October 29, 2026
Teacher shortages are usually described from the school’s side of the hiring desk: unfilled positions and candidates who do not meet the ideal qualifications. But a new study suggests that another important part of the story has received far less attention—the people who apply in the first place.
Drawing on job-posting and application records for nearly 57,000 teacher applicants across 19 traditional school districts and 24 charter organizations, Upjohn Senior Economist Aaron Sojourner and colleagues find that applicant supply is surprisingly thin in many traditional districts. Districts averaged just 3.3 unique applicants per opening, compared with 6.1 in charter organizations. Across organizations, the numbers varied substantially, suggesting that teacher shortages can look very different from one place to another.
The difference is not simply one of quantity. Charter schools attract more applicants, but those candidates tend to be less experienced: 52 percent of charter applicants reported prior teaching experience, compared with 72 percent of district applicants. District applicant pools were also more heavily white. In both sectors, Black and Hispanic teachers were underrepresented relative to the students they would serve.
The timing of recruitment also matters because earlier postings tend to attract more applications. A stereotypical narrative about teacher hiring suggests that schools routinely wait until the last minute to fill classrooms. However, the authors find that only about 11 percent of openings posted during the traditional spring-to-fall hiring season were classified as late, although this figure varied substantially across organizations.
Strikingly, a large share of job postings—especially among charter organizations—occurred outside the traditional spring-to-fall hiring season, such as during winter and around the start of the spring semester. These out-of-season postings are excluded from the calculation of late openings. The results suggest that the reality of recruitment timing is more complicated than traditionally believed.
Taken together, the findings shift the question from how schools choose among applicants to more basic ones: How do they get enough people to apply—and how do they attract experienced teachers? For traditional districts, where applicant pools are often especially small, raising salaries, improving working conditions, or investing more in recruitment may matter more than refining selection processes. For charter schools, similar reforms could attract a more experienced applicant pool. In both sectors, improving the quality and volume of the applicant pool may require improvements in job quality, a challenge for under-resourced schools.
The paper, "Exploring the Landscape of Teacher Applications," was written by Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Constance A. Lindsay, Elton Mykerezi, Aaron Sojourner, and Lauren Dachille and was published in Economics of Education Review.
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