Where Have All The Teachers Gone?
For those of you of a certain age, you’ll recognize in the title of this week’s posting a small tweak of a classic folk song written by Pete Seeger. My version of the song spotlights an issue that has preoccupied me recently – the decline of teaching as an attractive option for young people planning their futures. I’ve written recently about a project several colleagues and I have been engaged in for the past 18 months or so. We’ve been interviewing teachers, teacher educators and administrators about what sustains them, what keeps them battling the strong headwinds – political, social and economic. We hope to extract from these conversations some words of inspiration about the rewards of the profession that might begin to draw more interest and attention to teaching as a worthy option.
I’ve spent the bulk of my time in recent months editing the transcripts of those conversations. I’ve been inspired by these educators’ sense of teaching as a mission, a calling, while at the same time quietly cursing the process of turning spoken language into readable prose. I needed a break from that work – a piece about the baseball playoffs and the triumph of small market teams over big budget juggernauts or about putting my garden to bed — but fate had other plans for me. One of the first items that greeted me when I opened my computer this morning came from New Hampshire where, for 11 years I taught, administered and prepared teachers for the state’s schools.
We’ve been returning to the state every summer for more than forty years, and I care deeply about the lives of its citizens, most specially its children, so this online article which I will share with you now https://indepthnh.org/2026/10/13/nh-teacher-workforce-facing-tough-recruitment-retirement-and-affordability-pressures-nhfpi/ drew me right back to this critical issue of the broken teacher pipeline. I will summarize it briefly, but I encourage you to read it in full to get the benefit of the supporting evidence it provides. It should be obvious to you that this is a national issue. The specifics may be unique to a place I love, but the basic problem affects every state.
The article reports that New Hampshire faces the prospect of recruiting more than a thousand new teachers every year because of teacher retirements and teachers leaving the field or leaving the state. At the same time, the number of teachers graduating from education programs in the state’s colleges and universities has declined by 50% over the last decade and currently stands at the shockingly low level of around 250. The causes of that decline, according to the article, are the growing gap between the earnings of teachers compared to those of graduates who enter other fields. The gap is particularly stark in comparative starting salaries across occupations.
I would add to these factors the decline of respect for teaching among the general population, the increasing stress on teachers from political pressures, the increasing quantification caused by the rise of testing, the lingering effects of the prolonged school closings during Covid and the growing impact of charter schools and vouchers on public education’s budgets.
That’s quite an army of forces to try to counter, particularly in the current atmosphere, but there’s one more that I find even more troubling. The growing decline of the teacher population actually serves the interests of powerful antiunion forces who see teachers’ unions as a major part of the Democratic tent. These same forces stand behind efforts to slash all forms of tax-supported government expenditure (think Doge) of which education is one of the largest. A teacher shortage invites the infusion of untrained low-paying non-union workers, as well as non-human, machine-based instructional approaches, like the teacherless high schools that are being proposed in cities around the country.
Teach for America, for all its flaws, was responsible for development a new respect for the work of teachers, one that drew new applicants who would never have considered teaching. We need a similar renewal, one based on the importance of human connection and relationship building at the core of all teaching and learning. We hope that hearing about the rewards of this work from role models who have stayed the course for decades and have felt enriched by it will begin the long process of righting the educational ship.
