Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com
Schools are in full swing. Classes are packed with students, but some are missing a full-time teacher.
If there’s a vacancy in most professions, another colleague takes up the slack. But teaching is unique. It’s impossible to make an unfilled teaching vacancy invisible since there are always 25 or 30 student witnesses.
As school begins in Iowa, the exact number of unfilled teaching vacancies is hard to determine. The Iowa Department of Education won’t release official numbers until late this year. So, is the teacher shortage a real problem, or nothing to worry about?
I think it’s more accurate to call the teacher shortage a crisis.
There’s a serious shortage of professionals willing to work in an occupation where they are not adequately compensated. According to the Economic Policy Institute, teachers earned 26.6 percent less than their college-educated, nonteaching peers in 2023. The institute calls that disparity a “teacher pay penalty.”
I call it a crisis.
But in Iowa, the “pay penalty” is not the only problem. Some legislators from the majority party have called teachers names like “groomers” or “pornographers,” and accused them of indoctrinating students in “woke ideology.” New graduates don’t want their careers attacked by politicians trying to score political advantage.
But it could get worse. If the state implements DOGE task force recommendations on merit pay and Iowa’s main public pension program, qualified professionals willing to teach will clog Iowa roads escaping.
Legislative actions can have serious consequences for our students. Here are a few anecdotal examples.
Fort Dodge Community school’s 8th grade has only one math and one science teacher for 250 students. Cedar Rapids schools are missing two elementary art teachers, one elementary music teacher, and one third grade teacher. In the high schools the district is missing one science, one math teacher, and four special education teachers. Southeast Valley High School is missing a family consumer science teacher.
Reporting on the number of teaching vacancies varies wildly. The state Department of Education boasted in a recent news release, “Iowa’s investment in a strong teacher pipeline is having a positive impact across the state.” The agency claims Iowa’s educator workforce “grew significantly by 10 percentage points” over twelve years, and that 98 percent of teacher vacancies were filled during the past school year. But those numbers include private and charter schools.
In contrast, Channel 5 news in Des Moines (We Are Iowa) reported on August 18, “Less than a week until school districts can begin their academic years, over 3,000 jobs are listed on the Iowa Department of Education’s hiring hub, “Teach Iowa.” Around 650 of those are in-classroom teaching gigs.”
Days before the school year began, WHO-TV news reported, “According to Teach Iowa, there are still over 500 classroom teacher positions that are unfilled across the entire state. Out of those, 30 are world language teachers.”
So, what can a district do if it can’t find a qualified teacher? The first choice is to find a qualified substitute. But by Iowa law, a long-term substitute can only fill a vacancy for 90 days.
I’m certainly not throwing shade at substitutes. They’re as essential for a school as they are for a sports team. Any subbing job is hard. Long-term subbing is even harder. There’s also a severe substitute teacher shortage. So, most schools scramble to find someone who will take the job.
For a district that can’t find a long-term substitute, there are few options—all of them bad. If the school is large enough for multiple elementary sections of a grade, they can combine sections. So, a class of 18 becomes a class of 36. In a small school, districts must consider combining grade levels. For example, that might mean 3rd and 4th grades combined.
At the high school level, it may mean having students take classes online or cancelling classes like physics or advanced math.
The Bible tells us, “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” The Iowa legislative majority sowed the wind by not adequately funding schools and repeatedly attacking teachers. Now, our kids are reaping the whirlwind of classrooms with no teacher.
Editor’s note: Patrick Kearney also addressed Iowa’s teacher shortage in a Bleeding Heartland post from early August.
Top image is by Photoroyalty, available via Shutterstock.