In some ways, Utah is faring better than other states in dealing with its teacher shortage, according to a recent Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute report. But the research shows there are many ways to define a teacher shortage, and Utah still has some areas of concern.
Compared to other states, the report found Utah has one of the lowest teacher vacancy rates in the country. That means at the start of the school year, there are not a lot of unfilled positions compared to the number of students.
Another area where Utah is strong is overall educator retention rates. After the 2021-2022 school year, 90% of Utah teachers returned to the classroom. While this is slightly lower than the year before, report author and senior education analyst Andrea Brandley said it's still higher than most states.
“I think this is critically important when we think about the COVID-19 pandemic and the effect that had on teachers. I think there was a bit of an expectation that we would see a mass exodus of teachers from the profession,” Brandley said.
But while that did not happen, Brandley said vacancies alone don’t paint the full picture. For example, schools could increase class sizes instead of hiring a new teacher. In the fall of 2021, Utah had the highest student-teacher ratio in the country, according to the report.
A more common definition of a teacher shortage is not having fully-qualified licensed teachers in every classroom.
The report found that during the 2022-2023 school year, 13% of Utah teachers were considered “underqualified.” And that number varied greatly by district. It ranged from 32.7% in the Tintic School District in rural Juab County to 6.7% in the Iron County School District. At the individual school level, there was a range from no underqualified teachers to an entire staff that weren’t qualified. Overall, charter schools fared worse in qualified teacher staffing.
Some researchers have said Utah has a high rate of underqualified teachers compared to most states. But Brandley said it’s hard to compare qualifications since states have their own standards.
Being “underqualified” can mean a variety of things, according to Malia Hite, executive coordinator of educator licensing for the State Board of Education. It could mean a teacher has a professional teaching license and an endorsement to teach math, but is also assigned to teach a physics class and doesn’t have that endorsement. She said that can often happen in smaller rural areas where one person is covering multiple subjects.
On the extreme end, underqualified could mean someone with no teaching experience is hired on an emergency basis, which Hite said accounts for about 5% of Utah teachers.
Mary Burbank, director of The Urban Institute for Teacher Education at the University of Utah, is concerned by the number of underqualified people in the state’s classrooms. The ideal scenario, she said, is that teachers would be fully prepared for the classroom on day one.
“Districts don't typically want to hire people who are underqualified,” Burbank said. “If the alternative is to not have anyone in the classroom, then they're certainly going to choose folks who are on their way to being prepared.”
These employees are usually required by their school to get a license within a certain amount of time. But while they may be working towards proper certification, “it's hard to simultaneously learn that while you're doing the job of a full time teacher,” Burbank said.
To fix this problem, Burbank thinks there needs to be more collaboration between universities, school districts and education stakeholders to find a solution.
“We need to think differently about how we prepare teachers,” she said.
For Hite, the way to decrease underqualified teachers is to keep qualified ones. “What are the things that are pushing them out earlier than we would want?” she asked.
Qualified educators are more likely to stay in the profession than underqualified ones, according to the Gardner report. Early-career teachers also have a low retention rate.
Hite said the profession is “under attack from a lot of different directions” and she has anecdotally heard from people who quit because of that. And while Utah’s retention rate is higher than most states, Hite worries for the future.
Meanwhile, she is encouraged Utah had a smaller percentage of underqualified educators during the 2022-2023 school year than it did the year before.
Both Brandley and Hite were encouraged by Utah’s overall performance, but as Hite cautioned, “that doesn’t mean there’s not stuff to do.”
