The Teacher Shortage Isn't What You Think — And Why the Math Stopped Working for Me
Post #5 of 14 · Cloned Classroom Model Series | Kept Curriculum
By MsVRichardson — B.S. Science, M.Ed. Curriculum and Instruction, Ed.D. Public Health (in progress) · 13-year math teacher · Founder, Kept Curriculum · Creator of the Cloned Classroom Model™
For thirteen years, I tried to be two teachers at once.
There was the teacher my M.Ed. (master's in curriculum and instruction) trained me to be — the one who had spent years studying how adolescents actually make sense of mathematics, the one who could name out loud why discourse, multiple representations, and immediate feedback are what move a seventh grader from "I don't get it" to "wait, do that again." The one who knew what masterful middle grades instruction was supposed to look like, and who walked into the building every morning believing it was possible to deliver it.
And then there was the teacher the pacing guide asked me to be — the one delivering ten new lessons in ten days, prepping a benchmark over three units, grading exit tickets between bells, and somehow still finding time to "differentiate" for thirty learners in each of four sections. A hundred and twenty kids. Ten brand-new concepts. Two weeks.
This was a challenge — a real, daily, full-body struggle to find success for those learners inside a structure that wasn't built to support it. It took head-bumping with administration. It took hard conversations, some of them through tears. It took the kind of sustained effort that only a teacher who deeply loves the work would even attempt. And the kids learned. The growth was real. But the cost of producing that growth, under those conditions, was being paid almost entirely by me.
And eventually, my nervous system said no.
If you're a middle grades teacher and you've felt this — the persistent sense that you know what good teaching looks like and you cannot get there from inside this model — you're not alone, and you are not the problem. You're not undertrained. You're not under-committed. You are caught inside a system whose math, quite literally, was not mathing.
This article is about what makes the work hard — and what changes when we stop pretending the design is the only design.
The shortage is real. The story we tell about it is wrong.
The headline number is roughly 400,000 unfilled teaching positions across U.S. schools, with chronic vacancies concentrated in middle grades math, science, special education, and English language intervention (Darling-Hammond et al., 2019). It is not a pandemic blip. It is the structural condition of the American teaching workforce.
But here's the part most coverage leaves out: in many states, there are more credentialed teachers than there are filled classrooms (McVey & Trinidad, 2019). Teachers with the right paperwork — increasingly, with master's degrees — exist in numbers sufficient to staff this country. They are just not in the room.
Both of these things are true at once — and they have to be held together, because the contradiction is the whole story: we have a shortage of teachers in classrooms, and we do not have a shortage of certified teachers.
Where did the qualified ones go? They didn't leave education. Many of them, like me, left the current structure of the U.S. educational system — the structure the vast majority of K–12 teachers still work inside. They moved into curriculum design, instructional coaching, ed-tech, tutoring, private practice, consulting, content creation. They kept teaching. They just stopped trying to do it inside a structure that was breaking them.
That is not a recruitment problem. It is a design problem.
What teachers actually know — and the gap the system creates
Here is what our programs equip us with as foundations, and what the research backs: lead mathematical discourse so students reason aloud, defend, revise (Shernoff et al., 2017); differentiate in real time based on what each learner just produced; provide immediate intervention when a misconception surfaces, not three days later when the quiz comes back; build the kind of relational continuity that adolescents need to take intellectual risks (Zhou et al., 2024); and align middle grades instruction with the deeper thinking, written argument, and conceptual fluency that students will need in high school and college.
The foundations come from our preparation. The craft — the part that actually delivers excellent teaching in front of real adolescents — is built on top of those foundations over years of practice, revision, and relationship.
We know this. Our programs taught us the foundations. The research confirms what good teaching looks like. The craft is what we build out of thousands of real classroom moments.
And then we walk into a 50-minute period with a pacing guide that requires us to introduce a brand-new concept today because we have to introduce a different one tomorrow. Inside that single bell-to-bell window, we are supposed to deliver direct instruction (because there is no other mechanism for getting the content into thirty students at once), ration out time for guided practice, build in collaboration, run the classroom routines that keep behavior manageable, and still leave enough room for a meaningful exit ticket so we know what tomorrow's reteach has to fix. Fifty minutes. All of it. Every day. And we call that day's lesson taught.
The gap between what we know works and what the model allows us to do is the part that breaks people. Not the kids. Not the hours. The gap.
The mathematics of masterful teaching
Let me make this concrete. Here is a real two-week stretch from a seventh grade math pacing guide — Unit 4, Equations and Inequalities.
