Rural communities face unique barriers to providing every student with a well-rounded, excellent education. Chief among them are staffing shortages: rural communities often struggle to recruit and retain qualified teachers. Recent shifts to the federal policy landscape threaten to worsen this challenge. This memo recommends action steps for federal, state and district policymakers to end rural teacher shortages. 

Challenge and Opportunity

When I left my job as an elementary STEM teacher in rural North Carolina, I gave each of my students an envelope, pre-labeled with my family’s address, and told them to write me a letter with their good news. A year later, an envelope arrived from a student who wrote to tell me that he missed science class; he hadn’t had a science teacher all year. My heart sank, remembering his enthusiasm and interest in science, and knowing that a year without science class put him off track for more advanced courses later, courses he would need if he wanted to pursue a STEM major in college. 

This is hardly a unique story. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently made headlines warning of an increasing teacher shortage crisis across the world. In the U.S., teacher shortages are a well-documented problem in certain subject areas and locations. In rural communities like the one where I taught, educator shortages are longstanding and to many, feel intractable. 

What do we know about rural teacher shortages? 

Rural schools serving low-income students and those serving mostly students of color have the highest rates of teacher turnover nationally–markedly higher than schools serving similar groups of students in urban and suburban areas. 

A 2020 study of California school districts found that rural districts posted an additional twelve teacher vacancies for every 100 teachers compared to their urban counterparts. These rural California districts also struggled more to fill vacancies with qualified staff, hiring twice as many emergency certified educators. 

And while this pattern may not be consistent across all rural communities, rural schools appear to struggle more with the impact of shortages. In the 2023-2024 school year, a national sample of rural school administrators actually reported lower rates of teacher vacancies than non-rural schools: 69% of rural schools said they were fully staffed compared to 56% of all public schools reporting. But rural schools in this same survey who experienced vacancies were more likely to report that they impacted the day-to-day experience of students and teachers.

Rural schools struggle to recruit educators, with fewer applicants and fewer qualified candidates, and fewer teacher preparation programs nearby from which to recruit teacher candidates. Teacher preferences may work against rural schools’ efforts to recruit from outside the community: national research shows that teachers are more likely to teach within fifteen miles of their hometown, and by virtue of smaller local populations, administrators have a smaller pool of candidates to draw from who fit that profile. Instead, rural schools often find themselves working against the grain of teacher preferences, recruiting from outside of rural communities. 

Recruiting from outside the community presents its own share of challenges, and for these and other reasons, rural schools also struggle to retain teachers. New research studying rural teacher mobility between 1987 and 2018 found that rural teacher shortages across the country were driven much more by turnover than by other causes that are often responsible for open positions (such as retirement, or growing student enrollment). Teachers were over twice as likely to move out of rural schools and to urban or suburban schools as they were to move from urban or suburban schools to rural schools.

Non-rural schools may be able to offer some benefits and resources that rural schools cannot, but compensation may not be the main reason educators are leaving rural schools. While thirty-four percent of teachers who left rural schools did cite salary and benefits as their reason for leaving, the most significant reported causes of rural teacher turnover had to do with school culture and working conditions, particularly issues with school leadership.

Plan of Action

In the face of these challenges, rural schools have tremendous assets to draw on in building, hiring and retaining a strong teaching workforce. For local community members in small rural labor economies, teaching can be an attractive job, particularly to community members who don’t want to leave to access economic opportunity. Rural schools that have cultivated positive, close-knit relationships to their school communities can also be attractive to teachers looking for a supportive environment, and many rural schools offer the chance to live in a small, interconnected community with access to nature and affordable cost-of-living.

But rural schools can’t do it alone. In order to leverage these assets and end teacher shortages, local, state and federal leaders play a critical role. What can leaders at each level of government do to end teacher shortages? We recommend action at the district and school, state, and federal levels.

Recommendation 1. District and School-Level Actions to Attract and Retain Teaching Talent 

Identify your school community’s strongest assets: what attracts teachers to teaching in your community? Use these as a starting point to inform your recruitment strategy.

