You may have heard there’s a teacher shortage in Michigan this year. And last year. And the decade before that. And the decade before that.
Even back in the 1920s, newspapers like the Kalamazoo Gazette, Saginaw News, and others published stories that there were teacher shortages across the country, and within their circulation areas, due to low pay.
But this modern-day teacher shortage is different. Remember during the pandemic when the shelves carrying toilet paper were empty?
The teacher shortage is not that kind of shortage, where there was really less of the product. It’s an Orwellian shortage.
That was revealed in a May 13, 2022, article published by Bridge Michigan.
“How bad is Michigan’s teacher shortage?” the article asked in a subhead.
Finally, in the 11th paragraph of the story, Bridge spilled the beans.
“The number of public K-12 teachers has grown by 2% over the last decade while the student population has shrunk 9%, state data shows,” the article stated.
Ah so, it’s a shortage with more teachers and fewer students. The facts didn’t deter Bridge, however.
“But those numbers don’t tell the whole story about the difficulties districts are having filling teaching positions,” the site said.
Michigan’s teacher shortage tale has been sung by a Greek chorus of public-school advocates: newspapers, TV news, nonprofit news sites, teachers unions, and all the nonprofits that support the education system.
In 2022, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed spending $2.3 billion over four years to address the shortage. In 2023, the state legislature set aside $370 million of the state budget to address this teacher shortage.
This will be the 13th year I have written about the teacher “shortage” in this state.
When I first reported on the topic during the 2013-2014 school year, there were 97,288 full-time teaching jobs and 1.56 million students in this state. In 2023-24, Michigan had 100,585 full-time public school teaching jobs and 1.42 million students.
More teachers. Fewer students.
A teacher shortage?
Sure, why not? Especially when it’s a convenient scapegoat.
On Feb. 10, 2025, Chandra Madafferi, the president of the Michigan Education Association, blamed the state’s lackluster performance in national testing on the phantom teacher shortage.
“When we don’t have enough high-quality educators working in our schools, the result is less individual attention, lower test scores and graduation rates, and fewer students who are prepared for college or the workplace,” Madafferi wrote.
My reporting over the past 13 years has included countless Freedom of Information Acts, asking school districts for data such as the number of applicants for teaching positions, the number of school teachers working for the district, and salary information.
In those 13 years, it was clearly difficult to tell if there really is a shortage.
“Michigan has not prioritized studying this labor market and the shortage issue, so analysis is somewhat stymied by a shortage of available, timely, and relevant information,” the Citizens Research Council of Michigan stated in 2019 when it tackled this issue.
“The simple fact is that anecdotal and media reporting is not sufficient to establish that a statewide crisis exists,” the Citizens Research Council report stated. “The research does not show that Michigan is currently facing a statewide teacher shortage, but it does document some troubling trends along the teacher pipeline that are likely contributors to the challenges local schools face filling certain classroom vacancies.”
It is not disputed that some districts have difficulty filling certain positions.
That was evident in FOIAs that showed hundreds (even thousands at times) of applicants for a single position and no applicants for a handful of others. The hard-to-fill teaching positions almost always were in special education, foreign languages, and high-level math and sciences.
It should be noted that union-negotiated contracts have historically hindered districts by not allowing them to pay teachers more for taking less desirable teaching jobs. Nearly all teachers in this state have had their salaries determined by just two criteria: how many years of service they’ve put in and the level of education attained.
The teacher shortage in this state is a never-ending tale. It started in the 1920s and has continued virtually every year. Newspapers clamored about teacher shortages in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950, 1960s, etc.
The Detroit Free Press reported that teachers’ pay is so low, they are being forced to take jobs in other businesses that pay more.
“Despite the fact that pay was at a low level last year, and in some places the year before, this year is the first in which the low wages have resulted in an actual shortage of teachers,” the Free Press reported.
That story ran in August 1934.
Tom Gantert is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.
