“We saw the fact that on day one every single classroom was staffed with a credentialed teacher… Even though all of our classes were staffed with a credentialed teacher, we are still hiring for permanent positions. We were able to achieve on day one a 99.8% teacher fill rate.”   

– Superintendent’s Report to the LAUSD Board of Education, August 13, 2024¹ 

In LAUSD’s annual Local Control Accountability Plan for the 2024-25 school year² the district states that due to “staffing shortages” 43% of the $3 billion budget for high needs students³ went unspent. As a result of these staffing shortages, “fewer students were able to access the increased and improved services for academic and social-emotional supports…” 

It’s unclear how Carvalho produced his 99.8% teacher fill rate figure above. LAUSD open data portal data shows the teacher fill rate was 87.8% at the time. LAUSD started that school year (2024-2025) with 4,467 vacancies of certificated educators. Classroom teachers accounted for nearly 74% of these vacancies (3,314 positions). By the end of the school year, 1,396 of these positions were filled and 767 of these positions were eliminated in budget revisions leaving an estimated 1,151 unfilled vacancies. ⁴ 

The number of budgeted positions is based on the number of teachers needed to comply with class size caps, however LAUSD does not monitor or report how many classrooms are in violation of the class size caps. According to an analysis performed by the UTLA Research Department using LAUSD data, nearly 16% of 11th and 12th grade classes were overcrowded and in violation of class size caps in Spring 2025. 

Hollowing Out the Educator Workforce 

Understanding the educator shortage on a district level requires an analysis of trends in recruitment and turnover, experience, and hiring practices. As we looked deeper into the distribution of experience among our educators, two concerning trends emerged. First, there has been a consistent decline in the share of educators with 10-25 years of experience. In 2019, 55 percent of all educators had between 10-25 years of experience. Only 5 years later, that share dropped to 34 percent. The decline in the size of this cohort is a concern as these experienced educators play a key leadership role in schools. 

Second, if the trend continues, LAUSD is two years away from seeing an uptick in retirements. Many educators retire after 30 years of service when they are eligible for pension benefits. The share of educators who are 5 years away from eligibility (25+ years of service) has increased sharply, from 21% in 2019 to 30% in 2025. Nearly one in three educators at LAUSD are 5 years away from potential retirement. 

The hollowing out of the middle-experience cohort combined with the increase share of educators close to retirement suggest an overall decline in experienced educators at LAUSD — a concerning trend for our students.  

Voluntary Separations Have Doubled 

Every year, LAUSD hires a cohort of educators new to the district.⁵ And every year, educators separate for a myriad of reasons, including retirement, voluntary quits, and involuntary terminations. In most years the number of hires keeps pace with the number of separations from the previous academic year. (See table below)  

In the 2021-2022 academic year the district hired 2,863 educators, while there were only 1,836 separations in the 2020-2021 academic year. That accounts for a net increase of nearly 1,027 new educators. Since that year, separations are on the rise. Annual separations between 2018-2020 averaged 1,500 a year, which has grown to average 2,200 separations between 2021-2023 — an increase in annual separations of nearly 700 educators. 

Accounting for most of the increase in separations is the increase in voluntary separations. Voluntary separations do not include retirements, terminations, or non-reelects (teachers who are not asked to return). Including the 2021-2022 academic year and the years that followed, the number of voluntary separations from LAUSD has doubled. Accordingly, the share of all separations that were voluntary has increased by 16 percentage points, from 27% (2018-2020) to 43% (2021-2023). 

In addition to happening more frequently, these voluntary separations are happening earlier in educator’s careers. Since 2019, the median term of service of educators separating is 5 years. In recent years that median has dropped to 4 years, suggesting a gradual trend toward early voluntary separations. The graph below shows this distribution mapped, with more recent years in darker greens.  

The increase of darker shades in more recent academic years shows a sharp increase in the volume of educators who have separated voluntarily in recent academic years. Though separations are specifically concentrated among new hires, voluntary separations look to have increased across every cohort.  

Another way to understand retention is to understand the retention rates of cohorts — how many educators hired at the same time are retained. Only 1,202 (73%) of the 1,654 educators hired in the 2019-2020 academic year have retained their employment with LAUSD. Looking across multiple cohorts, 10% of educators leave before their second year of employment with LAUSD. From these 5 cohorts alone, we expect 463 educators to separate in the next year. 

Digging Deeper: Substitutes are keeping our schools open 

As we lose experienced educators and hire newer educators, we run the risk of losing experience in our classrooms.  There is a significant growth in newer educators (0-10 years), jumping from 24% share in 2019 to 37% in 2025. However, most of these newly hired educators are substitute teachers. Nearly 800 of the 1,800 educators with less than one year of service are substitute teachers. This is a significant jump from prior years. 

Substitutes play a vital role, meant to strengthen and support schools by allowing teachers to stay home when they are sick, attend IEP meetings, pursue professional development, and more. Subs are UTLA members, and many have years of classroom experience. However, substitutes are not meant to carry the workload of a roster carrying certificated teacher — it is both unfair to expect our substitutes to fill vacant positions and to deprive students of a teacher certificated in the subject matter.  

An overhaul is needed 

The teacher shortage is not a new problem, nor is it unique to LAUSD. It is well documented that teacher pay lags other professions that require comparable levels of education and training. However, LAUSD’s compensation structure is particularly problematic for recruiting and retaining new teachers, for several reasons:  

1. The starting pay at LAUSD for classroom teachers is not adequate: $68,965 

2. The amount of additional academic coursework required to move up the pay scale (98 salary points, the equivalent of two master’s degrees) is 40 percent higher than many other districts and not attainable for many educators.  

3. The chaotic and uneven step system results in minimal pay increases for many new teachers – annual pay increases of 0.16 percent or less— during their first five years. 

Rather than propose the standard “across the board” raises we have negotiated in past labor agreements, in February 2025 the UTLA bargaining team, made up of 140 educators, proposed an overhaul to the salary tables to address new teacher retention and recruitment, and create a more equitable salary structure. We also proposed lower class sizes for 11^th and 12^th grade, and district-wide tracking of class size violations. Educators across many levels of experience support this overhaul in part because one of the most widely felt issues across the workforce is overcrowded classrooms and high caseloads, a problem that obviously can only be solved with more educators.  

Methodology 

We used two different files UTLA receives from LAUSD to generate this analysis: 1.) UTLA bargaining unit membership data and 2.) Separation data. UTLA monthly membership files between August 2019 and February 2025 were merged to create a unified record of all educators ever hired by LAUSD represented by UTLA. Separation files between January 2019 and September 2024 were joined into this record to add separation date and reason to each of these records. is record to add separation date and reason to each of these records. 

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1.  LAUSD Board of Education meeting, August 13, 2024, 1:22 minute mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QaDnF0ATvs  ↩︎
2. Page 3 of the LCAP:  https://www.lausd.org/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/Domain/1266/LAUSD%20FINAL%202024-25%20LCAP.pdf
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3. English Language Learners, foster youth, low-income students. ↩︎
4. Vacancy data is from the LAUSD open data port ↩︎
5. The data and discussion in this post defines educators to include all UTLA represented job titles, the majority of which are classroom teachers (T, L, and Sped table total # here), except where noted also includes thousands of out of classroom certificated staff such as social workers, psychologists, early childhood educators, career and technical educators (adult education), nurses, substitutes and more.  ↩︎