In a stark about-face from just a few years ago, school districts have gone from handing out pink slips to scrambling to hire teachers.
Across the country, districts are struggling with shortages of teachers, particularly in math, science and special education — a result of the layoffs of the recession years combined with an improving economy in which fewer people are training to be teachers.
At the same time, a growing number of English-language learners are entering public schools, yet it is increasingly difficult to find bilingual teachers. So schools are looking for applicants everywhere they can — whether out of state or out of country — and wooing candidates earlier and quicker.
Some are even asking prospective teachers to train on the job, hiring novices still studying for their teaching credentials, with little, if any, classroom experience.
Louisville, Ky.; Nashville; Oklahoma City; and Providence, R.I., are among the large urban school districts having trouble finding teachers, according to the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban districts. Just one month before the opening of classes, Charlotte, N.C., was desperately trying to fill 200 vacancies.
Nationwide, many teachers were laid off during the recession, but the situation was particularly acute in California, which lost 82,000 jobs in schools from 2008 to 2012, according to Labor Department figures. This academic year, districts have to fill 21,500 slots, according to estimates from the California Department of Education, while the state is issuing fewer than 15,000 new teaching credentials a year.
First things first- if, in a recession, the first thing you cut is teacher ranks, you’re just a moron from a pure investment standpoint (as recessions will generally require re-education and retraining of the workforce) and completely ignorant of basic macroeconomics, because public sector spending should be increased, and expanding education is a better way than most. So let’s just get that out of the way. Additionally, I guess a decade of slashing salaries to give tax cuts to those who don’t need them, vilifying them and their unions and blaming them for every societal ill, cutting benefits and lengthening hours, not supporting them and allowing parents and students to run roughshod over teaches, while acting like their pensions are a gift to ungrateful slobs instead of the delayed salary they negotiated for and took less up front so there would be something for their retirement may not have been the best fucking idea.
People aren’t stupid. They know a shitty job with unstable employment when they see it. Most people who become school teachers are already willing to forgo huge salaries because they love what they do- you add on the rest of the bullshit, and people say to hell with it and pursue other options.
Hoocoodanode?
Riggsveda
Couldn’t have said it better–and I’m a public employee.
smintheus
Didn’t the Providence school system threaten just a few years ago to fire all their teachers to then rehire some of them again on a worse contractual basis?
ETA: They did fire all the teachers in 2011, just to make budget cuts.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/providence-ri-school-district-all-teachers-are-fired/
PaulW
this should be a question to all union-breaking Republicans: are you CERTAIN you want to drive workers out of education (because charters are having the same problem hiring by the by) by constantly berating the profession and cutting state funding for salaries?
Gustopher
Given the underfunding of pensions, and the states abandoning their commitments, I really have to wonder why anyone would be a teacher without getting a lot more money. Or any type of public servant.
Republican governors have shown that they cannot be trusted to pay deferred compensation. Workers need to demand the pay now.
Mike in NC
Republicans have wanted to destroy public schools ever since they couldn’t impose their Creationist and Evangelical curriculum on all those kids, thanks to the Supreme Court.
David Fud
And, it is still going on. The people of Jefferson County Colorado are trying to rid themselves of a trio of “school reformers” who have done all sorts of crazy things to try to destroy teachers. Their agenda to destroy public schools, teacher unions, and privatize the whole shebang keeps on moving forward with the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity money. Here is a FB source for information on the recall election and ongoing fights between teachers and the Board of Education there.
scott (the other one)
@PaulW: “Yes. The fewer parasites draining the taxpayers the better. True Americans pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and that includes 5-year-olds teaching themselves to read. Next question?”
Gin & Tonic
@smintheus: They sent termination notices to everyone in February of 2011. In May they re-hired essentially all of them, under the same contractual terms. They did not rehire about 100 out of about 1500, mostly those with outstanding disciplinary issues. This was all a game of budget chicken – it is unfortunately not uncommon.
BruceJ
@PaulW: Their answer will be uniformly “Why yes, we do. Those union thugs are destroying education n the US.”
