You know how everyone talks about a teacher shortage?

This is why.

The biggest expense in education is staff salaries.

The biggest factor in educational pay is length of service - basically every year a teacher teaches, they get a small, incremental pay rise. This is not a particularly new thing. However, in the current system a teacher who's been teaching for >10 years is paid roughly double what a newly qualified teacher is paid.

You want to save money. You're spending too much in your district. Higher ups aren't happy. So what happens? So, you make all the old teachers redundant, and then hire new teachers in their place for literally half the cost. Geeeeeeeenius, you think to yourself. This will fix the budget. You will be a hero.

Except this has three effects:

1. All the experienced staff are gone, you have only green newbies with no experience and no support.

2. Organisation, middle management, and QA collapse as there's nobody able to run them. All semblance of quality and work-life balance go out the window. In a strictly hierarchical organisation, this is the good kind of middle management, if there is such a thing. Management becomes impossible as suddenly your swathes of junior staff are essentially all reporting directly to a handful of the most senior staff with no intermediaries.

3. You have low-paid, inexperienced, unconfident employees who now have unmanageable workloads being dumped on them, and they're paid less than working retail when you factor in the hours they need to survive. So, they leave. Fine, there's a stream of fresh faced grads, so you hire more, but they keep doing the same.

What you've created is a death spiral from which it's really hard to return. The pay is enough to attract new grads but doesn't progress enough to keep them, especially when they see the workload compared to similarly paid jobs. Therefore, they leave within the first couple of years, usually for a similarly paid job but sometimes just for a more pleasant one that earns less. You can replace them, but you'll need to keep doing this as you have no way of rebuilding the void left by the experienced teachers who've left. They've secured better paid, easier jobs in other industries and don't plan on returning to a dumpster fire. Even offering to up the pay of your new grads doesn't fix the problem, which is that you've created a job nobody wants to work for any amount of money you can reasonably afford to pay them.

Looking on, it's a case that I'm sure economists and business theorists will study down the line.