Fewer Students, Tighter Budgets, Greater Needs: What the 2026 Education Workforce Data Reveals

The education workforce is at an inflection point. For more than a decade, the answer to workforce challenges was roughly the same: recruit harder, pay more, ease certification requirements. That approach is running out of road. Enrollment is falling. Budgets are tightening. And the students who remain require more support, not less.

The Kelly Education Re:work Report draws on responses from more than 2,500 educators and administrators to show where the pressure is coming from and where the path forward is already taking shape. Here are five realities shaping what comes next.

1. Enrollment is declining, and the pipeline is not coming back.

The National Center for Education Statistics projects public school enrollment will fall 5% between 2022 and 2031, dropping from 49.6 million to 46.9 million students. A Brookings Institution analysis projects even steeper long-term losses, estimating traditional public schools could serve 3 to 6.5 million fewer students by mid-century. Twenty-three states are projected to lose at least another 5% of their students by 2030. West Virginia faces an 18% decline. California is expected to lose 500,000 students.

The teacher pipeline is contracting at the same time. Retirements and exits to other industries continue to rise, and fewer students are choosing teacher preparation programs to begin with. Beginning this summer, new federal student loan limits will further restrict access to graduate education programs, including those required for teacher certification in many states and for all pediatric therapy licenses. To retain federal loan eligibility, programs must demonstrate earnings premiums over high school graduates, a threshold that 60–80% of teacher preparation programs currently fail to meet. 

For districts facing the steepest enrollment losses, the question has already shifted. It's no longer "how do we fill positions?" It's "how do we redesign the work itself?"

The districts making progress have stopped waiting for the pipeline to recover and started building their own. Grow-your-own programs, paid apprenticeships, and community college partnerships are how they're developing candidates from within their own communities. Endorsements in high-need areas like special education and multilingual education, paired with leadership residencies that give emerging educators real responsibility before they step into full roles, are producing results that traditional recruitment cannot.

2. Burnout is structural, not personal.

Nearly 4 in 10 educators say they consider leaving the profession at least once a month. More than half identify absenteeism and burnout as their school's most pressing challenge. Forty-two percent say they're asked to cover for absent colleagues at least once per week, and nearly half report that their districts rely on long-term substitutes to cover vacant teacher positions entirely.

These numbers are connected. The educators most likely to leave are usually the ones absorbing the most coverage load. When they go, the remaining staff picks up more. It's a cycle, and compensation adjustments alone don't interrupt it.

Nearly 6 in 10 educators say visible emotional support would reduce burnout and improve attendance. When you look at what they mean by that, it's not a wellness program. It's manageable workloads, protected planning time, and a culture where asking for help doesn't carry a professional cost.

The districts making real headway have gotten specific about follow-through, showing educators exactly what changed, and why, because of what they said. That visible connection between input and action is what builds the trust that makes everything else work. Coverage systems also need to be intentional: when the default is "find whoever is available," the burden consistently falls on the same people.

3. Special education and therapy shortages are the highest-stakes pressure point.

Among special education educators, 57% say their caseloads have become unmanageable. Half say high turnover in special education roles already threatens their school's ability to meet IDEA requirements. And when paraeducators are absent, 32% of the time the position receives no coverage at all, leaving teachers without support and students without the consistency their days depend on.

The therapy staffing picture adds another layer of urgency. Speech-language pathologist positions are projected to grow 18% through 2033. Board-certified behavior analyst roles will grow 22% over the next decade. Rising autism diagnoses, now affecting approximately 1 in 54 children, and pandemic-related language development disruptions are accelerating that demand, while the pipeline to meet it is contracting.

There's a training gap on top of the staffing gap. Special education educators consistently name the same professional development needs: behavior management support, training for neurodiverse learners, trauma-informed strategies, and executive functioning approaches. Applied behavior analysis addresses all of these directly, yet administrators consistently underinvest in it, often because they're less familiar with what it looks like in a classroom. That gap has real consequences for both students and staff retention.

At Kelly Education, we work with districts across the country on exactly these challenges, and the districts seeing the strongest results are the ones treating special education and therapy staffing with the same rigor as any other high-stakes workforce decision. That means planning further out, investing in structured mentorship for new special education teachers, and building paraeducator coverage systems that don't rely on improvisation.

4. The gap between what leaders say and what educators experience is where progress stalls.

Sixty-nine percent of administrators say mental health efforts for staff have increased. Only 45% of educators say they've felt those changes in their own buildings. This pattern holds across the report and points to something more systemic than a single miscommunication. 

A plan that doesn't reach classrooms is just a memo.

This gap usually isn't the result of bad intentions. It's the result of treating announcement as implementation. A new initiative gets launched, communicated, and checked off. Somewhere between the decision and the classroom, it doesn't land, and educators who have seen this before update their expectations accordingly.

 Specific communication about real decisions is what closes this gap. When educators can point to something concrete, a coverage policy that changed, a planning period that got protected, a request that was acted on, trust builds in a way that announcements never produce.

5. Replicable solutions already exist.

By the time students graduate, they'll have spent the equivalent of an entire academic year being taught by substitute teachers. Paraeducators often log more one-on-one time with students with disabilities than any other adult in the building.

And yet 77% of districts provide substitute teachers with no training beyond basic logistics. Only 17 states have competency standards for paraeducators. Nearly three-quarters of paraeducators plan to leave within a year, not because they don't care about the work, but because passion alone can't sustain people in roles with low pay, rushed onboarding, and no visible path forward.

 The good news is that districts are already proving what changes when you invest in these roles. In Charleston County, South Carolina, a market analysis of substitute pay rates and a targeted adjustment lifted fill rates above 90% within a month. In Mesa, Arizona, Chief of Staff Justin Wing has been leading that shift through a partnership with Arizona State University. Mesa Public Schools began with a single elementary school — a third-grade team that moved from isolated classrooms to a shared model where educators collectively served a larger group of students with flexible, daily schedules. The results spread quickly. Within two years, the entire school had adopted the model, and groups from across the country have since visited Mesa to study it firsthand. States like Missouri and Wisconsin have long required licensing and training standards for substitute teachers, and that foundation of professionalization shows up in both recruitment and retention. None of these approaches require unusual resources. They work in ordinary buildings. 

Frameworks like LEARN give paraeducators and substitute teachers a shared, concrete picture of what effective practice looks like across every support role. When people know what success looks like and receive training built around those expectations, they stay longer and perform better. For districts interested in team-based models, the most practical starting point is small: one lead teacher, one content specialist, one support staff member, and an integrated substitute working from shared goals with protected co-planning time. Measure team retention and student engagement. When the data supports it, expand.

Read the full Kelly Education Re:work Report here.