Gather data to find the root causes of teacher recruitment and retention issues in your community, and design your teacher recruitment and retention strategy based on these root causes. If your state does not offer a shared teacher exit survey, districts can use their own exit surveys to gather data on teachers’ reasons for leaving, and use that data to narrow in on solutions. Alaska’s Lower Kuskokwim School District, for example, has historically struggled to recruit and retain new teachers, and wanted to know why educators were leaving. As part of a Regional Education Laboratory (or REL)-supported project, the district used exit survey data to identify substandard educator housing (which is provided by the district to educators at a subsidized rate) as a key barrier to working conditions, and has since partnered with a local vocational education program to build additional housing for educators. 

A critical step in this process is gathering and monitoring data and pivoting when solutions are not having their intended impact. For example, many rural districts have turned to four-day school weeks in the hope of solving a host of challenges, including teacher shortages, budget shortages and long student commute times. But early evidence suggests that four-day school weeks are not having the intended impact on teacher recruitment and retention, and in fact, may result in additional turnover. Armed with this evidence, districts can adjust course. 

Put current students’ and local community members on a path to become educators and school staff. While recruiting from outside the community may still be necessary in the short and medium term, preparing the next generation of local communities for jobs that allow them to stay in the community provides a benefit to both current and future students. Grow-Your-Own programs and high school pipeline programs into teaching jobs are a powerful potential tool. As part of regular reporting, publish data on program outcomes. 

Share teachers (and services) across districts. For the hardest to staff roles and roles where student enrollment is too low to support a full-time teacher in a certain subject area, rural districts can work together in cross-district consortia to share access to courses–sometimes virtually, sometimes in person. Some districts also use this shared services model to provide professional learning to educators.

Recommendation 2. State Actions to Support Rural Teacher Recruitment and Retention

Target solutions based on demonstrated staffing shortages. Too often, states fund one-size-fits-all solutions to teacher shortages that direct limited resources too broadly, often to roles that schools don’t actually struggle to fill, or to schools that don’t have any shortage of qualified applicants. Prioritizing the highest-need areas is especially critical when working with limited resources: with a limited amount of money, a state can do more to solve teacher shortages by targeting incentives to the teacher roles where they are most needed. Both Alaska and Colorado, for example,provide incentives to teacher preparation candidates to teach in rural schools.

Fund educator pipeline programs targeted to rural communities with demonstrated shortages. States have made significant recent investments in Registered Apprenticeship, Grow Your Own, post-baccalaureate and high school pipeline programs to recruit and train new teachers. States can prioritize rural districts with demonstrated shortages to pilot and expand these programs. Ensure timely evaluation and publication of outcomes for these programs.

Fund rural schools fairly. Rural districts have lower enrollment, face higher overall costs to deliver student services, can’t reduce costs through economies of scale, and have fewer local resources in the form of local tax dollars and ability to levy local bonds. Rural districts rely more on state and federal funds for this reason, and state education funding formulas are critical to ensure rural schools have enough money to provide critical services. To ensure local schools can fund competitive salaries and support recruitment and retention initiatives, states should evaluate whether or not their current funding formulas are sufficient to meet rural schools’ needs. 

States nationwide have taken this on, with Utah recently revising its school funding formula to provide rural schools up to 1.5 times the per-pupil funding rate of non-rural schools. Both Wisconsin and Massachusetts provide schools with supplemental aid specifically for rural schools; Wisconsin’s program has made a demonstrated impact on rural students’ college enrollment and completion. 

Some states are committing new state money directly to educator salaries, working to close the gap between rural and non-rural districts. In 2023, Arkansas funded a statewide raise of the state’s minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000, and provided all K-12 public educators with a raise of at least $2,000. Research from the first year of implementation found that it had substantially increased funding for both rural and urban schools. Rural schools, which had provided average starting pay of $2,400 less than urban districts, cut that gap to $48 in the initiative’s first year. 

Give districts the flexibility to share staff and resources. Increasingly, rural school districts are working across districts to share limited staff and resources. Forming local consortia, districts may give students the opportunity to enroll in advanced or specialized coursework across districts. States can ensure that state policy reduces barriers to this approach; Texas, for example, passed state legislation to remove barriers to this approach and support growth through a new Rural Pathway Excellence Partnership Program, which currently serves ten consortia made up of thirty rural districts. Massachusetts’ Rural School Aid Program specifically prioritizes district spending to “increase regional collaboration, consolidation, or other strategies to improve long-term operational efficiency and effectiveness.”

