Supply and Demand in the Postpandemic Teacher Labor Market

Teacher staffing challenges were pervasive throughout the pandemic, but the downturn in student enrollment combined with the end of ESSER funds leaves considerable uncertainty about the postpandemic teacher labor market. We use data on new teacher endorsements and job postings scraped from district hiring websites in Washington to measure supply and demand for teachers over time and by subject area. Relative to prepandemic levels, the supply of new endorsements has recovered from a pandemic-era dip, demand for teachers has declined, and supply modestly exceeds demand for new teachers in the aggregate. This aggregate measure, however, masks considerable heterogeneity across subject areas; demand for special education and science teachers, for instance, considerably outpaces the supply of new endorsements in these areas.