Claims of teacher shortages in recent years are more complex than the typical rhetoric suggests. Digging into limited labor market data helps uncover particular scarcities—and surpluses—depending on subject, grade level, student type, and teaching location. New research exploring the staffing processes in rural districts helps illustrate the nuance required to both assess and address the challenges specific to those schools.
Researchers Se Woong Lee and Minseok Yang (the latter a Fordham-AEI EEPS alum) use data from the Wisconsin Education Career Access Network (WECAN), a centralized system for Badger State districts to post teacher—and other—vacancies, and for hopeful candidates to upload their applications for those jobs. More than 95 percent of districts use the system, thus providing a trove of data from across the state. They analyze WECAN job postings and applications from 2014 to 2016. Interestingly, some charter and private schools also use the system today, but it is unclear whether they did so in the previous decade. Either way, Lee and Yang focus their study only on full-time teaching positions in traditional districts. That still results in more than 390,000 application-year observations, representing 41,300 teacher candidates who applied for 26,600 vacancies across 404 districts. Staffing records from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction provide data on final hiring decisions. Their analysis separated districts into four different typologies—rural, town, suburban, and urban—and compared the numbers and characteristics of applicants and hirees for teaching jobs in the various locales. They also used a mapping tool to determine the distance between applicants’ reported home addresses and the schools to which they applied.
The first big finding: 62 percent of applicants did not apply for vacancies in any rural school, while 6 percent applied exclusively to rural schools. The remainder listed themselves as geographically flexible and showed that to be true by applying to schools of multiple types. The median number of applications received per teacher vacancy in rural districts was nine, compared to eight for urban districts, ten for town districts, and 14 for suburban districts. Their analysis indicates that distance from an urban area seems to be driving this pattern: the farther away a job is from the city, the fewer candidates who apply. Additionally, math and special education teaching vacancies, regularly reported to be the hardest jobs to fill, received lower than the median number of applications across the board with minimal difference based on district type.
Female, non-white, and highly-qualified teachers (as determined by factors like years of experience, degree attainment, and college GPA) all demonstrated reduced inclination to apply for rural jobs. Conversely, individuals with prior rural teaching experience and graduates of rural-based teacher preparation programs exhibited a higher inclination to apply for such jobs. It is perhaps not surprising to learn that applicants to rural schools tend to live much further away (median 39 miles) from the districts to which they are applying, compared to those applying for suburban or urban jobs.
As to hiring, women, teachers with less than three years of experience, and those possessing master’s degrees were more likely to be hired by rural districts than by other district types. The authors speculate that the latter finding is probably due to the fact that so few of them apply to rural schools so they are quickly snapped up whenever possible. Internal applicants (defined as those who currently or previously worked in the district to which they are applying) were 5.9 percentage points more likely to be hired in a rural district than at any other district, and candidates with rural teaching experience or who graduated from a teacher prep program in a rural area also were more likely to be hired in rural districts than in urban or suburban districts.
Lee and Yang note a couple of limitations to their work relating to details of both the supply and demand sides of the equation. How many other candidates declined an offer before the final candidate accepted? Do novice teachers really want rural jobs or are those simply the easiest for them to get? Etc. The age of the data also raises questions about its applicability to today’s employment ecosystem, not to mention the impact of public school/district enrollment declines and growth in the charter and private school sectors. Even so, Wisconsin’s geography hasn’t changed much since 2016, with more than half of districts still defined as rural and encompassing 30 percent of the population. Concern regarding teacher vacancies in those schools has only increased in the last ten years, and the findings here echo those of other analyses showing a nuanced picture of hiring in specific places and subjects.
Based on their findings, the authors assert that “grow your own” programs and efforts to bring pre-service teachers into rural schools for internships or job shadowing would be beneficial policies for district leaders to implement. At the state level, paying all candidates during their student-teaching period, providing funds for hiring bonuses in hard-to-staff positions, and increased support to rural-focused teacher-preparation programs are also suggested as ways to help boost the number and diversity of applicants for rural teaching vacancies.
SOURCE: Se Woong Lee and Minseok Yang, “Who Is Applying to and Being Hired by Rural Schools? What Vacancy and Application Data Reveal About the Rural Teacher Labor Market,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (August 2025).