Week 8
Evaluating and Writing Algebraic Expressions — 50 min
Simplifying Expressions — 50 min
Using Number Sense to Solve Equations — 50 min
Solving One-Step Equations (Add/Subtract) — 50 min
Solving One-Step Equations (Multiply/Divide) — 50 min
Week 9
Two-Step Equations — 50 min
Solving Equations of the Form p(x + q) = r — 50 min
Graphing and Writing Inequalities — 50 min
Solving Inequalities by Adding & Subtracting — 50 min
Solving Inequalities by Multiplying & Dividing — 50 min
Ten distinct lessons, delivered across ten days, to four sections of roughly thirty students each — a hundred and twenty kids. The following Monday, learners sit for a benchmark assessment covering all of Units 1–4.
Now let's do the time math.
A typical teacher in this setup has one planning period per day, somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes. Let's call it 45 minutes on a good day. Over those two weeks, that is 10 planning periods totaling roughly 450 minutes — if you actually get them. In most middle schools, several of those periods are claimed by PLCs (professional learning communities — the structured collaboration meetings teachers have during the school day). And PLCs aren't one thing. There's the grade-level PLC, the content-team PLC, the department PLC, the data-team PLC, the MTSS meeting that ends up sharing the PLC slot because there's nowhere else to put it. Most of those meetings exist for good reason — and most of them produce something useful. The structural problem is that they share the same minutes lesson planning needs, and there's no second pot of time anywhere in the day.
Even on the days the period is truly yours, planning periods are also when you call parents, respond to emails, copy materials, meet with the SpEd (special education) team, release the next assignment digitally across three different platforms (because the math one and the LMS one don't talk to each other), play IT for the parent who CC'd an administrator on a four-sentence email asking how to log in, deal with the kid who just got referred, and run to the bathroom. Realistically, you have maybe 250 focused planning minutes in those two weeks for actual lesson preparation.
In those 250 minutes, you are expected to peel through the district-created resources for each lesson — resources that are written for the on-grade-level learner, with tools and supplements you have to hunt down, print, and project (and pray the projector cooperates, the cart is charged, and the link still works). You are expected to build or adapt ten conceptually coherent lessons with multiple entry points for the SpEd, ELL (English language learner), and accelerated learners sitting in the same room. You are expected to design ten exit tickets diagnostic enough to tell you who needs reteach tomorrow. You are expected to grade those exit tickets across 120 students every day to actually act on them. You are expected to build review for a four-unit benchmark. You are expected to analyze the data when it comes back. And you are expected to do the relational work — the check-ins, the "you good?", the redirect with grace — that adolescents require.
That is not a planning load. That is a job description for four people compressed into one body. And we are doing it for less, in real dollars, than a teacher made a decade ago — North Carolina, where I taught, fell from the national middle tier to the bottom third in teacher pay rankings during my time in the classroom, and inflation-adjusted pay is now below where it was when I started (meaning today's paycheck buys less than the same teacher's paycheck bought a decade ago; NEA Rankings & Estimates, 2023–2024).
So here is the honest sentence: you are not delivering mediocre lessons because you don't know how to design great ones. You are delivering whatever you can finish in the time the system gave you.
In an earlier article in this series — The Day I Stopped Being a Performer — I told the story of sitting across from my principal and asking him for a specific, measurable expectation. How much growth did the learners in front of me need to show? What level of understanding did they need to reach to move the school forward? Give me a number. A rooftop expectation. I'd build to it.
And I told him — with complete, unqualified confidence — that if he gave me that target, I would meet it. I was that certain.
The one thing I asked for that he could not give me was time. A rooftop expectation. A basement-level starting point. One hundred eighty days to close the distance. One hundred twenty-plus learners. He couldn't give me uninterrupted, protected planning time because that time didn't exist in the model. He wasn't withholding it. The structure didn't have it to give.
What I didn't fully understand sitting in that office is that he was working inside the same impossible math I was. His pacing guides were handed down from the district. His evaluation rubrics measured things he didn't design. His budget couldn't buy more time because more time wasn't for sale. He was, in his own way, also being asked to do something the model couldn't deliver. The trap wasn't him. The trap was the structure he and I were both standing inside.
That's the math. And no amount of grit, organization, or "growth mindset" rebalances it.
Why excellent teachers leave — and why no one hears them go
When the math stops working, two things happen at once.
