Mark Macyk will be starting his fifth year teaching middle school English in Nicetown this August. He likes where he works, but one problem has persisted – teacher vacancies.
“In this one English room right next to me, we’ve had nine teachers in there over the course of five years. We tried the gym teacher in there. We tried a long-term sub,” he said. “We’ve tried certified people, uncertified people, and what all of them have in common is that they were not ready.”
Macyk is a teacher at Edward T. Steel School in North Philly’s Hunting Park neighborhood. He said challenges brought by vacancies and turnover have led to lasting effects on students and staff.
“When you have this kind of disruption, you don’t learn anything,” he said. “So we have all these situations where you get this whole group of kids who fall behind, who become ‘the group that didn’t have the teacher.’ But every other teacher has to then fill in these gaps.”
Macyk’s situation isn’t unique.
According to a recent report from Penn State University’s Center for Evaluation & Education Policy Analysis (CEEPA), Philly’s years-long teacher shortage has continued to escalate. The city, in particular, has been relying on emergency permits to fill these gaps.
What are emergency permits?
The report focuses on the amount of emergency permits issued for teachers in Pennsylvania. Permits authorize teachers to be in classrooms, but often without the needed experience, said Ed Fuller, the author of the report.
“Certified teachers have taken and completed a teacher preparation program, and have passed the appropriate test and then applied for [and received] certification from the Pennsylvania Department of Education,” he explained. However, “you can be a teacher without being certified. You can become a teacher and be on an emergency permit.”
Teachers who are certified in Pennsylvania are typically required to go through student teaching, related education, and testing before entering the classroom.
Pennsylvania public school entities, or Local Education Agencies (LEA), are able to request emergency permits when they must fill a vacant teaching position but are unable to find a “fully qualified and properly certified” educator with a “valid and acceptable” certificate.
During the state’s 2021-22 school year, the number of emergency permits exceeded the number of newly certified teachers.
This trend has continued, with the number of permits awarded each year for new teachers continually being higher than newly certified teachers.
Fuller explained while these numbers encompass the entire state, the problems are worse in Philadelphia.
“The number of teachers in Philadelphia County accounts for about 10% of all the teachers in Pennsylvania,” he said. “But Philadelphia County also accounts for about 47% of the vacancies in 2025 and about 38% of the teachers on emergency permits in 2024, which is the latest data we have. So Philly disproportionately has many more vacancies than other places in the state and way more emergency permits.”
These numbers are “troubling,” said Laura Boyce, the executive director of Teach Plus Pennsylvania, a teacher advocacy organization.
“The number of newly certified teachers has been declining in Pennsylvania over the last decade or so by about two-thirds, and we’re increasingly relying on emergency-permitted teachers,” she said.
Making things even more complicated is a lack of support for emergency permit teachers, said Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) President Arthur Steinberg.
“The programs in the colleges aren’t great to begin with,” he said. “Imagine throwing someone that hasn’t even had one of those into a classroom, or a special education classroom, with no support, and wondering why they leave.”
Supporters of the permit, though, say emergency permits allow those with skills who may not have wanted or been able to go through the traditional certification route to be in the classroom.
Teachers working on emergency permits could benefit from extra support, said PFT’s Treasurer LeShawna Coleman.
“I think there’s a lack of support for teachers with emergency certifications, but then we’re expecting them to perform as if they are certified teachers,” she said. “If the district is going to do this, then you have to provide the proper support.”
She emphasized the problem itself is not emergency permits being used, it is that the permits, without support or guidance, isn’t enough.
Real impacts
Macyk explained teacher shortages can increase responsibilities for teachers already employed in the Philadelphia area.
“The biggest problem I see with these vacancies is that people are so unprepared,” he said. “The schools are already so understaffed and stressful that nobody makes it long enough to become a good teacher. And that perpetuates itself, because then who quits? The veterans are now quitting because we’re overworked. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Students are also impacted negatively. Macyk said in Philly, children are often experiencing trauma outside of school. He said this means that classrooms with teachers who don’t have the right resources, or no teacher at all, can have a bigger impact on kids.
“I can’t imagine being a little kid who’s life is already challenging, and then all of a sudden, one-third of your day is filled with a teacher who doesn’t care, or doesn’t have a certification yet, or doesn’t exist,” he said.
Teachers without the proper certifications or training may not be equipped to serve all students’ needs, explained Boyce, of Teach Plus Pennsylvania.