Provide access to virtual courses. When rural districts cannot hire enough teachers or muster enough students to provide specialized or advanced courses, states can also work creatively to provide access to these courses statewide. Montana’s legislature created the Montana Digital Academy, which has provided statewide access to virtual courses since 2009. The classes, taught by certified Montana educators, ensure that students anywhere in the state (which boasts the most one-room schoolhouses of any state), can take Advanced Placement, dual enrollment and specialized courses like Indigenous Languages or Artificial Intelligence.

Gather and publish the data to better understand shortage patterns. States should give themselves, districts and the public the ability to understand shortage patterns at a detailed level, including by rurality. States should collect data that allows leaders to understand, at a minimum, how rural schools are experiencing shortages:

• At the school and district level 
• Disaggregated by teachers’ certification area and subject taught 
• Disaggregated by teachers’ demographics
• Disaggregated by teachers’ years of experience 

Gather data on teachers’ reasons for leaving through statewide teacher working conditions surveys and exit surveys for departing teachers. Systematize this data by requiring collection at the state level through a single survey, deliver data back to district and schools, and provide facilitated opportunities to analyze data and act on feedback. Publish disaggregated data by rurality to understand the unique issues facing rural schools. Tennessee’s statewide teacher working conditions survey, for example, provides detailed statewide data on teachers’ and administrators perspectives on working conditions year over year; the survey’s research partner published analysis of results for rural schools.

Recommendation 3. Federal Actions to Support Rural School Funding and Success

Maintain access to federal education funds that rural schools rely on to support teachers. Federal funds are a critical source of funding for rural schools, who rely on them for a host of core functions, including many that directly support teachers: paying salaries, providing supportive professional learning, and funding innovative approaches to recruit new teachers. As the Trump administration has impounded allocated funds, released promised formula funds late, proposed cutting funds for future budget years, and abruptly begun moving funding programs to other agencies that lack the capacity or expertise to run them, rural schools have been left to plan for the worst. This has created an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty, leaving rural schools struggling to plan ahead for the months and years ahead. (For more on how cuts to these programs impact rural schools, see the table, “Using federal education funds to end rural teacher shortages.”)

Increase access to discretionary grant funding by including rural schools in the Secretary of Education’s Supplemental Priorities. Rural schools often struggle to apply for and effectively compete for discretionary federal grants that could be used to support teacher recruitment and retention. With a Supplemental Priority, the Secretary could ensure rural schools are prioritized in future grant competitions. 

Release guidance on how federal funds can be blended and braided to end teacher shortages. The Department of Education has historically provided a wide range of federal funds that can be used in concert to fund teacher recruitment and retention strategies; it is critical to maintain access to these funds. If, in the future, the Department’s role in funding and providing technical assistance to states is restored, the agency could work to ensure that more schools are making strategic investments to meet their goals around the teacher workforce. The Department could provide guidance to states and districts highlighting how schools have successfully brought these funding streams, along with state, local and philanthropic dollars, together to end teacher shortages. For more on current funding sources that states and districts can use to solve teacher shortages, and how cuts to these programs will impact rural schools, see the table, “Using federal education funds to end rural teacher shortages.” 

Build a real-time national teacher labor market data system. Currently, very little detailed, timely data exists to understand the national landscape of teacher hiring and persistent vacancies. The Department of Education should spearhead a collaboration between the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to provide better national teacher labor market data. States and local communities would be able to use this data to support secondary research to understand where rural communities are having success in lowering teacher vacancies and where others are struggling. Research suggests that the prevalence of rural teacher shortages may vary by state, and the field would benefit from understanding why. 

Build the evidence base for teacher recruitment and retention practices, and fund rural-specific research. Much of the research on effective practices for attracting and retaining teachers does not specifically test the effectiveness or implementation challenges of a specific intervention in rural contexts. The federal government has an important role to play in funding action-oriented research to solve these urgent problems. At a minimum, it is critical that Congress continue to invest in programs like the Department’s Education Innovation Research grants (which include a specific priority for rural research).

