Photo by Kampus Production
The 74Million: Just before the winter holidays, the National Center for Education Statistics released new data on school staffing in the 2021-22 academic year. The data are provisional, but they represent the best look yet at how school staffing levels have changed over the course of the pandemic.
The new data show that schools have been adding teachers even as they serve fewer students.
The first graph below tells the national story. Student enrollments fell in the first full year of the pandemic and have not recovered. In total, student enrollments in public schools are down 2.6% (1.2 million) from the 2018-19 academic year. Meanwhile, those same schools employed 32,000 more teachers (a gain of 1.1%).
There’s wide variation across the country, but public schools in many states have been adding teachers while serving fewer students. The next graph compares the change in student enrollment versus the change in the number of teachers by state from the 2018-19 to the 2021-22 school years. Complete data were available for 47 states and Washington, D.C.; of those, 40 had a lower pupil/teacher ratio last year than they did in the last year before the pandemic. Data for all years isn’t available yet for three states — Illinois, Nevada and Utah — but they also appear to be lowering their student/teacher ratios.
The new NCES figures are from last school year, but they help answer some questions that other federal datasets can’t address.