Research Hub

The new report The State of Our Educator Pipeline 2023: Strengths, Opportunities, and the Early Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic examines one of the most significant challenges facing Illinois public schools: ensuring we recruit and retain well-prepared and diverse teachers and leaders to guide students in every school.

A follow-up to the 2022 report The State We’re In, the new report finds signs of stability and even improvement to Illinois’ educator pipeline during the exceptionally challenging COVID-19 pandemic period. The report also outlines where there is work ahead to ensure there are high-quality, diverse educators in every Illinois classroom and underscores the equity implications at the heart of this issue.

Findings include:

• Illinois has more teachers, support staff, and school leaders working in classrooms today than it has in over a decade, calculated both in general and per student.

• The supply of new teachers and principals has gradually increased in recent years, while supply of new paraprofessionals, one of the state’s largest shortage areas, has declined.

• More educators have stayed in their jobs and in their schools, even during the difficult first two years of the pandemic and given significant challenges with school climate. Whether this stability remains beyond SY21-22 remains to be seen.

• Schools continued to face challenges staffing certain positions—with some of the most challenging areas to staff including paraprofessional positions, special education teaching positions, and bilingual teaching positions.

• Despite research indicating that teacher diversity benefits all students, racial disparities at every stage of Illinois’ educator pipeline—from recruitment and supply to retention— persist.

• While the diversity of candidates going into teaching in Illinois is increasing, overall diversity of our teacher workforce continues to lag student diversity by significant margins.

The report highlights several places where the state has taken steps to address some of these challenges by temporarily creating more flexible licensure options, offering significant investments in grants in shortage areas, and piloting new programs to address diversity across the teacher and principal pipelines. Often these changes are temporary, and investments are short-term.

This report should help policymakers both to recognize the progress being made to address shortages and increase diversity and highlight where more work is needed.

State of Our Educator Pipeline Data Dashboard

A supplement to the report, users can view metrics from the report at the district level and filter districts by county, legislative district, funding tier, student demographics, and more.

Social Media

Share and tweet about the report using @advanceillinois and #edpipeline2023 

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The State of Our Educator Pipeline: Community Events

Taking a look at what’s specifically happening in educator recruitment and retention at the school district level, these fall events in Collinsville (Nov 14) and Joliet (Nov 30) included a presentation of the report and a panel discussion with local leaders and/or educators.