Chapter 5: Teacher Shortages, School Funding, and Legislative Austerity: The Influence of South Carolina’s School Finance Legislation on the Teacher Labor Market

Concern has grown over the teacher labor market shortage in education across the United States (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). Nationally, over a 10-year period (2007–2017), the elementary and secondary teacher labor market decreased by approximately 1% (NCES, 2021). While this decrease seems plausibly negligible, considering that hard-to-staff districts are often forced to hire uncertified and under-qualified individuals to have an adult in their classrooms, the shortage understates the challenges across the field (Garcia & Weiss, 2019). The teacher, labor market shortage is not monolithic, exacerbated in specific subjects (e.g., STEM), specific types of schools/ districts (e.g., high poverty), and in specific regional areas (e.g., rural; Cowan et al., 2016; Hutchison, 2012).