School districts all over the country are experiencing teacher shortages. The main reason is obvious: teachers are seriously underpaid. The term coined to explain the phenomenon is the teacher weekly wage penalty, or “the percent by which public school teachers are paid less in wages and compensation than other college-educated workers.” This number reached a record 21.4 percent in 2018. That means that choosing to go into teaching over another profession upon completing college results in a loss of more than one-fifth of potential earnings.

Teachers are overworked, too. It’s already a demanding job, and cuts in public-school funding — which have been ongoing since the start of the Great Recession and exacerbated by the charter-school movement — coupled with increasingly demanding performance metrics make school work environments even tougher. “Today, teachers teach, discipline, support, remediate, attend countless trainings, prepare students for dozens of evaluations at the local and state level and are told to do more with less,” writes Virginia middle-school teacher Joy Kirk. “This mantra grew louder during the recession and continues today. During the recession our responsibilities and accountability grew while our support and financial assistance shrunk.”

Why would a person choose a career that’s difficult and undercompensated over one that’s equally difficult but better compensated, or equally compensated but less difficult? Furthermore, teaching requires training, and tuition prices are rising across the board. People who might otherwise be drawn to the profession are put off by the prospect of taking on debt they see no clear way to pay down without moonlighting. An increasing number of teachers leave the profession after only a few years to make ends meet elsewhere, and more than a quarter of all teachers now say they don’t plan to stay in the classroom.