Giving Compass' Take:

• Pacific Standard discusses how different states are struggling to both recruit and retain teachers. Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?

• One model to look at is the San Francisco Unified School District, which as been aggressive in its recruitment efforts, including programs that support more training for "emergency-credentialed" teachers to move beyond stopgaps.

• Here's why teachers need more say in their professional learning.

On the first day of the 2016–17 school year, the San Francisco Unified School District was short 38 teachers. That meant about 6 percent of the district's classroom vacancies had gone unfilled, forcing the district to rely on substitutes. Since then, SFUSD has turbo-charged its recruitment and retainment efforts, working to attract existing teachers and launching a number of new programs to establish a robust, predictable pipeline of qualified teachers.

"This was our deliberate response to the teacher shortage," says Daniel Menezes, SFUSD's chief human resources officer. "We realized that you have to do two things at once: You need to have a traditional, robust, meat-and-potatoes recruitment program ... and on the programming end, we also have to invest in a teaching pipeline portfolio that basically delivers a predictable number of teachers every year."

Thanks to the district's two-pronged approach, SFUSD schools opened last week with 99 percent of the district's classroom vacancies filled.

As a new report from the Learning Policy Institute, a non-profit research organization, makes clear, SFUSD is not alone in its proactive response to vacancies. In the wake of cuts to education funding (and teacher salaries) during the Great Recession, school districts across the country continue to struggle to recruit and retain educators. More than 100,000 classrooms around the country started last school year with a teacher not "fully qualified to teach," and educators say the shortages continue this year. In subjects like mathematics, science, and special education, almost every state is experiencing teacher shortages.

Read the full article about how states are dealing with teacher shortages by Dwyer Gunn at Pacific Standard.