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Executive Summary

Most mainstream media reporting on the supply and demand for K- 12 public schoolteachers across America ignores the dramatic differences for teachers at different grade levels and in different fields. Around the country, school officials typically report they have no trouble at all finding qualified people to teach in grades K-5 and middle and high school subjects like physical education, social studies, and English. However, school officials in every region of the U.S. frequently find it difficult if not impossible to recruit and retain qualified math, science, and special education teachers.

There are two reasons for the substantial and growing shortage of qualified teachers in fields like math and science. First, teachers and prospective teachers with this specialized knowledge can nearly always command much higher salaries in the private sector than they can in teaching. This is not nearly so true of other teachers. Second, the so-called “single salary schedule” used to determine teacher pay rates in the vast majority of school districts in the country does not allow school officials to offer higher pay for hard-to-fill teaching positions.

School officials who routinely fail to fill math and science teaching positions, or fill them only with teachers who actually specialize in other fields, would undoubtedly modify or scrap the single salary schedule, but for the entrenched opposition of teacher union officials, especially local and state officers of the National Education Association.

And teacher union officials have so far been very successful in blocking significant reforms of the single salary schedule because of state and local public policies authorizing them to act as the “exclusive” (monopoly) bargaining agents of all the K-12 teachers in a school district.

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