Good morning. Welcome, Naxios today. It's Monday, August 21st. I'm Naila Boudou. Here's

what you need to know today. A rare and dangerous west coast tropical storm. Plus, more Americans

are falling behind on credit card payments. But first, today's one big thing. America's

teacher shortage continues. Once again, the school year is beginning in America with

not enough teachers. Turnover rates are high and fewer young people want to go into the

profession. Excuses Erica Pandy is here to explain why, as well as what's being done to

solve this persistent problem. Hi, Erica. Hi, Naila. Can you first lay this out for us by

the numbers? How many vacancies are there right now? So according to research from the Kansas

State University's College of Education, there are over 30,000 vacancies in the U.S. and

more than 160,000 jobs that are filled by teachers who aren't qualified. So they may have

a voucher, but not their certification yet, something like that. And that's not even a

full estimate. I mean, I spoke to the the College of Education. They said that they have

a lot of the data, but some states haven't reported. So it's likely even more than that.

And can you put in context like 30,000 teachers, what that means for the overall system? Here's

a stat from the National Center for Education Statistics. And they're saying that as of

October 2022, 4% of all public school teaching positions were vacant. So 4% might not seem

like a lot, but like we just said, it's tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands

of teachers. And it's a lot of crucial positions, like one of the areas that's really dire is

special education teachers. So there's a lot of roles that need to urgently be filled.

And there's just no one out there who wants the job. We had a very similar conversation

around this time last year. Can you remind us why people don't want this job? There's

just a lot of burnout in the profession. I mean, we talked to superintendents who say that

...