To paraphrase: “These people don’t care about you. Listen, and understand! Those republicans are out there! They can’t be bargained with.They can’t be reasoned with They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. ”
They want to eat the world. They don’t care who dies in the process. They can always hire someone else desperate to live a little while longer for less money.
Joey Maloney
Don’t forget NCLB, which has sucked all the fun out of the profession by making it impossible to act as professionals, instead reducing teaching to rote test prep. And the metastasizing of top-heavy administration that suck up a disproportionate amount of the meager budget while subtracting rather than adding value to the teaching experience.
I could go on – for hours – but fortunately for all I have to start my shift in 20 minutes.
RSA
It’s crazy. Indiana, for example, issued issued 16,578 licenses to first-time teachers for the 2009-10 school year. Four years later than number dropped by more than 10,000.
Of course, math and science are the first subjects to take the hit, because teachers with those backgrounds can get much better-paying jobs. That makes solutions a little tricky, because the obvious thing is to pay those teachers a lot more than other teachers…
smintheus
@Gin & Tonic: Thanks for the info. I had a vague recollection that they’d backed away from the threat after they’d basically dragged the teachers through hell all spring.
Bobby Thomson
Lack of education among the proles is a feature, not a bug.
Also, too, you forgot the lovely reaction to teachers and their students being murdered.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Dean Baker had a short post about this today, also too.
It’s one thing for bloggers and DFH commentors on the Web to gripe about these things. But what is going to be done about it? Are Democrats in elective office going to make it an issue in the upcoming elections? Are they going to propose sensible policies to reverse it and ways to pay for it?
Here in VA, I’m not seeing lots of activity in trying to get Democrats and sensible people riled up to vote. Republicans are trying to throw a new justice off the state supreme court, etc., etc., but it doesn’t seem to be having much of an impact that I can see. Even my favorite local political site, Blue Virginia is spending much of its time talking about Trump and the national GOP machinations even though the VA election is less than 100 days away…
I hope Hillary and Bernie and Martin speak up loudly and often about issues like these. I hope Terry and the state Democrats find their voice and break through the noise, too. They can’t let the Teabaggers set the agenda and the parameters of the debates. They need to be hammered on the way that they’re destroying public education and too much else…
We need to stop being distracted by the stupid things the GOP candidates say and instead pound them on what they have done and what they intend to do if they win.
Cheers,
Scott.
Opoponyx
Thank you, John Cole.
–A teacher
Kay
I’m not a teacher but I do want to keep the “public” in “public schools”, so I find myself squarely in their corner a lot.
I thought this was an interesting take on it, because there IS something weird about teacher-bashing. I can’t decide what it is- obviously part of it is ordinary anti-labor politicking and part of it is that public education is a huge pot of money and they’d love to privatize, skim 15% off the top and redirect it, but there has to be something else going on- the attacks are just so over the top.
dww44
@Mike in NC: Truthfully and regrettably, the GOP has cut public education in these parts mostly because they simply don’t believe in the value of a public education. In this small city we are now into the 3rd generation of students educated solely in private mostly religious schools, as were their parents. The public schools have become largely the domain of AA’s. This is not a good thing. Public schools provide more than a public education; they provide common life experiences among students from different cultural and racial backgrounds resulting in a more cohesive and respectful community of citizens.
While the cutting continues apace,there’s no pushback from middle class whites either because they’ve no vested interested in making them succeed. They’ve been running from them for far too long. Plus most of them vote Republican and believe that all taxes are evil.
What’s been done and being done to public schools, along with what is being done to Planned Parenthood and women’s reproductive health, are two of today’s issues that just make me viscerally angry because I feel so powerless.
Kay
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Democrats are hugely disappointing on it. Democrats have a bit of a problem, too. Even if they did want to run on it (I haven’t seen any indication they do, but if they did) the truth is they’d have real trouble drawing distinctions between Democrats and Republicans. I have no idea how Clinton distinguishes herself from John Kasich, for example. Kasich’s position on public ed is pretty much the DC Democrats’ position. This is one where both sides really DO do it. If there’s any change it isn’t going to come from DC. It’ll be state level.
bemused senior
My daughter is a gifted special ed preschool teacher and early interventionist … kids placed in her class make remarkable progress and many/most end up in transitional kindergarten and then mainstreamed. When she started her public school job 3 years ago, her classroom was empty except for a few bare bookcases. She spent her own money, my money, diy hours and many “donors choose” projects to obtain the materials that now fill her classroom and enable her kids to learn. It isn’t just the salary and the oppositional bureaucracy … teachers have to make gold from straw. It’s disgusting.
