Distance learning affected disadvantaged students most. The teacher shortages are just piling on.

The kids hit hardest when the pandemic closed their schools are also among the most likely to start off the year at districts without enough teachers and other staff.

Many schools have all the teachers they need, data shows, despite a national uproar over a teaching shortage. But data suggests that districts with large numbers of Black, brown or poor students – the students who fell furthest behind in math and reading during remote schooling – could bear the brunt of the teaching vacancies.

Disadvantaged students are the most likely to enter classrooms over the next few weeks with new teachers, substitutes, teachers with the least amount of training, and a shrinking number of the most-experienced teachers, based on a USA TODAY analysis of available data and interviews with experts and teachers.

Schools serving high concentrations of kids of color and kids from low-income families have more anticipated vacancies on average, survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows.

More than 6 in 10 high-poverty elementary schools said they will be short teachers this school year, compared with 4 in 10 low-poverty ones, according to the federal survey data. And compared with schools where more than 75% of students are white, schools where more than 75% of students are nonwhite were also roughly twice as likely to report expected vacancies in English/language arts, math and biology/life science teachers.

Read more: An in-depth look at teacher shortage data

The shortages also appear to be worse in urban schools: As of late August, districts in the Baltimore, Chicago and St. Louis areas, for example, were short hundreds of teachers, teacher aides and bus drivers.

A concrete picture of exactly how many teachers are needed nationwide is elusive, although a combination of factors including pandemic exhaustion and a noxious political climate have led some teachers to leave their jobs.

The vacancies alone are an issue, and then there are the ripple effects – from the rush to hire inexperienced teachers to the stress those vacancies place on staff who are picking up the slack.

“That means it’s those populations of students whose learning is disproportionately impacted,” said Tara Kini, the chief of staff and director of state policy for the Learning Policy Institute, a research organization that studies teacher shortages. Kini noted that many of the greatest shortages predated the first year of distance learning and only worsened during the pandemic.

Some teachers leaving the field now said they simply couldn’t take it anymore.

Conor Geiger, 23, said his high-poverty charter school was so short-staffed last year that he couldn’t give his students the one-on-one attention they needed. He left the job over the summer after a year, largely because he said he felt helpless.

Most students in his high school history class were still learning core reading and writing skills, he said, and many were eligible for special education.

“I worry for my students, what’s going to happen to them,” Geiger said, but “the stress was unmanageable.”

During the pandemic, low-income students of color spent far more time in remote learning than their white peers. Their math and reading skills took a tremendous hit: According to a recent analysis comparing 2021-22 test scores with those from previous years, the performance of Black and brown children suffered most.

Schools are now tasked with the immense responsibility of catching these children up, which means stability in their classrooms is especially critical.

Sitting at a roundtable in her San Jose, California, math classroom a week into the new school year, high school math teacher Hong Ha Hoang said – on the verge of tears – that she remembers when the pandemic shut down schools on March 13, 2020, because she was celebrating Pi day the day before the holiday with her students. Hoang never saw her students – many of whom are English-language learners, qualify for free- and reduced-price school lunches and are either Latino or Vietnamese – again.

“It actually breaks my heart how many students have come into my class since we came back to school, and said, ‘Hey Ms. Hoang, I know you care a lot about us learning math, but I did not pay attention to any of my classes last year or the year before. I just logged on a Zoom, turned off my camera and left,” Hoang said.

“I feel like now – more than ever – we need to focus on ‘What does it mean to learn again?’ and ‘What does it mean to believe in ourselves again?"

Achievement gaps: These testing disparities were already growing. COVID added fuel to the fire.

Why some teachers are leaving

Since the start of the pandemic, fewer than half of all teachers agree the “stress and disappointments” of their jobs are worth it. That is a significant decline from the three-fourths of teachers who said the same thing in previous years, according to annual educator surveys from the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.

That’s nearly as problematic as not having enough teachers: “Low morale matters in and of itself, whether or not teachers quit,” said Heather Schwartz, RAND’s director of the Pre-K to 12 educational systems program and a senior policy researcher. Almost half of the teachers who voluntarily stopped teaching ahead of retirement in 2020 did so because of pandemic-related stress, RAND’s data suggests.

Geiger, in Philadelphia, said the only reason he didn’t quit in the middle of his first year is because he loves his students and didn’t want them “to be stuck without a teacher.”

