The teacher shortage in Virginia is getting worse, and one reason is that teachers retired in accelerating numbers in the 2021-22 school year. While the Virginia Retirement System (VRS) reported 4,345 retirements per year on average between the 2016-17 and 2019-2020 school years, the number leaped to 4,881 — an increase of 536, or 12.6%, in the school year now ending.
“COVID-19 has exacerbated the state teacher shortage,” comments the Virginia Public Access Project in publishing the data.
COVID undoubtedly played a role. Older teachers with fully vested retirement benefits, whose age made them more vulnerable to the virus, might well have opted for retirement as a way to minimize their risk of exposure. Others might have grown frustrated by the schools’ policy response to COVID, such as implementing remote learning and heaping on new layers of paperwork. Yet others might have wearied of the politicization and polarization of public education, both the invasive wokeness and the parental backlash to wokeness, which has grown more intense even as the COVID pandemic raged.
The graph above provides a clue as to what is going on. Mid-year retirements, as reported by the VRS, have increased roughly by half in the COVID years.
The departure of a teacher mid-year is much more disruptive than that of a teacher leaving after serving out the school year. When a teacher leaves mid-year, he or she leaves school administrators scrambling to find a replacement. Even if one can be found, students can suffer a discontinuity in learning.
The surge in mid-year departures, I suspect, is an indicator of increasing teacher burn-out. The fact that this measure remained elevated last year, even as the COVID crisis was subsiding, is alarming.
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