Citizen Alan
@dww44:
Tell me about it. In Mississippi, the most aggressively pro-education Democratic candidate we’ve had in YEARS just lost the primary … to a semi-employed truck driver who put his name on the ballot as a joke. I just don’t see the point of it anymore.
smintheus
OT, but wow Sam Brownback’s brother is a sociopath. The Topeka paper portrays him as basically untouchable because of his brother’s protection.
jl
Thanks, Cole, for posting this. The problem has been in the news around the SF Bay Area. The SF school district is, I think, a hundred teachers short for fall,and is asking their teaching staff to look for potential recruits.
Sad and pathetic. I personally know a few SF HS teachers, one of them who is a truly excellent and outstanding teacher, who got good and sick and tired of getting pink slips every spring and spending half of their summer wondering whether they had a job for the fall. So two of them moved off to suburban school districts that had the money to not treat them like shit every spring, and one left the profession.
Edit: I also remember hearing about a local district that may have shot down and disabled kids program, leaving the parents in the lurch, because they don’t have the money to recruit a qualified instructor.
I’m sure the likes of Trump and Jeb! have a plan, though.
Original Lee
Thanks for this post, John Cole. Almost everyone in my family is a teacher. Back in the Sputnik days, and also during World War II, teachers were considered essential for national defense. Public schools were essential for helping turn immigrants into citizens who supported the American Way. I guess back then we had different Others to be worried about and the Powers That Be decided assimilation was the best strategy.
My current theory is that the Internet and cable TV are making it easier for the crab bucketers to be fed misinformation. If you don’t have other sources of information, and if you’re not inclined to think much for yourself, it’s easy to swallow all the lies. Schools are like fact-checkers at newspapers, and we know what happened to them.
Kay
The most disgusting part to me is how many people attended public schools in this country. The schools were there for them when they were children. Now that they’re adults they’re just bailing? Great. Good job, adults. Very admirable behavior on our part.
Mike in NC
@dww44: You nailed it.
dww44
@Citizen Alan: How sad and tragic. Another clue, though, that explains the continued viability of Donald Trump, the Presidential candidate.
Pen
My wife got so far into her teaching education that she completed her student teaching assignment with flying color, only to switch majors near the end to mathematics and sociology. This was, of course, in the middle of Walker’s “teachers are the source of all ills” drive to ruin Wisconsin’s education system so I can’t say I didn’t agree with her decision.
Lamh36
OT, and it’s late night, but shit is apparently going down in Ferguson
reports of shots fired.
here is a video showing someone on the ground who appears shit and the video person screaming at police that the man is still alive and breathing, get him some help.
https://twitter.com/search4swag/status/630595778977796096
https://twitter.com/search4swag/status/630594824693923845
it’s amateur video so…usual caveats apply…
ETA: apparently looks like they arrested the guy recording the above video…
https://twitter.com/search4swag/status/630595307907125248
Omnes Omnibus
@Lamh36: This looks ugly. Very ugly.
SoupCatcher
California had around 8400 openings listed across the state before the weekend. And a lot of schools are starting up this week.
Meanwhile, in what is considered one of the top school districts in the south bay – Cupertino Union School District – all the teachers at an elementary school were shit-canned at the end of last school year. The writer implies that the principal was catering too much to the PTO – hard not to when they bring in a quarter million a year.
Lamh36
@Omnes Omnibus: yeah, but I really don’t know what happened before the guy on the ground, but like I said the videographer was arrested and the reports are of officer involved shooting and the shooting victim may not have survived but conflicting stories…but as usual there may be more to it?
Lamh36
Comrade Dread
You’re assuming this isn’t part of the plan. Demoralize and disgrace public school teachers. Make public education dysfunctional. Encourage more ‘solutions’ that funnel tax dollars to private corporations that hire online ‘teachers’ making $10 an hour without benefits to ‘teach’ hundreds of students logging in to class.
Villago Delenda Est
The utter poison that is the MBA mentality (what are our numbers this fiscal quarter? Who cares about projections beyond that!) has taken over, and it’s destroying us. We need our ROI right this motherfucking second.
This mentality is EVERYWHERE. Probably the only place where it hasn’t fully penetrated is strategic military planning, but the deserting coward and von Rumsfailed tried really hard to kill it there. Just about every major industry is obsessed with the short term bottom line. Investing in infrastructure is seen as lost profits, instead of future profits, because we don’t care about the future, we care about hookers and blow NOW.
The Moar You Know
Sorry to blockquote all this, but it is all true. My wife is entering her 21st year of teaching. Those twenty years have seen the job go from “somewhat rewarding” to “absolutely miserable”. And you’d think that things might be getting better for them, but you would be wrong. Precisely the opposite. Our state, as you mentioned, needs over 21000 teachers, but local school boards made up of small time idiot TeaTards are doing their damndest to make an already utterly intolerable, shitty, life-destroying job even worse.
My wife won’t quit – she wants her pension. That she has EARNED. Teachers don’t get Social Security, as most of you may not know. When teacher’s pensions get looted, they are left with absolutely nothing.
So she won’t quit, but I wish she would. The job is visibly and slowly killing her. All stress, all the time; nobody should have to live like that. I feel guilty that I go to work and get paid pretty much the same and rarely have stressful days. Guys, if you would, please help the teachers. They need it more than almost anyone else I can think of.
ETA: I obviously have ended up, thanks to my wife’s job, knowing well over a hundred teachers at this point. Not one will recommend it as a career to anyone. I think that kinda says it all.
The Moar You Know
@Mike in NC: Here’s the uglier reality; they don’t give a shit about those things. What they want – really want, and I hate to say a lot of people who identify themselves as ‘liberals’ want as well, are segregated schools.
They don’t say that, of course. They bitch about the unions and the teachers, some of them send their kids to charters or private or parochial schools, and none of them will ever say it overtly, but they want segregated schools.
Suzanne
Hah.
Mr. Suzanne is a bilingual SLP, so he’s the speech, language, and reading specialist in the special ed department responsible for all the kids at his schools who have Spanish as a first language and have an IEP. He started at a new district this year, because his last one didn’t give him a raise in seven years, and they put them all through so much bullshit that his entire speech team quit last year. Oh well, fuckers. Crap on people enough, and see what happens.
Ruckus
@The Moar You Know:
I believe that this is a big portion of the parents side of the equation. Many, many people don’t want their kids to have to mingle with the “wrong” people. Problem is of course those parents are the wrong people.
The other side is the money. And politicians trying to appeal to those wrong people. And it’s not just K-12, public colleges are in the same financial boat. That’s a big reason why the huge increases in student loans. Have a friend who attended a CA state college 40+ yrs ago and turned that degree into a very reasonable career. She could not understand why a student would have such high student loans, she thought that an education at a state school was still very cheap. Most people don’t know how much our school systems have been fucked up by 30-40 yrs of bad policies, little money and bad politics. They have been told, if anything, that it is the schools fault. It’s mostly bullshit of course.
Mike G
Repuke plan:
Drive teachers out of the profession with hate campaigns and shitty pay and conditions
Slash credential requirements “because of the teacher shortage”
Slash pay some more because credentials are no longer required
Quality of teaching inevitably declines
“See? Public education is declining, time for full privatization”
cosima
Not sure that it will make anyone feel any better about the state of education in the U.S., but will say that here in Scotland the situation regarding shortage of teaching staff is the same. Where we live the cost of living is astronomical, so they are discussing (not sure where it is in re: putting into place) subsidizing rent to attract teachers. They actively recruit teaching staff from other areas of the UK where teaching staff has been reduced (budget cuts) — but, again, it’s expensive to live here (though lovely), and a long way from their families, so their success rate with that is not very good. My daughter will go into a composite 6/7 class this year, following being in one last year, because our school is short teaching staff. We had continual temporary head teachers last year, and are hoping that a permanent head teacher will have been hired over the summer so that the kids will return to school (next week) with a head teacher that will stay & effect positive change.
