New federal survey data on the education workforce shows that a majority of schools had a tough time filling at least one fully certified teaching position this fall. Public schools reported having six teacher vacancies on average in August, based on responses to the School Pulse Panel by the National Center for Education Statistics. About 20 percent of those positions remained unfilled when the school year started. The two most common challenges schools said they faced in hiring were a lack...

This article is part of the collection: Data Bytes: Parsing Education Data Into Snack-Sized Servings. New federal data on youth mental health offers a few silver linings, but experts caution these signs of progress don’t mean U.S. students are out of the storm. The CDC released the results of its biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey earlier this month, highlighting changes in students’ responses from 2021 compared to 2023. Over those two years, the percentage of students overall who reported...

We wrote recently about some of the reasons that may be keeping teachers from pursuing the bilingual educator route, despite the widespread need for teachers who can instruct English learners. The need has gained new urgency as the immigrant population in the U.S. grows. Politicized clashes over the nation’s immigration policy have seen the governor of Texas busing migrants newly arrived across the Mexican border to cities like New York, Chicago and Denver. All districts in all three metro...