Florida’s Teacher Workforce Research Brief Series

This brief introduces a series of research briefs examining how Florida’s teacher workforce has changed over the past decade and the implications for recruiting, preparing, supporting, and retaining teachers statewide.

This brief examines trends in teacher turnover across Florida and finds that turnover remains elevated, particularly among early-career teachers, in high-demand subject areas, and in schools serving large shares of economically disadvantaged students and students of color.

This brief examines changes in teacher salaries across Florida and finds that recent investments helped boost beginning teacher pay, but compensation growth has not kept pace for many experienced teachers.

This brief examines how the composition of Florida’s teacher workforce has changed over time, finding a more racially and ethnically diverse workforce but an increasing reliance on novice teachers to staff public schools.

Using statewide data from 2020-21 through 2024-25, this brief finds that Florida schools are increasingly relying on inexperienced, temporarily certified, and out-of-field teachers, with these challenges concentrated in schools serving larger shares of economically disadvantaged students and students of color.

This brief finds that Florida increasingly relies on beginning teachers to staff its public schools, but high rates of attrition during teachers’ first five years threaten long-term workforce stability.

As Florida’s rural communities continue to change, this brief finds that the state’s most geographically isolated schools face the greatest challenges recruiting and retaining a stable teacher workforce.

Drawing on evidence from six research briefs, this summary finds that Florida’s teacher workforce is undergoing significant change, with growing reliance on novice teachers, persistent turnover, and uneven access to qualified educators across schools and communities. Taken together, the findings suggest that teacher workforce policy should focus not only on filling vacancies, but on creating the conditions that allow teachers to remain and grow in the profession.

This study draws on data from the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) Staff Information System. These data include information on instructional and support staff working in K-12 schools in Florida. We draw primarily on annual data from the 2013-2014 to 2025-2026 school years that is collected in October of each school year (i.e., Survey 2). In some instances, Survey data is missing or incomplete for some school districts, in which case it is supplemented with Survey 3 data. Data are available for staff that are not exempt from Florida’s broad public access to government records. These data were provided by the Florida Education Association, which requests these data from the FLDOE annually. See full appendix for additional details about the data used in this report.