Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

What happened to all the teachers?

Kindergarten at Martinez Elementary School

L.E. Baskow

Kindergarten teacher Raeleen Martinez conducts an interactive story time with her students in their room at Martinez Elementary School on Tuesday, October 7, 2014. .

Clark County’s teacher shortage is affecting the schools that most need good teachers.

The school district has struggled to fill more than 600 full-time teaching positions since last year, a problem that overwhelmingly affects Southern Nevada’s poorest students. Clark County lets new teachers choose the schools where they’d like to work, and few choose the poorest.

Throughout the district, teachers are getting harder and harder to find and keep. Why? It’s a complex mix of local and national factors, many of which are beyond the district’s control.



1. Not many people want to be teachers anymore.

It’s not a statistic that typically makes headlines, but it’s one of the most important trends in education: Since the 1970s, students at colleges in America have earned fewer education degrees, the traditional path to becoming a teacher. The reason? Teaching increasingly is perceived as a thankless, low-paying job. Teachers largely are the target of people’s fury over the country’s declining education system.

2. Teachers who do leave the profession leave early in their careers.

The relatively few people who do enter teaching tend not to last long. Nearly half of teachers in America either switch schools or quit the profession by their fifth year in the classroom, costing taxpayers an estimated $2 billion each year to train and recruit new teachers.

To add insult to injury, teachers are most effective after five years of teaching, research has shown.

Changing schools isn’t much better, either. Research has found that regular turnover creates a negative school environment and hurts student performance.

3. Nevada is facing its worst teacher shortage ever.

It doesn’t get any more stark than this. In 2004, when the county was riding high on the valley’s population boom, the Clark County School District had only nine subjects for which it didn’t have enough teachers. A decade later, after the Great Recession stalled growth and slashed salaries, that number soared to more than 50. Many of the empty positions are for special education.

4. Many Clark County teachers are retiring.

Part of what makes filling empty teacher positions difficult in Clark County is that veteran teachers are retiring almost as fast as the district can hire new teachers.

A decade ago, the number of teacher retirements hovered around 250 per year. Now, it’s almost twice that.

Not only do the retirements roughly equal the number of empty positions the district needs to fill each year, they also mean hundreds of classrooms are losing experienced teachers.

5. More teachers are coming into the profession through nontraditional routes.

In the face of huge teacher shortages, school districts across the country are turning to programs designed to get instructors into classrooms as quickly as possible.

One of the biggest ways to do that is hiring people who haven’t earned education degrees, and training them to become teachers. This is known as an alternative route to licensure.

Programs have exploded in prevalence since about 1998. The Clark County School District makes extensive use of its ARL program, graduating about 200 new teachers every year.

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