Contact: Casey Carmody
651-539-4181
casey.carmody@state.mn.us

ROSEVILLE, MN — More than half of Minnesota teachers holding a license are not working in a public school, according to a new report published Wednesday by the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board.

Among the findings, teachers who received special permission to teach outside of their licensure field or did not hold a standard license for their position filled 3.8 percent of all teaching assignments across the state.

School districts throughout Minnesota also reported difficulty in filling teaching positions despite the fact that approximately 70,000 individuals with a license are not currently working in a public school classroom.

These results are part of the "/pelsb/assets/2019%20Supply%20and%20Demand%20Report_tcm1113-370206.pdf2019 Biennial Minnesota Teacher Supply and Demand" report, which provides a snapshot of Minnesota's teacher workforce for lawmakers, education stakeholders and the public. The Wilder Foundation, with support from PELSB, summarized an analysis of 2017-18 state teacher licensure data and a survey of school districts and teacher preparation providers to create the report.

“The report clearly illustrates how districts are struggling to find fully prepared and licensed individuals to fill teaching positions,” PELSB Executive Director Alex Liuzzi said. “And all of these concerns substantially increase when looking at whether we have enough teachers of color in Minnesota.”

The report showed there is a continued disparity between the demographic makeup of the state's students and their teachers. Findings indicated that students of color made up a third of Minnesota's student population while teachers of color were only 4.3 percent of the teacher workforce.

Data analysis also found the proportion of teachers of color in the Twin Cities metro area was 7 percent as compared to an average of approximately 1.2 percent throughout greater Minnesota. But the metro area’s proportion of teachers of color still fell well short of its number of students of color, which was 44.4 percent.

However, several districts reported that some targeted strategies made improvements when recruiting teachers of color, including efforts to communicate a commitment to racial equity to district staff.

The difficulties districts had when hiring licensed teachers were not limited to any one area of the state. All of Minnesota’s economic development regions had similar proportions of teachers working on special permissions in subject areas where they were not fully licensed.

“What we’re seeing is that hiring challenges that districts face are persistent across all licensure areas and regions of the state,” Liuzzi said. “It’s not specifically limited to only the Twin Cities or only to one or two spots in greater Minnesota.”

The report’s findings did not provide trend lines because 2019 is the first year PELSB oversaw the biennial supply and demand report. PELSB is currently developing new data collection systems to better track teacher licensure data over time that will give a more complete picture of Minnesota’s teacher workforce.

The Board is also advocating for resources to implement a statewide teacher survey to learn more about why licensed teachers are not working in the profession.

“Our next step is collecting more comprehensive data to uncover why so many teachers leave the classroom,” Liuzzi said. “With the additional information, we can find solutions to increase enrollment in teacher preparation and increase the retention of our current teachers.”

The full “2019 Biennial Minnesota Teacher Supply and Demand” is available to download on PELSB's data reports webpage.

PELSB is Minnesota's Teacher licensure board. The Board maintains high standards for licensure to provide the state's public school students with well-qualified teachers in their classrooms. For more information about teacher licensure in Minnesota, visit the PELSB website.

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