The teacher shortage across California is getting worse, hitting urban districts hardest, but pinching even rural and suburban schools as well, according to a survey released Wednesday.

As a result, students are seeing a revolving cast of substitutes, canceled courses and less qualified teachers in their classrooms, according to district officials who were surveyed.

Across the state, 75 percent of districts reported a shortage of teachers this school year, including 80 percent of urban districts and 69 percent of schools in the suburbs, according to the poll conducted by the California School Boards Association and the Learning Policy Institute, an education research nonprofit.

And it’s getting worse, according to 80 percent of the 211 districts surveyed, which represented a good sample of the state’s 1,000 districts, the pollsters said.

“Teacher quality is the in-school factor most closely linked to academic achievement,” said Chris Ungar, president of the California School Boards Association, in a statement. “So, in order to give our students the education they deserve, California must do a much better job of attracting, developing, supporting, and retaining teachers.”

In Oakland, the district has struggled to hire enough math, science, foreign language and special education teachers, said school board member Jody London.

At Oakland Technical High School, one Spanish class never had a permanent teacher last school year, she added.

“The kids were doing Spanish online all year,” she said.

Special education teachers were the hardest to find, with nearly 90 percent of districts saying they experienced a shortage.

Teacher turnover, a shrinking supply of new teachers and cost-of-living issues contributed to the shortage.

Schools with disproportionate enrollment of English learners or students of color were more likely to report teacher shortages.

Districts are using a variety of techniques to address the shortage, according to the survey, including pay raises, housing stipends and bonuses for hard-to-fill positions, as well as perks like job sharing.

In Oakland, officials have boosted teacher pay by about 17 percent over the past few years, including a new raise funded by a ballot measure approved by voters this month.

“If we as a country really value education, what are we going to do to make the profession of teaching attractive?” said London. “It’s not something that kids today think about.”

San Francisco Unified offers bonuses, has boosted salaries and is tackling the teacher housing crisis to lure teachers and keep them.

A one-bedroom apartment in the Excelsior/Outer Mission neighborhood costs nearly $2,000 per month, the lowest median rent in the city. The average teacher salary is about $70,000.

For teachers facing eviction, the city already offers down-payment assistance as well as legal services, among other housing support programs. In addition, the school board is considering the use of district surplus property to build teacher housing.

Yet San Francisco Unified fell 38 teachers short on the first day of school this year and scrambled to fill those positions as well as unexpected teacher vacancies that have popped up since the start of the year.

“Our teachers can’t find places to live and they are having a hard time staying in San Francisco, and it is fueling our teacher shortage,” said school board President Matt Haney. “There is tremendous urgency to build brick-and-mortar housing for teachers, and we want to demonstrate that this approach can be successful and help us address our recruitment and retention challenges.”

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker