Staffing gaps in U.S High Schools, 2013 – 2021 What has changed for schools with high Black and Hispanic enrollment?
Access to school counselors and certified, experienced teachers is linked to better academic, social, and behavioral outcomes for students, and staffing indicators are recognized among the important measures of K–12 educational equity. The impact of these educators is especially consequential at the high school level, where students in schools with more experienced and credentialed teachers are more likely to succeed in postsecondary pathways. Likewise, lower student-to-counselor ratios are strongly associated with higher GPAs for students and increased likelihood of high school graduation
In practice, however, access to these critical resources remains unequal. Disparities in access to counselors and certified teachers are well-documented in the literature and have been rightly recognized as a civil rights concern. This analysis uses longitudinal civil rights data to quantify the extent of staffing inequities in U.S. high schools nationally between 2013 and 2021, specifically examining whether access to teachers and counselors in high schools with high Black and Hispanic student enrollment, relative to high schools with low Black and Hispanic enrollment, has changed in over nearly a decade.
Approach.
We used administrative data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) and the Common Core of Data (CCD) and merged longitudinal school-level data, creating a dataset with school characteristics, racial composition, and staffing levels for five time points (2013, 2015, 2017, 2020, and 2021). To examine patterns by racial composition, we defined a predominantly Black and Hispanic school as one where 75 percent or more of students identify as either Black or Hispanic (following GAO’s definition). Using this measure, we classified schools by High (≥75%), Mid (25–74%), or Low (<25%) Black + Hispanic (BH) enrollment.[i] Our final dataset consists of 23,458 high schools across the United States.
Our two key indicators in this dataset to understand if staffing inequities exist are (1) Full Time Equivalent (FTE[ii]) counselors in high schools and (2) Ratio of students to FTE total and certified teachers.[iii] In the first analysis, we examine counselor access by identifying high schools that reported no counselors and consider trends by schools’ Black + Hispanic enrollment, from 2013 to 2021. In our second analysis, we consider overall teaching capacity and certified teacher access. For this, we examine the distribution of student-to-teacher ratios, both for total teachers and for certified teachers only, across all Black + Hispanic school enrollment groups from 2013 to 2021. We display the spread of ratios by year and school Black + Hispanic enrollment, marking both the median and the 90th percentile. For each category of school Black + Hispanic enrollment, the median gives us the ratio of schools in the middle of that category while the 90th percentile identifies the ratio for the most understaffed 10% of schools within that category. Both these statistics help us see how staffing inequities have shifted over time in schools with different proportions of Black and Hispanic students.
Data limitations restrict our analysis to the quantity of teachers available to students, measured through total and certified teacher–student ratios. While we recognize that teacher quality is also an important dimension of educational equity, our focus on quantity addresses an important policy question.[iv]
High School Composition
We first consider the changing demographic landscape of U.S. high schools. Between 2013 and 2021, the racial composition of U.S. high schools shifted, with a substantial increase in the proportion of schools with ≥75% Black and Hispanic student enrollment. In 2013, just under 17% of high schools fell into the high Black and Hispanic student enrollment category. Less than a decade later, in 2021 their share had grown to over 21%, reflecting broader demographic shifts in the student population. Over the same period, the proportion of schools with <25% Black and Hispanic student enrollment has declined, from about 59% in 2015 to 48% in 2021, which indicates that more schools now serve predominantly Black and Hispanic students.
Figure 1
School Counselor Access
Our analysis shows that in 2013 and 2015, 15–18% of high schools with the highest Black and Hispanic enrollment (≥75%) had no counselors, the highest rate among the three enrollment groups. This rate declined somewhat after 2017, as it did for all schools, and still remains more than 15% of high BH schools, which as seen above are an increasing share of US high schools. By contrast, schools with low Black and Hispanic enrollment (<25%) consistently show the lowest rates of counselor absence, despite small increases after 2013.
Figure 2.
