From a story on axios.com headlined “School districts across America will do anything for more teachers”:

School districts nationwide are turning to extraordinary measures in a desperate effort to get enough teachers in their classrooms before the academic year kicks off.

Why it matters: The teacher shortage — driven by burnout, low pay and ever-increasing demands — is a slow-motion crisis that’s happening everywhere, and there’s no easy way to reverse it.

• The wage gap between teachers and the rest of the comparably educated workforce was about 21% in 2018. That disparity was a much smaller 6% back in 1996, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, reports Axios’ Erica Pandey.