Financially, as U.S. citizens, we have some challenges living here that we would not have in the U.S. — taxes are above 40% for us for the UK, and we pay US taxes on top of that. Fuel, housing & food are sky-high. Our number one reason for moving here (able to do so only because my husband’s job puts him in a position to get a visa where most could not) was for our daughter — so that she could grow up in a place where public education is valued highly by the majority of the population, and strict gun laws are in place. The peace of mind that I feel, as a parent, based on those two issues alone is huge.
When we last lived in the U.S. I attended rallies supporting teachers, donated heaps of money, volunteered in classrooms, worked with the local dem group to register voters, wrote, printed & distributed (on my own dime) bilingual fliers re: voting issues for upcoming elections (we had a large Hispanic population in my area). Some weeks I spent 20 hours doing that sort of thing, some weeks 60. My daughter sometimes went along with me when I did those things. I felt like I was doing all that I could, and yet the apathy… Cannot count the number of times that I told people who didn’t want to vote in presidential elections because they felt their vote didn’t make a difference that they had better vote in every election, particularly the local elections where school boards were voted in, or they’d find that soon enough they’d not be able to vote at all.
That was Jefferson County (Colorado), and as noted above, they are going through some hellish times with their school board right now.
It all begins and ends with GOTV, in my opinion, but phone calls to state reps & senators probably help once that ship has sailed.
Earl
Walker gave my mother a negative $5k raise a couple years back. She’s on her last semester before she retires.
And out in CA in the bay area, teaching is a cute hobby to be supported by a spouse. Average salaries are $65k in redwood city or san mateo. http://patch.com/california/redwoodcity-woodside/comparing-the-salaries-of-peninsula-teachers
For those of you not from sfbay/peninsula, that means you’re struggling to afford housing: even $1500/mo to share an apartment (which is cheap) is nearly half your take-home pay. And thats an average, so there are teachers making less! Yet it’s hard to recruit them. Weird.
Zinsky
Garrison Keillor said something recently to the effect that, “if you attack public schools, you are attacking the mortar that holds western civilization together. This means you are not a conservative, you are a vandal”.
Riggsveda
@Citizen Alan: Get rid of your open primaries. These kinds of things happen in states that have them, and it makes ratfucking the Dems easy.
Mustang Bobby
During the recession, Miami-Dade County, the fourth-largest district in the country, did not lay off one full-time teacher during the recession. They got rid of a lot of central administration, reduced some offices by 50% and closed and consolidated schools in overlapping feeder patterns. Full-time employees had ten furlough days added over the year, basically cutting one paycheck but spreading it out over the year, and they went from a $6.5 billion budget to a current $4.5. It was painful, but it was better than what some states did, and now they’re able to add programs and increase the teaching staff.
PaulW
@scott (the other one):
Congratulations, Scott, Trump wants to hire you. ;)
satby
I’m helping an international academic high school exchange program place students in my area of Michiana this fall and I was pretty shocked to find out that the two nearest high schools in Indiana are privatized. They’re the public high schools, but the running of the schools has been outsourced to the K-12 corporation. Which offer most of their classes online, with the parent expected to be the “learning coach”.
And people around here are so anti-tax that they would risk their kids schooling. Both Indiana and Michigan are being run by Tea bagger governors so I guess it makes sense they would try to destroy the public school system, but parents going along with it amazes me.
Ron Skurat
@Mike G: I think this is spot-on, but it raises the question of what happens after. Underpaid privatized teachers will inevitably result in “graduates” who can’t handle college and who can’t function in the workplace.
Is the “plan” just to kick the can down the road & deal with it (or not) once the politicians & upper middle class have retired to a fortified compound outside Scottsdale?
frosty in dallas
many states especially the red ones try to make up for the shortage by decreasing teaching standards ala alternative certification with much of the same effectiveness as the Viet Nam era’s 90 day wonders…
they let in uncommitted clowns then complain about quality.