Student-Teacher Ratios
When considering either total and certified teachers (Figures 3 and 4 respectively), High BH (≥75%) schools have noticeably higher student-teacher ratios than Low BH (<25%) schools, meaning each teacher has more students in their classroom. This pattern is particularly pronounced when looking at certified teacher access. Across all years and groups, when comparing student-teacher ratios, both the median and 90th percentile, the certified teacher ratio exceeds the total overall teacher ratio equivalents, meaning that there are more students per certified teacher than per teacher overall. Notably, our analysis also shows that this gap between the certified and total teacher ratios is consistently the largest for High BH (≥75%) schools. This indicates that, across time, High BH (≥75%) high schools have not only had larger class sizes than schools with fewer Black and Hispanic students, but they have also relied more on teachers who lacked full certification.
The 90th percentile threshold marks the ratio above which the most understaffed 10% schools in each group fall, and here again, the gap widens at the extreme as the disparities are more pronounced for High BH (≥75%). For example, in recent years, the 10% most understaffed High BH schools have Student-to-Certified teacher ratios that are consistently 5-6 students more than in the 10% most understaffed Low BH schools. In other words, while the median High BH high school is slightly more understaffed than the low BH school, the most understaffed 10% High BH schools (≥75%) are faring much worse than the most understaffed 10% Low BH schools (<25%).
Figures 3 and 4
Recommendations
Our analysis shows that staffing inequities in U.S high schools disproportionately impact high BH (≥75%) schools, where students are more likely to attend schools without counselors and are more likely to be taught by teachers who do not meet full certification requirements. High BH schools are an increasingly larger share of the nation’s public schools. Closing persistent counselor staffing gaps in these schools begins with more investment towards hiring counselors in these schools, but that is merely a first step in terms of improving support for students. Prior research shows that high school counselors spend a significant amount of their time on administrative and other non counseling duties, which limits the time they have available for direct student support. High BH (≥75%) schools are more likely to serve students who fall within the first-generation college-goer demographic, and to effectively meet these students’ needs, school districts should have clear role definitions for counselors to allow for more direct counseling time and prioritize ongoing professional development for counselors so they can better serve an increasingly diverse student body.
Our analysis also shows that teaching shortages disproportionately impact high BH high schools leaving them grappling with the dual challenge of large classroom sizes and greater reliance on teachers who are not fully certified. Given this, high BH (≥75%) high schools should be prioritized for teacher pay raises, improving teaching conditions, teaching service scholarships and incentive programs that can attract and retain more certified teachers. Considering the costs tied to certification, rigid licensure requirements can, over time, shrink the certified teacher pool. To address this, state licensing bodies could provide better support to teachers who are interested in pursuing certification through strategies such as guidance to navigate the certification process, reducing financial barriers through low-cost training programs and offering flexible, alternative certification pathways that are rigorous.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Michael Cattell at The Pennsylvania State University for his initial inputs to the data analysis.
Notes
(i) We excluded schools with incomplete race enrollment data to ensure accurate calculation of Black + Hispanic (BH) enrollment shares, specifically, schools with any of the seven race group values missing (NA), or if the sum of all race-specific enrollments was zero.
(ii) Full-Time Equivalent (FTE). “A unit that indicates the workload of an employed person in a way that makes workloads comparable across various contexts. FTE is used to measure a worker's service in a place (e.g., school). FTE is the number of total hours the person is expected to work divided by the maximum number of compensable hours in a full-time schedule. An FTE of 1.00 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker, while an FTE of 0.50 signals that the worker is only half-time.”
(iii) Certified Teacher Is defined as “Has met all applicable state teacher certification requirements for a standard certificate. A certified teacher has a regular/standard certificate/license/endorsement issued by the state. A beginning teacher who has met the standard teacher education requirements is considered to have met state requirements even if he or she has not completed a state- required probationary period. A teacher working towards certification by way of alternative routes, or a teacher with an emergency, temporary, or provisional credential is not considered to have met state requirements.”
(iv) This analysis has some limitations. First, the data includes regular, alternative, and special education high schools, which serve student populations with different needs and hence may have differences in staffing patterns. Second, we calculated total enrollment using only the seven reported racial categories and excluded the “unknown” category. While this approach allows for consistency in calculating the percentage of Black and Hispanic students, it may undercount total enrollment in some schools.