Revisiting the public K-12 jobs crisis
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This week’s special topics post is on the public sector employment situation, particularly in education. I wrote about this a while back and continue to monitor it; this is an update of where we are at the beginning of the new academic year.
Since the pandemic, there has been a big difference in job recovery between the private and public sector, in the Inland Empire, statewide, and nationally. The chart below compares growth in private and public sector employment since 2020, with January 2020 serving as the baseline. As you can see, government jobs dropped less after the pandemic, but the private sector bounced back better: government job levels are now lower than they were before the pandemic. The difference with private sector jobs is night-and-day, especially since private sector employment returned to pre-pandemic levels over a year ago (July 2021).
K-12 education is a major part of public employment in the I.E. It accounts for close to 50% of all public sector jobs. From both a labor demand and labor supply side, the K-12 educational system has taken a major hit from the pandemic. From a labor demand side, many schools remained virtual through the Fall 2020 term, and many barely returned to person by the end of the 2020-2021 academic year, affecting demand for all sorts of jobs in the system. And from a labor supply side, many teachers struggled to return to work, and others retired early or left the labor force entirely.
These issues continue to impact the system and have also presented themselves in the data. Refer to the chart above: first, notice the receding line that has yet to return to pre-March 2020 levels: conservatively speaking, there is a 15,000-person or 11.5% shortage of jobs in the Inland Empire’s public K-12 educational districts. While there is some year-over-year progress (see the chart below), it is not likely that we will return to normal employment levels in this industry for the third academic year after the pandemic. Employment in the subsector in August 2022 is up 9.1% from August 2021 (from 107.1 thousand to 116.8 thousand), but some back-of-the-envelope math suggests that a gap of around 6-7% will likely remain for this upcoming year, even if September employment in the subsector also grows 9% from September 2021.
To be clear, private K-12, while much smaller than public K-12, is also facing a gap. Private K-12 jobs are also about 12% from the pandemic, and full recovery next month might be closer to reality, but it is still a bit far off. Until there are effective policies for bringing more teachers back into the districts, this problem will likely remain.