The first is interior. Teachers describe something researchers have named organizational exhaustion — exhaustion not from teaching itself but from the unsustainable architecture around it (Magliari, 2025). You are not tired from your students. You are tired from being asked to perform a job that cannot be performed at the level your training and your craft are capable of delivering. That is identity-level fatigue, and willpower does not solve it.
The second is exit. Teachers do not, by and large, stage public revolts against the staffing model. They quietly leave the classroom and find another way to use their craft. That is what I did. After thirteen years, I left the public classroom not because I stopped loving the work but because the work, as configured, was wrecking me. I want to be honest about how that thirteenth year ended for me, and equally honest about the fact that I don't think it has to end that way for the teacher reading this. Exit isn't the only door. Redesign is the other one.
I started Kept Curriculum because I still wanted to teach math — I just wanted to teach it in a structure that allowed me to teach it well.
Multiply that quiet exit by tens of thousands and you get the workforce we have now: chronic vacancies, larger class sizes filled by long-term substitutes, increased reliance on emergency credentials, and — most invisibly — middle grades students who are taught by out-of-field educators for a significant portion of their core instruction (Wilcoxen & Choate, 2026). The teachers who would have raised their hands and said "this needs to change" are no longer in the room to raise it. They are in another lane entirely.
This is why both things have to be said out loud at once: shortages persist despite a sufficient supply of certified educators, and excellent teachers keep leaving — not because their preparation was insufficient, but because what they had grown into through years of real practice no longer fit the room they were standing in. The craft of an experienced middle grades teacher is not something a program hands you. It is something you build, layer by layer, out of thousands of real conversations with real adolescents, out of watching a lesson land and watching the next one miss, out of revising your own understanding of what a learner needs faster than the curriculum revises itself. Teachers grow into education as education evolves. The system didn't evolve with them. It kept measuring master teachers against an outdated yardstick — one that never updated to reflect what excellent teaching actually requires now — and called them deficient when they couldn't fit inside it.
Neither half of that sentence is sufficient on its own.
Why the staffing model hasn't changed
When researchers talk about "school staffing models," they don't mean schedules or contracts. They mean the organizational architecture of teaching itself: who plans, who delivers, who facilitates, who intervenes, who assesses, who communicates. In American schools, the dominant model is what scholars call the one-teacher, one-classroom model — one adult responsible for all of those functions, simultaneously, for thirty children. Over 85% of U.S. teachers still work inside that exact configuration (Ingersoll, Audrain, & Laski, 2025).
That structure was designed for a different curriculum, a different student population, a different set of accountability demands, and a different cultural moment. It has not been redesigned to match what middle grades teaching actually requires now. International reviews are blunt about it: shortages persist most stubbornly in systems that maintain traditional staffing structures and treat teachers as interchangeable labor (Seeliger & Håkansson Lindqvist, 2023). Bellwether's policy work goes further and argues that maintaining the traditional staffing model during a shortage actively worsens burnout, because the load on the remaining teachers grows every time a colleague leaves (McVey & Trinidad, 2019).
The model is the bottleneck. Not the teachers. Not the administrators. The model.
What the research is actually asking for
When you read across the last decade of teacher-workforce research, the recommendations converge — and they look nothing like "recruit harder" or "raise starting salaries by 4%." The literature keeps pointing toward distributed expertise (an expert teacher's instruction reaches more learners, not just one section at a time), differentiated staffing (roles inside a classroom are no longer collapsed into one person), and instructional specialization (the person who designs and delivers the lesson is not necessarily the same person managing the room minute-to-minute).
What the research calls for, in plain language, is what I think of as coherence by design and facilitation by presence — the master lesson is engineered for quality, and the in-room teacher is freed to facilitate, intervene, and respond.
Most of the research describes these redesigns at the system level — co-teaching teams, instructional specialist roles, master-teacher-mentor structures with multiple adults sharing the work. CCM is a single-educator expression of the same principle: the same person plays the differentiated roles in sequence rather than performing them simultaneously. The architecture changes inside one teacher, not across a staffing chart.
Notice what is not on this list: bigger classes. Less expertise. Outsourcing teaching to a screen with no adult present. The research is asking for the opposite — more expertise per student, with a trained educator in the room doing the work that actually requires presence.
What CCM changes
The Cloned Classroom Model aligns with the structural redesigns the research keeps describing — built inside the classroom, not as remote learning, not as a flipped classroom, not as homework. The teacher is still in the room with your students every single minute of class. That doesn't change. What changes is what the teacher is free to do once they're there.
