Educators say low pay hinders teacher recruitment, retention efforts

SPRINGFIELD – Increased pay for educators, better school conditions, mentoring and mental health support are key factors cited by educators that could help alleviate the critical ongoing teacher shortage in Illinois.

“Poor Working Conditions” are among the top three causes of the shortage, according to the 2024-2025 Illinois Educator Shortage Survey released Monday by the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools. Limited applicants and issues related to salary and benefits are the other two.

Educators cited pay as one of those working conditions and argued that part of the solution must be to provide higher teacher salaries. The top three desired solutions cited in the survey were improved state and federal support, providing incentives to educators and improving recruitment.

“All teachers across the state feel under-compensated, and that is a real point of pain,” said Dr. Rachel Mahmood, 2024 Illinois Teacher of the Year and an educator at Georgetown Elementary School in Aurora. “If you can afford to pay more, you’re going to draw people towards your districts.”

LaTesh Travis, assistant superintendent for human resources in Berkeley School District 87, highlights the competitive labor market in hiring teachers and how low pay leads to more teachers leaving or not wanting to work in lower-income and rural areas.

To have a more equal distribution of educators across the state, Travis said, Illinois would need to raise the minimum income for all teachers to $55,000, because it is a main factor deterring people from the education field.

Last month, Gov. JB Pritzker proposed a new budget for the upcoming fiscal year that would increase K-12 funding by $300 million and boost higher education funding by 3% but would keep funding flat for the Early Childhood Block Grant program. The governor and lawmakers have to agree on a spending plan by the end of May.

The authors of the Illinois Educator Shortage Survey concede the term “poor working conditions” is hard to define and, thus, hard to solve.

“I think the area that’s interesting is when people talk about working conditions, and we even talked about this a little bit last year, that potentially means something different to every teacher or to every district or to every [school] building,” said Gary Tipsord, executive director of IARSS. “I don’t know that we’re in a good space to truly understand that yet, and I think that’s the place where we do need to continue to dig.”

Hoping to help improve teachers’ working conditions, Mahmood focuses on necessary discussions about why people came into the education field.

For example, Mahmood highlighted World Cafés, an inclusive dialog model that creates ideas and plans to enhance schools, as a tool she learned from working in the Indian Prairie Community Unit School District to format these discussions.

“The end goal of that is not only mutual empathy and understanding of each other’s stories and working on the culture and climate of our schools, it’s also showing teachers the role they have in shaping a school’s culture of belonging, with the ultimate outcome of teachers feeling validated and valued in their fields,” Mahmood said.

As teacher of the year, Mahmood focuses on raising retention rates by showing the importance of sharing the stories of teachers across the state.

Those surveyed say other initiatives that need to be taken on a statewide level are supporting and speaking about increased stress in educators and their mental health, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Robin Steans, president of Advance Illinois, an advocacy group focused on public education, says more mentorship opportunities for new teachers and education leaders would also help with teacher retention.

“This is a tight budget year, so [the Teacher Mentoring and Induction Program is] one of the programs that has been slated not to make that transition,” Steans said. “I think that is problematic because we lose a lot of teachers in those first three years, and Teacher Mentoring and Induction has a real impact on that. It really increases the retention rate, and that is absolutely critical.”

It is essential to retain teachers and add more to the workforce to keep up with the growing number of students in K-12 grade levels. Survey respondents cited improving recruitment, providing incentives and more support for staff as the top three strategies to combat the shortage.

In her role for the Berkeley School District, Travis travels to universities in the state to recruit graduating college students to teach in the district.

“When I go to the career fairs, that’s an indicator for me of how many people are going into education,” Travis said.

She notes it is especially hard to find and recruit specialized teachers for students.

“There is a huge shortage in special education, bilingual education, math teachers and science teachers. I truly believe, over the years, special education is leading the pack,” Travis said.

With special education having the most unfilled positions of all specializations in teaching, according to the shortage survey, school districts are specifically feeling the effects of the shortage the most through this avenue. This academic year, 1,215 of these positions were left unfilled.

This upcoming academic year, the Berkeley district is looking to introduce and bring in a cohort of special education teachers to help fill the vacancies in their schools. So far, 10 teachers looking for licensure endorsements have signed up.

Other strategies Travis says would help with recruitment include reaching out to middle and high school students through future teacher programs.

With what is expected of teachers and the added tasks due to the shortage, Mahmood says the time and effort that goes into teaching sometimes go unnoticed. To recruit and improve working conditions, she emphasizes the importance of going into schools to ask what educators require to feel supported and acknowledging their reasons for coming into the field.

“Educators’ stories of why they came into teaching is super important,” Mahmood said. “I think that teachers that have a strong ‘why’ story, it grounds them through the tough years and the great years.”

Jordan G. Owens is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.