In 2020, as the pandemic unfolded, many of us expected teacher shortages to surge. Schools were closing, reopening, going virtual, or hybrid. Stress was high, burnout was palpable. It seemed like the perfect storm for teacher shortages. But when I went looking for the data to establish a baseline, meaning actual numbers on teacher shortages across states, I found something surprising: I didn’t.
The U.S. Department of Education publishes an annual list of Teacher Shortage Areas, and curiously, most states report shortages in nearly every subject area. That raised more questions than it answered. So, I conducted a scan of every state department of education website to find state-reported data on actual teacher vacancies. I found that only two states—Colorado and Illinois—had publicly available data on actual teacher shortages.
At the moment when policymakers needed clarity the most, we lacked basic visibility into the teacher labor market. Since then, tracking teacher supply and demand data has become a regular exercise—not just for me, but for researchers across the country. Recently, in collaboration with Dr. Paul Bruno (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Dr. Tuan Nguyen (University of Missouri), we conducted a national scan to assess whether states are now collecting the core indicators necessary for strategic, data-informed policymaking and workforce planning (Bruno & Nguyen, forthcoming). The good news: as of 2025, 15 states publicly report teacher vacancy data.
The less good news still means that the majority of states lack timely, transparent information about the scale of their workforce gaps. And where workforce data exist, often they only tell part of the story.
A workforce equation with missing variables
In recent years, researchers have made important progress understanding the demand side of the teacher workforce equation–turnover, attrition, vacancies. Teams in Washington, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Michigan partnered with state agencies to analyze teacher turnover, one of the key drivers of demand. Washington state went a step further, leveraging novel estimation techniques to deliver one of the first near real-time estimates of teacher vacancies, an encouraging model for what’s possible.
But as my ECON 101 students know, a shortage is not just about demand. It's the imbalance between demand and supply.
Where are new teachers coming from?
Who is in the preparation pipeline?
When will they enter the workforce?
In which subjects or in which regions?
The most consistent source of data on teacher supply is the federally collected Title II dataset, which tracks enrollment and completion in teacher preparation programs. But Title II data lags by two years, offers limited granularity, and has faced reliability concerns–at one point being temporarily pulled offline. As of the date of publication of this piece, the most recent available Title II dataset is from the 2023–2024 academic year.
That means that unless states are systematically collecting their own data from teacher preparation programs, the most current view of their teacher pipeline is two years out of date. In our national scan, only eleven states provide any public evidence of collecting more current, program-level teacher pipeline data.
Without timely insight into both supply and demand, state leaders are left making high-stake decisions with incomplete information. Decisions about funding, incentives, and program expansion are often made with outdated information. In other words, we’re flying blind.
Craft Insights
Craft is working to develop alternative solutions: models that validate data as it’s generated, rather than a year after the fact, to move from reactive to responsive data practices in workforce development, a shift that could be pivotal in helping policy match the existing need in the field.
As part of Craft Education, Craft Insights is a dedicated research and analytics initiative focused on shedding light into workforce needs and investigating equitable pathways in critical sectors, like education and healthcare. States and communities need better infrastructure and better insights to make more effective and timely decision-making possible.
As part of our research portfolio, we seek to:
- Improve visibility into both workforce supply and demand.
- Link fragmented datasets to create more complete system views.
- Provide practical data tools that researchers and policymakers can use.
- Publish transparent, methodologically rigorous research and technical documentation.
- Elevate foundational knowledge so that more stakeholders can engage meaningfully in workforce conversations.
The teacher workforce is an example of a crisis that generated urgency without much visibility, which has led in many cases to reactive policymaking. Craft Insights seeks to contribute to the transformation of insights into shared, transparent, and actionable data infrastructure to foster more proactive decision-making.
This piece is not just a blog post analyzing teacher workforce data gaps. It’s an invitation to rethink how we measure the health of our workforce, to collaborate on building better analytic tools, and to join us as we develop more of Craft’s Insights.
This is just the beginning.