As an undergraduate political science major, Geiger became fascinated with education policy and philosophy. He’d done some tutoring in high school and worked as a research assistant studying the federal Head Start prekindergarten program, experiences that clinched his interest in becoming a teacher. So, he pursued a master’s degree in education at the University of Pennsylvania, intent on eventually teaching in a Philadelphia public school.

He began that stint last fall, but it was difficult from the start. Roughly a quarter of his students were absent on any given day, and the ones who did show up would often act out or struggle to concentrate. There weren’t enough staff to help respond to the antics, let alone students’ mental health needs. According to Geiger, three of the school’s students were shot to death last school year – one of whom he’d taught directly.

“I very much wanted to stay teaching in the city. I really wanted to try to work with students who needed more support,” said Geiger, whose master’s thesis focused on building literacy skills for students struggling to read. “But it was almost impossible to do that.”

Now, Geiger works in the nonprofit world.

Geiger is one of thousands of educators who quit teaching after the end of the last school year, joining the roughly 300,000 public-school staff who left the field between February 2020 and May 2022, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal labor statistics.

And the vacancy numbers – combined with existing research on attrition – suggest they disproportionately worked in poor communities. It builds on a trend from before COVID-19. Some pre-pandemic research found that in any given school year, high-poverty schools lose roughly 20% of their teachers; by comparison, roughly 8% of teachers leave each year nationally. The country’s public schools employ roughly 3.5 million teachers.

High-poverty schools also are more likely to grapple with shortages of substitutes and other support staff, the federal survey data indicate.

Hoang, who has taught for five years and is a participant in Teach for America, was finally able to use her first free prep period – built into her schedule to prepare for the classes she teaches – on the sixth day of the school year. The first five days she spent each of her planning periods subbing for fellow math teachers. Some were exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19, she said.

The district doesn’t have a teacher shortage, but substitutes aren’t always accessible. The East Side Union High School District, which has 20,000 students across 19 schools, has just 70 substitutes in its pool, and some aren’t taking up offers to fill in for absent teachers, said Glenn Vander Zee, the district’s superintendent.

“So that means teachers are taking their time out of their prep periods to sub for another class, and that means that we end up prepping after school,” Hoang said. “We also are low on supervisors, so I supervise my lunch and brunch now.”

Despite the additional work, Hoang said she recognizes that being a Vietnamese teacher in a school that enrolls mostly Vietnamese and Latino students, many of whom are from low-income families, could inspire other students to become teachers and broaden their ideas about success after high school. She wants the best for all the district’s math students and is concerned about students who can’t build relationships with their teachers during the first few days of the school year.

“We can try our best, but I think the best case scenario is to have their teacher,” she said. “We don’t want to lower expectations. We want to make sure students have the skills they need after they graduate so we’re working harder than ever to support students to reach those goals."

Teach for America is designed to help fill teacher vacancies. The program often sends its members, who have limited training, to high-poverty districts. For example, Hoang taught at a school on a reservation in New Mexico before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017.

Teachers in the program have to commit to only two years of teaching, and even though it’s a way to help districts who don’t have enough teachers, one Teach for America Bay Area leader said her team is especially focused on holding on to their teachers this school year. In the hallway of the high school where Hoang teaches, Adrian Breckel, a managing director of programs at Teach for America Bay Area, said the program’s leaders are “on retention watch."

States, districts try to fill teaching jobs by reducing standards

In some regions and states, although the exact number of job openings is difficult to quantify, districts are taking drastic measures anyway to combat a perceived teacher shortage. Some in rural Texas have adopted four-day weeks to better attract and retain teachers. Florida created a pathway into teaching for military veterans without bachelor’s degrees.

“We know from decades of research that students of color and students living in poverty are routinely assigned to be taught by teachers with less experiences, less qualified and less effective,” said Heather Peske, president of the nonpartisan nonprofit group National Council on Teacher Quality.

“They’re making knee-jerk reactions to lower entries to teaching,” Peske said, suggesting lawmakers made rash moves without supply and demand data.

Teacher shortages, burnout: Texas school district to adopt a 4-day week

That trend looks likely to continue.

Since the beginning of last year, the number of states exempting prospective teachers from prerequisites, such as content tests that show their mastery of the topic, grew, according to research collected by Peske’s group.