“On the whole, teachers who go through these emergency, alternate pathways tend to be less prepared, less effective, and they tend to leave,” she said. “So the effect on students is you’ve got a revolving door. You have a teacher in front of students who maybe isn’t prepared to meet the individual, diverse needs of their students, and so students are getting left behind. They might be having more challenges with student behavior, and it’s becoming an unsafe environment in the classroom.”
Boyce emphasized she does not want to “denigrate the role” of teachers on emergency permits. She said she believes they are still doing great work.
The vacancies, turnover and inconsistency that can come from using these permits, though, has a ripple effect – creating a scenario of students without stable teaching environments.
“It just creates an environment where you don’t have that feeling of security and attachment,” she said. “You don’t have teachers who have really gotten to know your needs and how to support your success. And it’s really hard on the other teachers in the building.”
The PFT’s Steinberg explained: “If vacancies are there and the classrooms aren’t filled, then someone has to cover it on their prep period, which takes away from their preparation time for their own classrooms. Also, if they’re not feeling well one day, it makes them more likely to stay home sick when they realize they’re going to come in and have to work straight through without any break or any time to modify their lessons for their students.”
Teaching is a specialized skill, he said, and can be incredibly difficult without the right experience or support.
Which is why teacher shortages and lack of certification ties into a more complex problem – the funding of public schools.
“You can’t just take someone off the street and throw them in and expect them to succeed,” he said. “And what people don’t realize then is the kids don’t achieve. Then you get the legislature in Harrisburg saying these schools are failing. They’re then saying, ‘Let’s cut their funding and increase the availability of vouchers or money for charter schools.’ ”
This cycle and lack of stable funding sources also leads to school buildings falling into disrepair, which then impacts staff and student morale.
“The conditions of the buildings are a huge issue,” said the report’s author, Fuller. “Facilities matter a lot to teachers. They matter a lot to students too, because it actually impacts student achievement, but it impacts teacher turnover as well, because nobody wants to work in a building that’s super hot because it doesn’t have AC, or it has mold, or it has asbestos, or whatever the case may be.”
Solutions
The report provides several recommendations to address this problem – including more funding, removing cost barriers for teacher certificates, and adding incentives to the student-to-teacher pipeline.
Low pay for Philly and Pennsylvania teachers limits recruitment and retention of educators, especially as it has not kept up with the cost of living and inflation.
“The average teacher salary in Pennsylvania is about the same as it was in 1990 once you adjust for inflation,” Fuller said.
Another barrier is the cost of student teaching – aka the field training experience required to become certified.
Governor Josh Shapiro and the Pa. legislature have expanded funding for “stipends” for student-teachers – which allow students to make money while fulfilling their student teaching requirements. In return, students must commit to teaching in Pennsylvania for at least three years.
In June, Shapiro announced $7.76 million in grants focused on focus on certifications for special education teachers, math, science and career and technical education teachers, which face a critical shortage.
Fuller explains this funding is vital – as student teachers can face major challenges if they do not receive this kind of financial support while teaching.
“Student teaching is a full-time job,” he said. “You go to school and teach or observe. You’re there all day, but if you still have to pay tuition, food, housing – how do you do that when you’re working free all day in a school? Well, you work at night, you work on the weekends, and that makes it really hard to get all the benefits from student teaching … So the student teacher stipend lets people focus on learning.”
North Philly teacher Macyk agreed. “[We should] improve the value proposition of being a teacher. Not just the pay, but how much it costs to become a teacher. For the student teacher stipend for me in grad school, I was asked by the school, ‘How would you change your student teacher program?’ What I would change is that I had to work full time for free for a year.”
PFT leaders also suggest other ways school districts and the government could use to identify and recruit teachers.
“Start identifying and introducing kids to the benefits of teaching while they’re still in high school, target and identify them and get them into programs where they would come out and become teachers” Steinberg said. “Also, increase the number of teacher apprenticeship programs, which, again, is a function of government, federal funding and through the state.”
Boyce said there also needs to be more Philly-specific data to help understand the exact causes of these vacancies and issues.
“I think we need to do a little bit more of a root cause analysis in Philadelphia. What is uniquely happening in Philadelphia?” she said. “Is it more on the recruitment and hiring side that we’re specifically going after emergency-permitted teachers? Are there more things that we could be doing to attract the teachers who are getting certified to Philadelphia? Are there some really specific school culture or leadership things that we need to address here?”
Fuller said he hopes the report helps those working with a sense of urgency to find solutions, since the problems arising from these shortages can have disproportionate effects.
“No child should have less access to quality teachers just because they live in a certain place,” Fuller said. “And that’s the reality of it. In Pennsylvania, certain kids who live in certain areas just don’t have access to quality teachers.”