Ian
Not to disagree with your broader point, but this sentence needs logical attention. Are we talking about Maine and it’s child labor force?
boatboy_srq
@cosima: Virginia (at least NoVA) does some innovative things for teachers as long as salaries aren’t involved. There’s a home ownership programme, for example, where the teachers can buy a house for 30% (give or take) the market value ($150K on a $450K home, for example, or for you roughly £100K on a £300K home) – provided the recipient agrees to remain teaching for the school district for fifteen years or some such nonsense. Burnout isn’t even factored into the equation. Naturally, with Richmond in the thralls of Teahadi wingnuts, there’s no talk whatsoever about raising salaries; and my POS county supervisor is campaigning on his “success” at improving schools and roads (as if either has actually happened) without increasing taxes.
pluege
given that US society is made up of people, and given that US society treats its teachers like crap instead of cherishing them, I question the validity of that statement. US people really do seem to be very, very stupid when it comes to their teachers.
maurinsky
My daughter is a teacher who is looking for a way out. She loves teaching, but she’s not allowed to teach. Teachers have no autonomy in the classroom anymore, someone else decides the curriculum and how they teach subjects. And the only measurement that counts are the tests, which don’t test the progress a student has made, which would be sensible, but where they are right now in comparison to the rest of the nation. So her student who started 3rd grade reading at a kindergarten level but is now almost at grade level is a failure. My daughter is a failure as a teacher because her students who have a parent who is jail and another who works 2 jobs and barely manages to feed her family is also a failure.
It is fucked up beyond all reason.
Jado
@pluege:
Whaaaaatt?!!
No way!! We’re really smart and stuff. We know those teachers are sneaky and tricky, but they won’t fool us! We’re gonna FIRE THEM before they can do those awful things they do which I can’t quite recall just now. And then, when they are all poor and hungry and crying to us about how much they want to teach, we will forgive them like good Christians and hire them back with the promise they will never try to do those bad things again.
And then everything will be fine!!
See? We are TOO smart.
Gretchen
My school district in Kansas decided to save money by buying out all the older, more-experienced, more-expensive teachers and replacing them with cheaper newbies. Unfortunately, even the cheaper newbies got the message and are looking for jobs anywhere else. And the new, inexperienced kids won’t have any mentors to teach them.
One of the progressive Kansas groups is trying to collect information on how many of the public-school-destroying legislators are homeschooling their own kids. Turns out, a lot.
Davis X. Machina
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Luke, 12:34
J R in WV
@Kay:
Kay,
Don’t forget that Tejas made it illegal to teach “problem solving skills” in their public schools – or at least tried to. The republicans want to make people too ignorant to see that the republicans intend to steal every nickel from the citizens of the nation to pay their dear leaders off.
Any teacher who attempts to teach labor history, or the true history of the Civil War including the reason those particular states with their “peculiar institution” [of enslaving people for eternity] attempted to use treason to depart the Union can expect to be under fire at best and jailed for violating educational standards at worst.
And I believe this is a deliberate conspiracy to dumb down the electorate, not an unintentional side effect of budget cutting.
They want cashiers too stupid to make correct change if you hand them $20.17 for an $18.17 purchase, which I have seen with my own eyes. Too ignorant to figure 6% sales tax if their register goes down in the closing part of your purchase. Unable to do a 20% tip after dinner and salad bar at Applebys (little joke to lighten up) without a smart phone tip application.
Why they don’t want their health care workers extra educated and smart I don’t know! Maybe they envision a two tier health system where republican leadership and super wealthy people get real doctors and the rest of us get EMTs and PAs?
I would rather live in a well educated population with diversity of all kinds, but some people probably feel threatened if their underlings are smart, experienced, speak other languages, can understand the calculus, etc.
Sometimes commenting on current events is depressing!
BeezusQ
Here in San Francisco you cannot afford to LIVE on a teacher’s salary (even with experience). Crappy studios in the WORST neighborhoods are going for well over $2500 per month. When I first moved here (as a teacher WITH experience, licenses from several states, and lots of grant writing experience) I was ignored for NON certified “teacher” (pay less, no union representation, etc.) A lot of bad planning, actions, and choices are coming back to haunt a lot of school districts.