This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown. It could be a legitimate issue within Indiana's public schools or it could merely be a mechanism

to give many public school teachers a financial windfall.

It all hinges on whether the state declares a teacher shortage.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Andrew Coulson comments.

What does it mean when there is a teacher shortage and how does that differ from how teachers unions typically talk about a teacher shortage?

Well, it really depends, doesn't it? This is not a term that is

encoded in some law. A teacher shortage is something that a state can declare, but I think from a reasonable

person's standpoint, we generally think of a teacher shortage as there

being too few teachers to put in front of the number of students that we currently have enrolled in our schools.

And for public schools, of course they have pretty rigid schedules of teacher pay, so those would not move very much so at that pay rate then?

Yes. What does it mean that Indiana is trying to declare a teacher shortage?

Well, there is a federal law that actually gives teachers the

prospect of loan forgiveness if their state has declared them to be in an area that is

suffering a shortage. So that's an appealing prospect certainly for the

teaching workforce.

Have other states declared shortages?

I have not followed the individual state level results, but I did look into the trend over time in the number of pupils we have

versus the number of teachers. What I found is that in the US as a whole

the number of pupils per teacher has gone down steadily

for 40 years.

All right?

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