For a country and nation to be successful, they must have some form of education, the better the education system in a country is the more likely it will be to remain strong and stable for decades. That’s why the current state of the United States education system is so worrisome. Though many of these issues existed before the Covid Pandemic, a lot of them because inflated during the 3 year period and have continued to worsen since. According to Zippa, teachers in the United States get paid 20% less than other professions with similar education and backgrounds. The EPI also found that 5% of the teacher workforce has been lost  since the beginning of the pandemic.

This type of data can be attributed not only to fears regarding Covid-19, but also decreased pay, a more stressful work environment, and high standards for teaching in the United States. Increasingly, teachers are thrown into schools that are underfunded and can’t afford to pay teachers what they deserve, as well as increased class sizes and state test score expectations which can lead to stress. The high standards for teachers means that for a recent graduate to be hired, they must have work experience and show high test scores to be considered for certain positions. However these recent graduates are struggling to gain this work experience and thus are competing for fewer and fewer job opening each year.

In 2010 the budget for the U.S Department of Education was 192.3 billion, however only 10 years later this budget had fallen to about 72.7 billion. With such a decline in spending for public schooling in the United States, it wasn’t hard to predict that this issue would arise. Underfunding schools leads to poor working conditions, overworked staff, and typically means students will display worse performance in school. All these factors have added up and led to this staff shortage that we’ve heard about on the news for the past year.

My mom is a teacher and works in a school that doesn’t receive as much funding as they should be receiving based off of performance by students. This means that her classes have grown in enrollment, and she has less time during the day to plan lessons and grade papers. Thus, outside of work she has to continue to do more work that she otherwise would’ve had time to do during the school day. This isn’t just the case for my mom, but thousands of teachers across the country as well.