“The pandemic created a perfect storm for us,” he said. “The results are: public education, we’re in trouble.”

Dire warnings of teacher shortages are nothing new, especially during the pandemic, and are sometimes overblown. But a confluence of warning signs suggest that the country is at a post-pandemic inflection point.

More teachers really have left the classroom, according to a new Chalkbeat analysis of data, the most thorough national look at teacher turnover to date. A number of them, including North Carolina, saw more teachers exit last year than any time in recent memory. Teachers who remain appear demoralized and stressed. Fewer young people want to join the profession. And there are long-standing shortages in certain subjects and schools.

“We are in an acutely serious and severe moment for the health of the teaching profession,” said Matthew Kraft, a Brown University researcher who co-authored a recent study titled “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession.” The study showed that across an array of metrics, the profession was “at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.”

These problems could get better as the pandemic recedes and policymakers respond, or they could shape a generation of teachers and their students.

In the first couple years of the pandemic, teacher turnover didn’t look much different than normal: down a bit in the summer of 2020, then up a bit the next year.

But more recently the story changed, as data has trickled in in the last few months. Chalkbeat obtained numbers from 15 states: Every single one showed an increase in teachers exiting the classroom, compared to the year before the pandemic. A number of individual districts have also reported jumps in teachers leaving.

In some cases this change was small, but in many states, more teachers left than any other year on record.

Read the full article about pandemic teaching profession by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat.