By Chris Coleman
Memphis opened this school year with approximately 300 hundred teacher vacancies. That is not just an education problem. It is an economic development problem.
In his 2026 State of the City address, Mayor Paul Young said of young adults disconnected from work and school: “This is not a talent problem. This is a pathway problem.” He was talking about workforce pipelines. But where do those pipelines begin?
They begin in a classroom. They begin with a teacher.
As we mark Teacher Appreciation Week, May 4-8, I want to make an argument that I don’t hear often enough in Memphis’s civic and economic development conversations: Great teaching is not just a social good. It is one of our most important economic development strategies. And right now, we are treating it like an afterthought.
The crisis in our classrooms
At the start of the 2025-26 school year, Memphis-Shelby County Schools opened its doors with more than 300 vacant teaching positions (Daily Memphian, Aug. 1, 2025). Forty days into the school year, 220 vacancies had been filled but not with certified teachers (Chalkbeat, Sept. 11, 2025). The teachers hired are not fully licensed, instead holding conditional permits that expire in three years.
Students in special education, elementary classrooms, and high school math sat without permanent, certified teachers, in some cases for weeks.
This is a structural crisis playing out in real time across our city. And every day a seat goes unfilled by a qualified educator is a day a child falls further behind.
Mayor Young’s Prosper 901 initiative aims to put 5,000 young adults on sustained career pathways by 2030. These are serious, ambitious goals. But talent pipelines do not start at job fairs. They start with a teacher who affirms a student’s potential and expands what they believe is possible.
What 20 years teaches you
For 20 years, Teach For America Memphis has worked inside this city’s highest-need schools and seen firsthand what great teachers can unlock in students and communities. More than 1,200 educators have served through our corps, reaching more than 60,000 Memphis students.
But the impact that matters most is not measured in our teacher placements. It is measured in what students do next. We have seen former corps members go on to lead school districts, serve as Shelby County Commissioners, sit on the MSCS board, run nonprofit organizations, and build institutions now woven into the fabric of this city.
None of that happens without the teacher who first told them the truth: Their circumstances do not dictate their destiny. While students from low-income communities and students of color often face unequal access to opportunity, those outcomes are not inevitable, and given the clear connection between educational attainment, workforce participation and economic mobility, we must do better by our kids.
More than a thank-you note
Teacher Appreciation Week is a chance to say thank you, and we should. Teachers in Memphis are doing extraordinary work under extraordinary pressure. They are serving students navigating instability at home, in their neighborhoods, and in the national news. They are doing this without enough colleagues beside them, because hundreds of positions remain unfilled every time the school year begins.
Gratitude matters. But gratitude alone will not solve the issues plaguing our education system, and there are meaningful ways that we can contribute to educator support.
The first is on a more personal note. Parents are a child’s first teacher, and that role does not end once a student is school-age. Parents must show up. And when parents show up, they must represent the values and respect they desire their child to exhibit. Real appreciation looks like knowing your child’s teacher by name, showing up to conferences, and reinforcing at-home the habits they learn at school and the unwavering belief that effort matters. When parents send a child to school ready to learn — rested, encouraged, and supported — they give teachers one of the greatest gifts possible. The partnership between parent and teacher is the foundation that ensures a successful education for students.
What changes things at the civic level is treating teacher recruitment and retention like the economic priority it truly is. That means businesses and civic leaders showing up for schools the way they show up for infrastructure projects and development incentives because an educated workforce is infrastructure. It means philanthropic investment in teacher development programs with proven outcomes. It means employers recognizing that the talent pipeline they depend on was built, student by student, by a teacher they may never meet.
Memphis’s workforce future is won or lost at the front of a classroom, long before a résumé is written or a job offer is extended.
Memphis, this is our moment
Somewhere in Memphis today, a student is in a classroom with the teacher who may change the trajectory of their life.
This week, I’d invite Memphis families, the business community, civic organizations, and elected leaders to ask a simple question: What are we doing (specifically, concretely, and measurably) to ensure that every classroom in this city is led by a great teacher?
Not just this week. Every week. Because every workforce strategy, every economic development plan, and every vision for what Memphis looks like in 2030 runs through that question. The pathways Mayor Young is building for young adults are real and necessary. But pathways are only as strong as the foundation beneath them.
That foundation is a teacher. It has always been a teacher. So to every educator showing up for Memphis students right now, thank you. Not just for what you teach, but for what you make possible: the leaders, builders, and changemakers this city is still waiting to meet.
Christopher Coleman is executive director of Teach For America Memphis.
