Postpandemic Teacher Supply and Demand

Teacher staffing challenges were pervasive throughout the pandemic, but the downturn in student enrollment combined with the end of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief 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 postpandemic supply and demand for teachers both overall and by subject area. We find that between 2022 and 2024, the supply of new teachers in Washington exceeded demand for teachers in the aggregate, but demand for special education and science teachers considerably outpaced the supply of new endorsements in these areas.