By the Learning Policy Institute’s June 2025 count, at least 411,549 U.S. teaching jobs began the 2024-25 school year either unfilled or staffed by someone not fully certified for the assignment. That is roughly 1 in 8 positions in the nation’s public schools. Part of the long-term fix runs through regional universities that prepare teachers and school leaders, increasingly through online programs supported by educational technology companies like Risepoint.
Where the gaps run deepest
Every state reported gaps in more than one subject, but the largest numbers cluster in special education, elementary education, language arts, and career and technical education. By breadth, special education leads, with shortages reported in 45 states, followed by science in 41 and math in 40.
Rural districts feel it most acutely. Smaller tax bases make it harder to compete on salary, teacher-preparation programs are often far away, and vacancies that go unfilled push more classes onto out-of-field instructors.
Two forces feed the problem. Fewer people are entering the profession, with interest in teaching among high school and college students near its lowest level in decades; enrollment in teacher-preparation programs fell by about 100,000 candidates in the years after the Great Recession and has recovered only unevenly since. Attrition drives the rest. The institute attributes roughly 90% of annual teacher demand to it, and fewer than 1 in 5 of the teachers who leave are doing so to retire; most cite pay, other career options, or dissatisfaction with the job. A shortage built on those trends does not resolve on its own.
The shortage reaches the leadership ranks
The gap is not only classroom teachers. Districts also need the administrators who run instructional programs, and those roles are among the hardest to fill in the highest-need areas. A special-education director has to manage compliance with state and federal requirements, individualized education plans, and budgets. Someone has to do that work in every district, including the small and remote ones.
Those jobs are filled by experienced educators moving up, and the credentials they require, typically an education specialist degree plus state certification, are a real hurdle for a working teacher in a district hours from the nearest campus. This is the point in the pipeline at which online graduate education matters most. It lets a regional university reach the teacher who is ready to become a director or a superintendent without asking that person to leave the school that already depends on them.
How one regional university feeds the pipeline
In January 2026, Northwest Missouri State University, in Maryville, expanded its online portfolio, built with support from Risepoint. The University added three graduate programs, two of them aimed squarely at the leadership gap: a Central Office/Special Education Director district-level certificate and a Central Office/Superintendent district-level certificate. A Hunt Institute analysis cited by the university found that 43% of Missouri schools have at least one special-education vacancy, the most difficult certification area to staff in the state.
The programs are designed around the constraints of a working educator. The special-education director certificate is fully online and accelerated, spans 12 credit hours over as few as 10 months at about $5,556 in total tuition, aligns with Missouri’s certification requirements, and builds on an education specialist degree or a master’s in educational leadership the candidate already holds. A companion superintendent certificate follows the same accelerated, online design and prepares veteran administrators for Missouri’s career administrator credential.
Northwest’s School of Education reports full employment in its graduate placement and counts more than 80,000 alumni, and U.S. News & World Report ranked the university among the top public regional universities in the Midwest in 2025.
“These programs allow us to extend our impact and strengthen how we serve the communities that rely on Northwest for prepared educators and professionals,” said Dr. Greg Haddock, the university’s associate provost of graduate, international and online learning.
Risepoint maintains the technology, while the university maintains responsibility for curriculum, teaching, admissions, tuition, financial aid, accreditation, and all other academic- and instruction-related functions and decisions. The faculty who teach Northwest’s on-campus courses teach the online ones. Risepoint, which works with more than 100 universities, primarily regional institutions, supplies the initial student outreach and student support that let an institution reach students at that scale.
“Northwest Missouri State has a powerful legacy of impact,” said Fernando Bleichmar, CEO of Risepoint. “We are proud to expand our partnership as the University creates more accessible pathways that support local schools and empower graduates to make an impact within their community.”
A lever, not a cure
Online graduate education does not touch the largest drivers of the teacher shortage. Pay and working conditions push educators out of the profession, and no degree program changes that. But it can remove distance and schedule as the reasons a working teacher cannot earn the credential to become the special-education director or the superintendent a nearby district badly needs. For rural and regional districts far from a university, that is a partial fix, but still one of the few levers a regional university can actually pull.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com
