🎶School’s out for summer.🎶 But many teachers may not be coming back into their classrooms this fall. In states as different as Mississippi and New York, school districts are struggling to hire and retain educators for the nation’s public schools. In Mississippi, students in some rural districts are expected to go without teachers for their classes entirely. Instead, they learn subjects like geometry from pre-recorded video lessons. According to the Mississippi Department of Education, there are almost 2,600 teacher vacancies around the state, which also has the lowest average salaries for educators in the country. The Jackson Public Schools District is using its recent boost in state rankings as a point of interest to lure educators to the area, but officials there still struggle to compete with better paying school districts in nearby states like Texas, Louisiana and Tennessee. New York, which has significantly more money for its educators, is also struggling. Pandemic burnout has led to many teachers leaving school districts faster than they can be replaced. The state senate passed the TEACH Act earlier this year in the hopes of addressing the state’s expected 180,000 teacher shortage over the next decade. One major issue compounding the shortage is that fewer college students are majoring in education now than they did two or three decades ago. Teaching isn’t as attractive of a profession as it once was, with political attacks ramping up and stagnant salaries deterring students from considering education as a path before they’ve fully entered the professional world. These issues are exacerbated when teachers suffer from a poor student loan debt-to-earnings ration in some states.
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