Frustrated and stymied by massive budget cuts that have trimmed salaries and classroom funding, Kansas teachers are “fleeing across the border” to neighboring states that offer better benefits and a friendlier climate for public education, NPR’s Sam Zeff reported.

To be sure, this is a tough time for the Sunflower State, where funding shortfalls forced a half-dozen districts to shorten their academic calendars, and teacher jobs are being advertised on billboards. But it’s hardly an outlier. Las Vegas, home to the nation’s fifth-largest school district, is undergoing a particularly brutal struggle to recruit, and keep, enough new teachers for the upcoming academic year. (After all, how many superintendents have been reduced to zipline stunts to draw attention to a hiring crisis, as was the case with the Las Vegas district’s Pat Skorkowsky?) And it doesn’t take much to find stories of teacher shortages in Arizona and Indiana, among many others.

There are plenty of creative ways of improving teacher retention but many of them cost dollars that districts say they simply don’t have to spend. At the same time, researchers and advocates contend that existing dollars aimed at teacher retention could be more wisely spent.

One solution: Residency programs that provide new teachers with intensive mentoring, coaching, and support for their first few years in the profession are gaining in popularity. But an underlying issue is that fewer people are opting to become teachers, and when they do, about half will quit within five years. Indeed, in last year’s Gallup poll, the percentage of people who said they didn’t want their children to become teachers jumped to 43 percent from 33 percent a decade earlier.

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Catherine Brown, the vice president of the Center for American Progress, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., said teacher colleges could help ease the crisis by setting a higher bar for applicants and developing partnerships to help their graduates make the transition to the workforce. However, schools are not attractive enough workplaces to draw top talent, and teachers have “virtually no opportunity to distinguish themselves for excellence,” Brown told an audience of education journalists at a seminar this past April in Chicago.