Much has been written about the current and growing teacher shortage in America.  Today, only 26% of teachers are under 35, while 48% are over 45, a near perfect reversal of the demographics in 25 years.  Many retirements are coming, but this “shortage” is actually a misnomer.  Universities grant more than 100,000 education degrees a year.  The National Center for Education Information, in annual surveys since 1983, has found that between 33 and 40% of “fully qualified” graduates in education do not go directly into teaching, however.  Within 5 years of starting a teaching career, 50% have quit.  As a result, approximately 4 million of the 6 million Americans holding bachelor-level education degrees do not teach.  We have a shortage of people willing to teach, not teachers.

Perhaps the primary reason for this is that teachers are not for the most part supported or compensated as professionals who have a key role in the overall success of the Knowledge Economy.  Rather, they are often treated as second-class citizens who couldn’t get a “real” job.  This, despite the fact that when the classroom door closes, what the teacher knows, how it is presented, and the attention given to individual students are the core drivers of learning and achievement.

Only 41% of teachers believe they are very well prepared to implement new teaching methods, and only 20% say they can integrate new educational technology.  Perhaps most telling is that the unit of measure for this professional development was not number of days of training, but number of hours. The cutoff category for the highest level of training was “more than eight hours.”  Of the 20% of teachers who said they were “very well prepared” to integrate educational technology into the classroom, only 33% had more than eight hours of professional development in the previous 12 months.

Second, teachers’ pay is low and not improving.  The average real salary for a public school teacher rose 1% in the past ten years, to $39,385.  Unquestionably, addressing these issues, which lead to the high turnover nationally and in the San Mateo Union High School District, must be a high priority as we change the model over the coming years.  This model now serves many teachers just as badly as it serves so many students.  Everyone, including teachers, must rethink traditional modes of operation.

We must talk about longer school years and school days, but we must be not be simply extending the status quo. I have suggested a number of ways the time should be utilized more effectively.  Mentoring at the beginning of a career has to increase and improve.  We must open the issue of tenure, which now results in the most inexperienced teachers being assigned the most difficult classes and makes addressing weak performance nearly impossible.  We must discuss how we can establish a career ladder for teachers based on excellence in the classroom and a pay scale that allows teachers who take difficult assignments or have expertise such as mathematics and science that are in short supply to be paid more.  Numerous models are being developed to adjust for the quality of students and measure teachers on improvements made.  We need to move to those if the public is ever going to support significant teacher pay increases.

From my perspective, teaching is in serious jeopardy of imploding unless it opens itself to new approaches and accepts different measurement standards.  We will never be successful in raising education to the standard necessary for the Knowledge Economy if we are unable to stabilize teaching and make it a long-term rewarding profession.

 

 

Vote for Peter H. Hanley on November 8