Reframing Systems to Thrive: Teacher Shortages in Post-Pandemic Schools

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic provoked crises within all social and economic sectors, casting a harsh light on the vulnerabilities and challenges across our health care system. The ripple effect following the initial pandemic crisis exposed the inequalities ingrained in our nation’s schools, including the national teacher shortage. As school leaders navigated new policies and procedures to keep students and employees safe upon returning to in-person learning, they simultaneously struggled with staffing demands between substitute teacher availability and filling teacher vacancies. The national media highlighted various methods across the country that state legislation and local education agencies engaged in to combat these challenges, ranging from increased salaries and stipends for new hires to national guardsmen/women serving as substitute teachers while on duty. During the 2022-23 school year, staffing gaps were projected to be higher, prompting even more decisive action from some states, such as waiving licensure or degree requirements to fill teaching positions. Other decisive actions included a number of rural school districts in Texas switching to a four-day school week in response to shortages. Research indicated a historical decrease in teacher candidates (Garcia & Weiss, 2019; Sutcher et al., 2016). The decrease in teacher candidates may be due to declining enrollment in university-based teacher preparation programs, low-wages, hard-to-fill positions in specialized content areas, and legislation restricting instructional content. However, the residual impact of the pandemic exacerbated the shortages and presented a new reality for schools across the nation. The teacher shortage prompted reflective and responsive action as school leaders entered new territory into not only how they can recruit and retain teachers, but also how to build systems of support for the entire school community with new initiatives designed to mitigate the staffing challenges.

In considering this from a systems-thinking perspective, general systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968) suggests that a system is a sum of its parts—self-correcting and self-regulating through dynamic and continuous interactions. Metaphorically, this is likened to semi-permeable membranes that are bombarded with inputs or demands, in which the system selectively absorbs and processes inputs and then returns an output into the environment. By further examining through an open systems perspective, the input is filtered through a social frame of feedback mechanisms that gauge the environment and then subsequently respond to the environment’s reaction to the output (Marion & Gonzales, 2014). Therefore, it can be argued that a system disconnected from its environment or not in sync with its environment will fail to thrive.

Through an open systems lens, the state and local responses to the national teacher crisis, like policy changes for waiving licensure requirements to military serving as substitutes, may be aligned to inputs. Accordingly, many school leaders are pivoting in post-pandemic schools, departing from historical hiring practices to fill vacancies with the new input opportunities. However, considering that student performance outcome expectations, or outputs, remain the same, there are considerations in the potential challenges that school leaders may face within the feedback mechanisms to support the needs of their new faculty while meeting the demands of the school environment. Here, the new inputs to mitigate the national teacher shortage prompt an examination into the experiences of school leaders as they reframe their systems to promote a thriving environment.