The New York Times misses the point. The *biggest* point.

[acroyear]

In Search of Good Teachers - New York Times:

With 50 million children set to return to school, districts all over the country are still scrambling to fill teaching positions and are having an especially difficult time finding qualified applicants to fill shortages in vital areas like math and science. These shortages will persist and the education reform effort will continue to lag until states, localities and the federal government start paying much more attention to how teachers are trained, hired and assigned.

Guess which word is missing there.

It's a big one.

A HUGE one.

"PAID"

Until this nation and these states and localities get off their collective anti-tax, anti-"socialist" arse and actually start PAYING people to be good teachers in those subjects, they will NEVER EVER EVER increase the candidate pool.  When the difference between a math major doing engineering work 3 years out of college and a math major being a public school teacher 3 years out of college is a factor of FOUR, then there is simply no contest.  To live well enough to match your own education and status, you need to be paid what your brain is worth or you will never find job satisfaction.

Giving a person a choice between a $26,000 teaching job and a $100,000 engineering or programming job?

Well, you could do the math if you ever had qualified teachers to teach you...

Teachers are not and have never been paid what they're worth.  Change that, and you change everything.

Comments

[cozit.livejournal.com]

If in a large enough school system, maybe... those who are "surplused out" have to top the list for those being hired into new slots elsewhere in my county. But if you work for a smaller district, even if you've got tenure you could fall victim to what happens when there are fewer students... or budgets get cut. Heck, there are at least 4 county-wide systems out west that I know of for certain that cut all of their media specialists... leaving maybe a couple for the entire county, mostly to oversee their school library collections (though at least one county has boxed up those as well - or farmed them back out to the teachers :-( )

Then there's what happens when someone is accused of abuse.. even if they're cleared later, sometimes it's impossible, or next to impossible to get re-hired anywhere.. all because some kid or parent decided to "get back at" a teacher for something. Or like that poor substitute teacher who made the news because some kid hit a porn pop-up laden site in her class (on purpose), and she couldn't get it to stop, had been told not to turn off the computer under any cirucumstances, and received no help from the administration when asked... she's under charges for corrupting minors (among other things) because several classes were in that room, and a number of them saw the screen... *all* of whom (after the first few) had to do some distracting and manuvering on purpose in order to manage that trick, as she'd re-angled the screen away from them, the best she could, given the circumstances. (I believe she was found guilty, but is still fighting it through appeals, with a great deal of support from quite a few places)