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Using federal education funds to end rural teacher shortages 

A range of federal education funds can be used to combat rural teacher shortages, including, but not limited to:

• Title I, Part A 
• Title II, Part A 
• Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) 
• Teacher Quality Partnership Grants
• Career and Technical Education State Grants 

For rural school serving high populations of Native students, the following funds can also be used:

• The Indian Education Professional Development Grant 
• The Native Hawaiian Education Program 
• The Alaska Native Education Program 
• The Native American Career and Technical Education Program
• The Native Hawaiian Career and Technical Education Program 
• The Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Career and Technical Institutions Program 

Access to the funds listed here have been threatened by the Trump administration, through revoking current awards (such as Teacher Quality Partnership Grants), proposed cuts to future spending, and proposed consolidation of funding streams into block grants to states at drastically lower funding levels (such as REAP and Title II, Part A). At the same time, the administration has begun to transfer administration of many of the programs above to other agencies, which are ill-equipped to quickly stand up complex programs that send billions to states and districts nationwide. In the wake of these disruptions and potential cuts, rural schools will have little support available from the federal government to solve critical teacher shortages, and will likely face worsening challenges in an increasingly strapped budget environment. 

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Conclusion 

The impact of teacher shortages impacts hundreds of thousands of young people like my former student each day–students who may go a whole year without a certified teacher, or graduate high school without ever having access to the advanced classes that unlock their future aspirations. Rural students of color and those living in high-poverty rural areas bear the brunt of this long-standing problem. 

States, districts and the federal government each have a critical and distinct role to play in supporting rural schools. And while rural schools are used to being scrappy and doing more with less, without state and federal support, districts will be hard-pressed to close teacher workforce gaps on their own. 

46 million rural Americans face mounting risks from temperature extremes that threaten workforce productivity, raise business operational costs, and strain critical public services. Though extreme heat is often portrayed in research and the media as an urban issue, almost every state in the contiguous U.S. has rural communities with above-average rates of vulnerability to extreme heat. To protect rural America, Congress must address extreme heat’s impacts by repairing rural health systems, strengthening the preparedness of rural businesses, and hardening rural energy infrastructure.

Extreme heat exacerbates rural communities’ unique health vulnerabilities

On average, Americans living in rural areas are twice as likely as those in urban areas to have pre-existing health conditions, like heart disease, diabetes, and asthma, that make them more sensitive to heat-related illness and death. Further compounding the risk, rural places also have larger populations of underinsured and uninsured people than urban areas, with 1 in 6 people lacking insurance. 

Limited healthcare infrastructure in rural places worsens these vulnerabilities. Rural areas have higher shortages of healthcare professionals who provide primary care, mental health, and dental services than urban areas. Over the last decade, 100 rural hospitals have closed, and hundreds more are vulnerable to closure. Finally, many rural communities do not have public health departments, and those that do are underfunded and understaffed. Because public health systems and healthcare professionals are the first responders to extreme heat, rural residents are severely underprepared. 

Congress should provide flexible resources and technical assistance to rural hospitals to prepare for emerging threats like extreme heat. Additionally, Congress should continue to enable the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services to provide loans or grant assistance to help rural residents retain access to health services and improve the financial position of rural hospitals and clinics. And because Medicaid expansion correlates with better rural hospital financial performance and fewer closures, Congress should invest in Medicaid to protect rural healthcare access.

Extreme heat puts rural businesses and workers at risk

Rural economic health relies on the outdoors (e.g., recreation tourism) and outdoor labor (e.g., agriculture and oil and gas extraction). Extreme heat in many of these places makes it dangerous to be outside, which impacts worker productivity and local business revenues. Indoor workers in facilities like manufacturing plants, food processing, and warehouses also face heat-related safety threats due to the presence of heat-producing machines and poorly ventilated buildings with limited cooling. These facilities are rapidly growing components of rural economies, as these sectors employ almost 1 in 5 rural workers. 

Simple protections like water, rest, shade, and cooling can improve productivity and generate returns on investments. But small-to-medium rural enterprises need support to adopt affordable cooling systems, shade and passive cooling infrastructure, and worker safety measures that reduce heat-related disruptions. Congress should help rural businesses reduce heat’s risks by appropriating funding to support workplace heat risk reduction and practical training on worker protections. Additionally, Congress should require OSHA to finalize a federal workplace heat standard.

