It's not a teacher shortage

94.8%.

That’s the share of foreign language teachers in São Paulo who are not trained in the subject they teach.

63.3% of Physics teachers face the same reality.

This isn’t anecdotal. It’s from Brazil’s 2022 Basic Education Census.

The instinct is to call this a “teacher shortage.”

But that’s not quite right.

Between 2020 and 2021, 1.3 million people graduated with teaching degrees in Brazil.

Only a third ever entered the classroom.

So the issue isn’t supply.

It’s that the system isn’t working — for teachers or for students.

Teachers don’t stay.
Students don’t get taught properly.

In the West, “teacher shortage” means slightly bigger class sizes.

But in much of the world, it means something far more fundamental:

Your teacher may never have studied the subject they are being asked to teach.

Access to quality education shouldn’t depend on where you’re born.

But today, it does. And the gap is far wider than most people realise.

This is the problem we’re working on at Efekta.

---

Originally posted on LinkedIn.