Researchers there have seen at least 12 states backing away from content licensure test requirements for teachers since March 2021, said Nicole Gerber, a spokesperson for the NCTQ. In March 2021, all but eight states required people wanting to be elementary teachers to pass a content test for licensure, and all but 10 states required all aspiring middle and high school teachers to pass a content test for licensure, with some exceptions, researchers there found.

"And, as the regulating authority over teacher preparation, states play an essential role in ensuring that their teacher prep programs are delivering new teachers who meet state standards," according to March report on teacher preparation policies from the NCTQ.

Many districts are taking a more traditional approach: offering signing bonuses, some as high as $22,000. Analyses from Burbio, a company that tracks schools’ responses to COVID-19, suggest July and August have seen “a marked increase in the size and duration of these” incentives. But these initiatives could lure educators away from schools with fewer resources that serve students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“Districts with the highest-need students are often training grounds for teachers who then go to wealthier districts,” said Henry Tran, an associate professor in the Department of Education Leadership and Policies at the University of South Carolina and co-editor of a new book called "How did we get here?: The decay of the teaching profession."

All of this points to an uptick in either underprepared or overwhelmed educators in schools at a time when the stakes of teaching are especially high.

Schools are now under immense pressure to catch kids up in what’s hoped to be the first close-to-normal year since the start of the pandemic. Almost all students will be learning in classrooms, and pandemic relief dollars – which some districts are using to deal with the vacancies – are flowing.

But without effective, high-quality teachers in all schools, disadvantaged students will struggle to get past the damage the pandemic did.

Teacher shortages aren’t uniform – and neither is the data

There isn’t reliable national data for tracking teacher vacancies. And some states even lag others in efficiently tracking teacher supply or whether educators are qualified to teach the classes they’re teaching, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Evaluating states for their data collection practices, researchers at the council found that in December,  only 16 states published teacher demand data. The number has grown slightly this year. For example, Florida and Utah have newly published data on teacher demand.

Researchers are left with a patchwork of data sources, which makes it difficult to fully understand the national landscape of teacher shortages. As RAND’s Schwartz put it, the story of teacher shortages is “annoyingly complicated.”

For example, some states are dealing with long-standing shortages in subjects including special education, math, science and English language development. In an analysis of survey data last year, the Learning Policy Institute found that the number of states reporting shortages in these areas grew slightly.

Then there are the newly created positions including classroom aides, tutors and mental health professionals – driven by the influx of pandemic relief dollars – that districts are hiring for, a survey from the RAND corporation shows.

All of this is taking place amid a yearslong wave of retiring veteran educators and is compounded by persistent churn among novice ones. Teachers have always left the field at relatively high rates – about 8% every year, and turnover is particularly high among educators still in their first five years of teaching.

Plus, early in the pandemic, districts reduced or suspended hiring, leading public-school employment to its lowest level since 2000. There were also a lot of temporary absences with teachers calling in sick or having to take care of family members or during the pandemic, which contributed to perceptions of a national shortage.

Adding to that stress are shortages in other staffing areas, such as custodians and bus drivers. Close to a third of the nation’s school districts have vacancies in transportation or custodial staff this school year, according to the federal School Pulse Panel conducted in June.

In some cases, districts have had to suspend or consolidate routes – and that could mean missed opportunities for learning for children without other options for getting to school. Research has found children who take the bus have fewer absences.

Christine Doucette, who has driven school buses in Connecticut for 25 years, worries about the impacts the roughly 1,000-driver shortage in her state will have on students. She knows the name of every student on her route and takes seriously her responsibility of both transporting them safely and being a friendly face they associate with their learning experience.

“I'm the first thing they see that they associate with school every day,” Doucette said. “I’m driving, but I also listen. I always tell them, ‘if you guys need to talk, stay on the bus. I'm not a counselor, but I'm here to listen.”

At least a few teachers working where students’ needs are acute are sticking it out – even under tough circumstances.

In San Pablo, California, Mary Jane Gordan is filling in – on a long-term substitute teaching assignment – in a kindergarten class at Bayview Elementary School.

The district where she works enrolls many Latino and Black students from high-poverty neighborhoods. Substitutes there aren't picking up long-term assignments, said Ryan Phillips, a district spokesman.

Gordan, a retired lawyer who has been a substitute teacher in the West Contra Costa School District for several years, said she thinks it's a disservice, particularly to younger kids, "to have just a stream of people subbing for a short amount of times."

Dive deeper: Here's what the data says about teacher shortages

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Teacher shortage affects these disadvantaged students the most