Developers of Wendy's Village, an affordable housing complex planned for teachers in Colorado Springs, Colo., completed their first homes in July 2025.
WeFortify

For much of the 20th century, teaching was a stable, middle-class job in the U.S. Now it’s becoming a lot harder to survive on a teacher’s salary: Wages have been stagnant for decades, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, and teachers earn 5% less than they did a decade ago when adjusting for inflation.

That’s one reason why there’s a widespread teacher shortage, with tens of thousands of positions going unfilled. At the same time, according to a 2022 report from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, there are more than 160,000 underqualified teachers in the classroom, meaning they don’t meet full certification or credentialing standards.

Originally published on theconversation.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.