In CCM, the teacher pre-records direct instruction once, with the care and craft a great lesson actually deserves. That recording — anchored to ready-made guided notes — delivers the content during the class period itself. While instruction plays, the physical teacher is free to move through the room. The same educator is now three roles at once, but instead of those roles being collapsed onto a single body in real time, they're sequenced and supported: the Broadcaster (the version of you on screen, delivering the lesson you designed at full quality — the lesson you'd give if you had the time to give it); the Facilitator (the version of you in the room, watching how students are receiving the content, prompting discourse, redirecting attention, pulling a small group when the formative data says to); and the Interventionist (the version of you sitting next to the student who needs you, one-on-one, while instruction continues uninterrupted for everyone else).
The four pillars hold it together: Consistency (every section gets the same high-quality core lesson), Accessibility (students can rewind, re-watch, re-engage), Equity (expertise is no longer rationed by which section you happened to be assigned to), and Sustainability (the teacher is not performing for six hours a day).
This is what the research has been asking for. It just hadn't been built for inside the classroom yet.
If you're new to this series, the full Cloned Classroom Model framework is laid out in the first article — Introducing the Cloned Classroom Model — and the practical first-week implementation is in How to Start CCM.
The relief
If you're still reading, here's the part I want you to hold onto.
You are not a bad teacher because the math didn't work. You are a person doing humanly impossible work inside a model that asks for humanly impossible things. The fact that you can see the gap between what you've grown into and what the system permits — that is your competence speaking. That is the years of practice, the relationships, the craft, the slow accumulation of expertise that no rubric ever caught. That is real. None of it has been wasted.
CCM is not a workaround. It is not a productivity hack. It is a way to teach the way you've grown to teach — discourse, intervention, real-time differentiation, deep relational presence — inside the school day, inside the model, inside your contract hours. It is the resolution of the contradiction between being a great teacher and following the rules of the building. You no longer have to choose.
This is hard. It is draining. And it can be doable again. It can be enjoyable again. The passion you brought into the profession — the reason you stayed in it long enough to actually become great at it — has a place to land that doesn't end with you in the parking lot at 4:30 wondering how long you can keep this up.
That's what changes.
A question for you
If the contradiction disappeared tomorrow — if you got to design and deliver the lesson you've always wanted to teach, and then spend the class period actually being with your students — what's the first thing you'd reclaim?
Tell me in the comments. I read every one.
Previous in the series: How to Start CCM: What the First Week Looks Like
Next in the series: Master Teacher on Screen, Facilitator in the Room — what happens to student achievement when the most effective version of you delivers instruction while the in-room version of you actually gets to teach.
About the author: MsVRichardson is a 13-year math educator, founder of Kept Curriculum, and the developer of the Cloned Classroom Model (CCM) — an in-class instructional framework that frees teachers to facilitate, intervene 1:1, and truly reach every learner. Learn more at Kept Curriculum.
#ClonedClassroomModel #CCM #TeacherShortage #MiddleSchoolMath #TeacherBurnout #EducationReform #KeptCurriculum
References
Darling-Hammond, L., Bastian, K. C., & Berry, B. (2019). Educator supply, demand, and quality. Learning Policy Institute.https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED617602.pdf
Ingersoll, R., Audrain, S., & Laski, M. (2025). The persistence of the solo classroom model and its consequences for teacher retention. Consortium for Policy Research in Education.https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED674616.pdf
Magliari, E. (2025). Organizational exhaustion and the middle grades teacher exit decision [Doctoral dissertation, University of Northern Iowa].
McVey, K. P., & Trinidad, J. (2019). Nuance in the noise: The complex reality of teacher shortages. Bellwether Education Partners.https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED596444.pdf
National Education Association. (2024). Rankings and estimates: Rankings of the states 2023 and estimates of school statistics 2024.https://www.nea.org/resource-library/rankings-estimates
Seeliger, S., & Håkansson Lindqvist, M. (2023). Dealing with teacher shortage: An international policy review. Education Sciences, 13(3), 227.https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/13/3/227
Shernoff, D. J., Sinha, S., Bressler, D. M., & Ginsburg, L. (2017). Assessing teacher education and professional development needs for the implementation of integrated approaches to STEM education. International Journal of STEM Education, 4(13).https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40594-017-0068-1
Wilcoxen, C., & Choate, K. (2026). Out-of-field secondary teachers and instructional coherence in middle grades classrooms. Professional Development in Education, 52(1).
Zhou, X., Padrón, Y., Waxman, H. C., & Baek, E. (2024). School climate, professional development, and STEM teacher retention. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 22(5).https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10763-024-10519-3
