will soon be hosting a pilot program to this effect. I think that’s great. But it also can’t be the only solution.
Lowering the barrier to entry for becoming a teacher is tricky. Testing for licensure, as well as testing to gain entry to an EPP is a legitimate obstacle for many prospective teachers. Eliminating these requirements (or allowing alternatives like GPA to substitute for a passing score) means more teachers entering the profession. But testing also serves a legitimate purpose—for instance, requiring prospective elementary teachers to pass the Foundations of Reading exam is one of the policies credited for Mississippi’s historic gains in literacy. The emerging concept of Performance-Based Licensure (in the words of MDE, “alternatives for educators who are positively impacting student outcomes yet face challenges in meeting licensure testing requirements”) has promise, but it’s generally hard to avoid a tradeoff between quality and quantity when it comes to eliminating criteria for becoming a teacher.
As I noted earlier, Mississippi policymakers opted for this strategy in 2020, temporarily suspending licensure testing and permanently creating a GPA-based alternative for entering an EPP. These policies resulted in an influx of new educators. I see no issue with these particular changes—suspending licensure testing was only temporary, and allowing a GPA-based alternative only applies to entering, not completing, an EPP. But going any further down this road (i.e., minimizing rigor in the licensure process to boost the number of new teachers) risks lowering expectations for instructional quality.
One of my chief concerns is that policymakers will increasingly rely on lowering the barrier to entry for teaching in order to avoid offering more competitive compensation.
This is already happening, and the results are coming into focus. Chronically low pay is pushing veteran teachers out of Mississippi classrooms, while a temporary suspension of testing requirements has facilitated an influx of new educators to take their place. From a pure numbers standpoint, maybe this can sustain Mississippi’s educator pipeline going forward. But it also means shifting our conception of teaching further away from highly-skilled professions like medicine, where high expectations and the accumulation of institutional knowledge have cemented American medical care as the envy of the world. You can’t say the same for American K-12 education, and there’s a reason for that.
The 4th grade reading sugar high
Mississippi public schools are finally getting national recognition for impressive gains in 4th grade reading proficiency on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). These results validate a series of controversial reforms in the 2010s (at least they were controversial at the time) to prioritize what’s known as the “science of reading” in early literacy instruction. The recognition is well-deserved, and other states should be taking notes.
Mississippi becoming a national leader in early literacy is obviously a compelling story. But the “Mississippi Miracle” refers solely to 4th grade reading proficiency—not other grades, not other subjects. The concern is that this singular achievement is already distracting from urgent and ongoing challenges in Mississippi public education. Mississippi students report some of the lowest ACT scores in the nation, postsecondary enrollment is in decline, and less than half of students go on to earn a high-value certificate, college degree, or industry-recognized credential—which, in turn, exacerbates a chronic labor shortage and one of the highest rates of poverty in the nation.
Even on the NAEP exam itself, folks tend to overlook the fact that by the time Mississippi’s previously-overachieving 4th graders get to 8th grade they trail the national average in reading. Don’t even get me started on achievement gaps (45% of White 4th graders in Mississippi were proficient in reading in 2024, compared to just 19% of Black students). In other words, these results might validate prioritizing the science of reading, but they do not validate Mississippi’s approach to public education as a whole.
There are a lot of areas for improvement in Mississippi public education. The most pressing should be the factor that impacts student achievement more than any other component of K-12 education: teachers.
As Governor Tate Reeves recently acknowledged, Mississippi teachers are preeminently responsible for the incredible gains in 4th grade reading. Now imagine what Mississippi public schools could accomplish if there wasn’t a critical teacher shortage.
Unfortunately, the Governor’s acknowledgement is just that—an acknowledgement. Without a commitment by policymakers in Mississippi to offer material incentives to strengthen the educator pipeline and make teaching a more attractive profession, districts will increasingly struggle to retain the teachers responsible for the “Mississippi Miracle.” The 4th graders who overperformed on the NAEP exam will move on to later grades, where access to licensed educators will become more precarious (teacher vacancies are generally more prevalent in middle school and high school than at the elementary level). By the time the next NAEP exams are administered, other states will likely make up ground by combining Mississippi’s approach to early literacy with existing compensation packages that are more competitive than in Mississippi.
With revolutionary progress in early literacy, Mississippi is genuinely on the cusp of becoming a national leader in education. Unfortunately, these efforts are being foiled by a critical shortage of teachers across the state. If Mississippi wants to remain at the forefront of educational progress in the 21st century, policymakers urgently need to invest in the teachers to make this happen.