Can I Interest You in Some More Troubling Education Data?

Thanks to everyone who tolerated me hijacking this newsletter to promote my new album last week (out now via Bandcamp, and coming soon to online retailers/ streaming).

Now back, as promised, to grim education data!

First, the latest South Carolina CERRA (Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention & Advancement) numbers are very not-good. For the fifth straight year, South Carolina, like most US states, is seeing an increasing (and record-breaking) number of educator vacancies. The number supplied by SC school districts to CERRA is 1,613 vacancies (which includes classroom teachers and librarians). I’ll probably get more into the potential limitations of this (still very useful) statistic in a future piece, but suffice to say: it’s obviously very bad.

Those 1,613 vacancies represent a 9% increase in overall vacancies from the previous, record-breaking year, making it the highest number of recorded educator vacancies in state history. (To put these numbers in some perspective, there wer…