The state of South Carolina has seen a drastic increase in the number of vacant positions within the field of education in recent years.
As the shortage continues to grow and affects public school students across the field, the state legislature and Department of Education, as well as state colleges and universities, have made efforts to identify the problems that teachers are facing and how to mitigate them.
Having a shortage of educational professionals is not something new to South Carolina, but the problem has only been exacerbated in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the start of the 2019-20 academic year, there were 555 vacant positions in the education field across the state. Five academic years later, this number has nearly tripled to 1,612 vacancies, according to a report released by the South Carolina Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA).
The number of teachers departing the field has also steadily increased over the past five years. During the 2019-20 school year, the number of teacher departures was 6,649. This number had increased to 7,352 by the start of the 2023-24 school year, according to CERRA's report.
The number of departures for the past school year is three-and-a-half times more than the number of South Carolina college graduates who are eligible to enter the field, according to the same report from CERRA. While data for 2023-24 college graduates isn’t available yet, during the 2022-23 school year, just 2,081 students were able to enter the field.
Teacher shortages are particularly prevalent in rural school districts where the quality of teachers is typically lower, which can have a direct impact on a student’s education, USC associate professor of educational leadership Henry Tran said.
The quality of teachers is measured from a variety of different metrics, including experience, exam scores or student test growth scores, but all metrics tend to be lower in rural underfunded schools because these districts cannot afford to pay their teachers as much as other districts, Tran said.
“Every one of those metrics are typically worse and lower in schools where you have a larger concentration of high-poverty students or underrepresented and marginalized racial minority students or students with low prior academic performance,” Tran said.
Tran said public schools that are underfunded see a rotating cast of new and often less-experienced teachers because rural schools cannot afford to pay their teachers as much as more heavily-funded districts can.
"When they catch their stride a little bit the other people are like, 'I'll pay you this much,'" Tran said. “And the challenge that they (rural districts) described to me was, ‘Okay, let's say we give them a signing bonus of $3,000, or whatever. No matter what we do, the other districts can beat that, right?’ They can beat the amount, and their conditions are usually less challenging, so they have more resources."
The state is employing various methods to alleviate the teacher shortage and its accompanying problems in South Carolina.
According to South Carolina Department of Education spokesperson Jason Raven, the state legislature has taken steps to improve compensation for teachers.
“We are grateful for the steps the General Assembly and Governor have taken to increase teacher pay. Lawmakers have upped the minimum starting salary to $47,000 (increased from $42,500). We are supportive of the Governor’s push to increase the starting teacher salary in South Carolina to $50,000. Minimum teacher pay is up 47% since 2018-19 ($32,000),” Raven wrote in a statement to The Daily Gamecock.
The Department of Education has also employed measures to create a budget proviso with a model policy for school districts to eliminate cell phone usage by students during the school day.
Another measure is the expansion of access to instructional materials that promote student success through programs such as iLead, the Leader in Me and Medal of Honor.
The state department is providing more support resources for teachers, including the expansion of a pilot program launched this past school year in Richland County School District One.
“This year, we launched Project Raise Your Hand, a pilot program between our agency and Richland One. We had 63 participants provide 320+ hours of support in 10 R1 schools serving and supporting more than 50 teachers. We hope to expand this program to at least one more school district this school year,” Raven wrote in the statement.
Raven said retention is the department’s biggest priority and that the state department is trying to accomplish this by prioritizing multiple avenues to increase retention rates.
“Research and common sense tell us the number one influencer of student success is a high-quality teacher in the classroom. This is our priority. Compensation isn’t the only factor for retention, schools that are retaining teachers are doing it through great culture and an environment where they are supported,” Raven wrote in the statement.
At USC, the College of Education is also prioritizing and investing in several programs to help increase college enrollment and prepare students within the college for a future in the education field.
“When I look at what our college can do, it's making sure that we have robust undergraduate enrollment and making sure that we're supporting people that want to come into the profession from other professions and also helping stabilize them once they’re in the classroom so they don’t create a vacancy by leaving the profession early,” Dean of the College of Education at USC Tommy Hodges said.
One of the College of Education's programs is Carolina CAP, which stands for the Carolina Collaborative for Alternative Preparation. The program is geared toward those changing careers and provides alternative forms of preparation for adults switching job paths to be able to enter the field of education.
Carolina TIP, which helps recent graduates from USC adjust to the field with support from college faculty and staff, is another program offered by the college.
“We have a program called Carolina TIP, or Teacher Induction Program, that follows our graduates out into the classroom at no cost to them and provides one-on-one coaching and support in the first three years," Hodges said. "And that program throughout its life has retained far greater than 90% of teachers that took part in that program."
One class that education students take within their first three semesters of college is EDTE 201, titled Issues and Trends in Teaching and Learning, which focuses on the many critical issues that teachers face.
Nate Carnes, an associate professor of middle-level education and an EDTE 201 instructor at USC, said the goal is to expose students to a wide variety of issues and talk to them about “how you might grapple with these issues.”
“We touch a little bit on behavior management, but we also talk about compensation. We talk about public scrutiny," Carnes said. "We talk about holding the line so that teachers don't get, especially our younger teachers, don't get themselves in trouble relating to students too much or too casually."
Other classes within the college are hands-on, allowing students to apply what they've learned in their coursework to a real classroom with public school students under the supervision of the classroom teacher and professor, Hodges said.
“They are interacting with one another in real-time so they get a very authentic picture of what the profession looks like, and they get to hone their skills and their ability to teach there in the company of real kids in real classrooms with a real dynamic setting that you just don't get in many institutions,” Hodges said.
While much is still unknown about what teaching vacancies will look like throughout the state, USC is seeing improvements at the collegiate level.
Hodges said the College of Education has seen enrollment increase and that it is on track to have its highest enrollment numbers ever.
“We had a much larger freshman class in the fall of '22. We maintained that size in the fall of '23, and we're on pace to have a record-setting freshman class this fall," Hodges said. "So, we're doing really well in terms of our enrollment, and we'll be graduating a lot more students here in the next couple of years."
Raven added that the Department of Education's employees and advocates continue to listen to what teachers have to say and are working to fix the major issues.
“We want teachers to know we hear them, we respect them and we are taking steps to support them," Raven said in a statement. "Our agency is committed to elevating discourse surrounding the teaching profession.”