New Mexico trains teachers it doesn't keep

By Amy Traylor, Editor & Publisher · October 7, 2026

New Mexico talks about its teacher shortage as a production problem — not enough people entering the profession. The state's own licensing records tell a different story. New Mexico holds current teaching licenses for 82,266 people. It employs 40,148 of them in its public schools. Fewer than half of the state's licensed teachers are in a New Mexico classroom.

Currently licensed vs. employed in a New Mexico public school, 2024–25. Source: NM PED licensure and staff records.

The gap is not simply people who never taught. When we match the licensed-but-not-working against a decade of teaching-assignment records, a large share are people the state already trained and put in front of students. Of roughly 14,400 endorsed teachers who hold a current license but aren't employed here, about 6,000 taught in a New Mexico public school between 2016 and 2023 — and about 3,100 of those were still teaching as recently as 2022 or 2023 before leaving.

Where the ~14,400 licensed-but-not-employed endorsed teachers come from. “No NM teaching record” includes out-of-state and private-school license holders. Source: NM PED licensure matched to 2016–2023 assignment records.

A word on what “left” means. Our teaching-assignment records run 2016–2023 (the two most recent years in the state file are incomplete and we set them aside). Someone counted as having “left” is absent from later teaching assignments — which includes moving into an administrative role, not only leaving education. We match people across years by license number, email, and name, in that order, because the state's assignment file omits a license number for about a third of staff.

Why this reframes the shortage

If the binding constraint were production, the fix would be to license more people. But New Mexico already licenses far more teachers than it employs, and a meaningful slice of the unused pool is made up of recently departed, still-credentialed teachers — people who could return without a single new degree being granted. That points at retention and re-recruitment, not initial supply, as the lever with the most slack in it.

Retention is where the state is losing ground year to year. Across 2016–2023, roughly one in seven teaching staff left New Mexico public-school teaching each year. The one bright spot was the pandemic year — departures fell to about 11.6% in 2020–21, when the labor market froze — before climbing back. Teachers moving between districts, by contrast, are a small flow: only two to three percent a year. The churn is mostly people leaving, not reshuffling.

Why it matters

A production framing sends money to pipelines — new preparation programs, recruitment from out of state, alternative routes to a first license. Those have their place. But if thousands of the people the state needs are already licensed and recently taught here, the cheaper and faster move is to find out why they left and what would bring them back. The data can't answer that on its own. It can say, clearly, that New Mexico's problem is at least as much keeping teachers as making them.

Figures are aggregate counts from New Mexico Public Education Department licensure and staffing records, compiled by the Impact Lab. No individual teacher is named or published. See the teacher workforce data page and our methodology. Figures are provided as-is; the official PED record governs.

— Amy Traylor, Editor & Publisher, New Mexico Impact Lab