The COVID-19 pandemic greatly exacerbated a long-standing and widespread teacher shortage in schools. By mid-2022, several indicators of teaching shortages and staffing stress were at record highs. Recent data from the School Pulse Panel (SPP) show that understaffing stress in schools has relented somewhat in the past year, though progress remains modest and uneven. The SPP also indicates that funding from the American Rescue Plan (ARP) has helped close some of these staffing gaps and address pressing needs in the nation’s schools.

While schools have been struggling to fill vacancies long before the pandemic due to chronic low pay and compensation, the stress of teaching during the pandemic made the teacher shortage even worse. A RAND 2022 report showed that 73% of teachers reported having “frequent job-related stress” compared with 35% of working adults, which can contribute to otherwise qualified potential teachers taking positions in other fields. This degradation of non-wage-related working conditions means that schools need to pay teachers more to retain them and adequately staff schools, yet this salary increase has not happened. In 2022, the teacher pay penalty—the gap in pay between teachers and similarly educated workers in other professions—hit a new high of 26.4%.

New School Pulse Panel data allow us to assess how school staffing has fared in the aftermath of the pandemic. Administered by the National Center for Education Statistics, the SPP has sampled school and district staff on a monthly basis since 2021. In August 2023, they surveyed 3,998 public elementary, middle, and high schools about staffing needs. Given the long-standing teacher shortage, the latest SPP data can be seen as an indicator of how effective the nation has been in alleviating long-run school staffing stress over the past year.

Figure A shows the percentage of schools that feel their school is understaffed entering the school years in August 2022 and 2023, including by the share of students that are in a minority group and by neighborhood poverty. (Note: we use the term “minority students” to be consistent with the terms used in the SPP survey.) The figure shows that feelings of being understaffed improved between 2022 to 2023, falling by eight percentage points. The improvement was relatively widespread, holding regardless of the share of minority students in the school. Feelings of being understaffed also declined in schools with lower neighborhood poverty, but there was no change in schools with higher neighborhood poverty.

The overall improvement may, in part, be linked to the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds provided through the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP). These funds—$122 billion in total—were intended to help PreK–12 schools safely reopen and to tackle learning loss and mental health challenges brought on by the pandemic. Figure B shows that 37% of schools surveyed in August 2022 reported that they created positions for the 2022–2023 school year using ARP funds. Of these schools, 15% created positions for academic interventionists, 14% created positions for mental health professionals, 7% created positions for special education, 7% created positions for instructional coaches, and 6% created positions for academic tutors. The creation of jobs using ARP funds was fairly similar across schools regardless of the school’s share of minority students or neighborhood poverty.

Unfortunately, the ARP did not solve shortages in certified teachers, and disparities in the extent of these shortages persist across schools. Figure C shows the percentage of public schools that experienced difficulty filling at least one teaching position entering the school years in August 2022 and 2023. Difficulty in filling vacancies declined slightly from 80% to 79% between 2022 and 2023. Underlying this modest decline, however, are larger declines in schools with less than 75% minority students and in schools in lower poverty neighborhoods. By contrast, schools with greater than 75% minority students experienced a six-percentage-point increase in difficulty filling teaching positions, and schools in higher poverty neighborhoods also experienced a four-percentage-point increase in difficulty. These findings suggest that long-standing disparities in teacher quality may have exacerbated over the last year, in which high-poverty schools suffer the most from a lack of credentialed teachers.

Taken together, the results suggest that while schools are rebounding from the pandemic in terms of staffing overall, improvements in the teacher shortage have been felt unevenly, with schools that are majority white and in high-income neighborhoods seeing larger improvements. A shortage of qualified teachers threatens students’ ability to learn and reduces teachers’ effectiveness. When the shortage is distributed so unevenly among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds, it hinders the U.S. education system’s goal of providing a sound education equitably to all children.