Extreme heat threatens rural energy security

When a power outage happens during a severe extreme heat event, the chance of heat-related illness and death increases exponentially. Extreme heat strains power infrastructure, increasing the risk of power outages. This risk is particularly acute for rural communities, which have limited resources, older infrastructure, and significantly longer waits to restore power after an outage.

Weatherized housing and indoor infrastructure are one of the key protective factors against extreme heat, especially during outages. Yet rural areas often have a higher proportion of older, substandard homes. Manufactured and mobile homes, for example, compose 15% of the rural housing stock and are the one of the most at-risk housing types for extreme heat exposure. When the power is on, rural residents spend 40% more of their income on their energy bills than their urban counterparts. Rural residents in manufactured housing spend an alarming 75% more. Energy debt can force people to choose between paying for life-saving energy or food and key medications, compounding poverty and health outcomes. 

To drive the energy independence and economic resilience of rural America, Congress should support investments in energy-efficient and resilient cooling technologies, weatherized homes, localized energy solutions like microgrids, and grid-enhancing technologies.

Abigail Swisher, Rural Impact Fellow at FAS, served in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, with a focus on STEM education. This post was originally published at HomeRoom, the official blog of the U.S. Department of Education.

Spanning 37,000 miles across Alaska, the Northwest Arctic Borough School District has struggled to hire and retain enough new teachers. The eleven villages within the district – many of them above the Arctic Circle – are sparsely populated and remote. The winters are long, and without easy connection to roads, teachers new to the area often feel the isolation of remote village life.Alaska’s Northwest Arctic Borough

Early-career and out-of-state teachers tend to be most heavily concentrated in Alaska’s rural schools, where they face a steep curve in adjusting to a new way of life while learning the ropes of teaching. As Northwest Arctic Borough Superintendent Terri Walker explains, “Our new teachers really have to learn everything: a new culture, sometimes a new language, new teaching skills, a new curriculum, customs and traditions of our kids, and the culture of our schools,”

But Northwest Arctic has found one approach to help their new teachers thrive in the classroom: A mentoring program that pairs new teachers with experienced educators from across Alaska.

The Alaska Statewide Mentor Project (ASMP) connects new teachers often isolated by physical distance with experienced mentor teachers who help them learn the skills to fit their unique cultural context. Mentors and mentees connect virtually each week and in-person several times per year, which usually requires long journeys involving travel by bush plane, boat, dog sled and/or snowmobile.

Mentors help new teachers develop culturally responsive practice, building on Alaska’s statewide standards for culturally responsive teaching. Roughly seventy percent of new teachers in Alaska’s rural and isolated schools come from out of state, so the program focuses on helping teachers learn their students’ cultural context and work to integrate into their community.

Cultural knowledge is crucial for new teachers in Northwest Arctic Borough, whose student population is ninety percent Inupiaq. Superintendent Walker says that the district’s work is deeply centered in preservation of the unique heritage and values of Inupiaq culture; their motto is “Atautchikun Iñuuniałiptigun (Through Our Way of Life Together as One).”

In the 2023-24 school year, ASMP served roughly 140 new teachers across the state. Many schools share the cost of participation for their new teachers with ASMP; in previous years, Northwest Arctic Borough has used federal dollars through the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) to fund teachers’ participation. “It’s a very popular program with our new teachers, and one we try to continue even as our district is operating at a ten-million-dollar deficit,” said Superintendent Walker. “We continue to work to support the program because we believe in it.”

And the program is getting results: rigorous evaluation (funded by an ED Education Innovation Research grant) shows that new teachers who participate in the program make larger student learning gains in reading and math, and stay in the classroom longer than new teachers without a mentor.

The Alaska Statewide Mentor Project’s results are heartening against a larger backdrop of challenges in attracting and retaining new teachers in rural and geographically isolated schools across the United States and its territories. With an additional expansion grant from ED’s Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program, the mentoring program is broadening its reach to teachers in the state of Montana, and to expand the existing program within Alaska to all teachers who are new to the state of Alaska, regardless of their years of experience.