In the comments to my previous post about school privatization, there was discussion of news reports that there is a shortage of teacher applications in Indiana lately. See, e.g. this Associated Press report.
Teachers have been treated poorly by policy makers lately. They are collateral damage to people who see the public school system as a big pot of money ripe for the taking. They are government employees which makes them anathema to certain ideologues. Because everyone has been to school, there is a temptation to believe that anyone can do their job. They have been politically active in support of lawmakers who support public education which makes them fair game to opponents of those lawmakers.
We can learn from other countries with successful school systems that the way to improve school systems is to to pay teachers well, treat them as professionals, and create an incentive for the best and brightest to go into the teaching profession. In the United States, and Indiana in particular, we seem to have an inclination to see whether doing the exact opposite will work instead.
Per the news report:
School districts across Indiana are having trouble finding people to fill open teaching positions as the number of first-time teacher licenses issued by the state has dropped by 63 percent in recent years.
The Indiana Department of Education reports the state issued 16,578 licenses to first-time teachers, including teachers with licenses in multiple subject areas, in the 2009-2010 school year. That number dropped to 6,174 for the 2013-14 school year, the most recent for which data were available, the Greensburg Daily News reported.
. . .
Enrollment in Ball State University’s elementary and kindergarten teacher-preparation programs has fallen 45 percent in the last decade. Other schools are reporting similar declines.Denise Collins, associate dean with the College of Education at Indiana State University, said enrollment there has fallen 7 percent, and the number of students completing an education degree has dropped 13 percent.
This is a problem that wasn’t created overnight and fixing it will take some time. We can begin by not regarding teachers as interchangeable widgets where schools would necessarily want to have as many of the cheap, new teachers as possible and regard experienced, but more expensive, teachers as a liability.
Such a change is not just a tweak here and there, but a “Damascus road” change in attitude toward teachers, schools and what it means to be educated. There are many places in this state where it’s best not to reveal the fact that you have degree, let alone an advanced degree. The attitude towards these issues has never been enlightened, which is probably why so many graduates from our universities, as excellent as they are, find their way to the state line as soon as they can after graduation. I’m afraid that the citizens of this state are reaping the consequences of a tradition, carried on by a reactionary legislature. Maybe the public will have to live out the meaning of the saying, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”.
Anti-intellectualism is a deep strain in the HOOSIER heartland. We distrust outsiders and experts, preferring to do what our grandpappy did. It’s the reason we had to explicitly include public education in the 1851 Consritution, because the promise of universal education included in the Northwest Territory documents never came to fruition here.
That being said, the more recent destruction of a carefully built public education network from k-16 is a more insidious agenda than we’ve seen.
First, you destroy the reputation of the profession (building on the “anybody can teach” meme) and the local community schools. (There have always been rough schools like those in Indy andGary, the “reformers” have just used those to extrapolate to all).
Then you massively undercut the public system by taking away local property taxes and making it a state responsibili in the sales tax (notoriously unstable revenue stream). Since the state controls the money, it will eventually reward the schools it likes and punish those it doesn’t.
Then you institute an “objective” test to be able to measure if all schools are equal, while ignoring that not all school communities are the same… No Child Left Behind, which could be replaced by simple social economic indicators for free. You can tell a school is going to fail if the community /families are failing.
Then you preach about alternatives… Business models must replace these outdated modes that take socio-economics and child well-being into account. Everything would be much more streamlined and better, if we only had better managers (and what else are principals and teachers but managers of potential work force.)
Enter the Charter School – public money, but no transparency, Started and run by private entities for the most part and unaccountable to the public they serve. You’d think with all this money and unfettered control, they’d be successful, but by and large they aren’t, so change the metrics by which they are judged.
And vouchers, don’t forget those. ideally they would be large enough to help the poorest kids get into better schools. Because all you have to do is slide them into seats in a religious school, and their family and community problems melt away. Of course, religious schools don’t have to take everyone….so tough luck kid. Oh, and forget that pesky line in the Indiana Constitution that expressly prohibits public monies going to religious institutions. Seriously, it goes to parents FIRST, so it’s cleansed of it publicness, or so says the Indiana Supreme Court.
Now, ultimately the goal is destruction of those pesky teachers’ unions, because they support the wrong party. But that’s easy. You strip them of nearly every right, denigrate them personally, destroy their professionalism by making licensing easy for anyone with a college degree, and soon- you find logical, smart, hard working people fleeing the classroom in droves.
We are also hitting the cusp of a historic 20 year cycle… 1950-1970-1990-2010… Every generation has a natural teacher shortage due to retirements, etc.
Perfect storm…
You KNOW it’s bad when even West Lafayette Schools doesnt get many applications for ELEMENTARY JOBS.
I’m too deep into thi,and too deeply committed to my kids and my community to do anything else but ride it out and fight back.
Thanks for listening.
Excellent, hoosierOne. Everyone needs to listen to that.
I agree with Stuart, hoosierOne, your post was accurate, well written and entertaining.
Bravo to Doug, Stuart and hoosierOne for their accurate assessments of how this shortage was manufactured. My fearless prediction is that, unless the current one-party rule of Indiana is vanquished, the next step will be to follow Kansas’ ploy and hire (more) unlicensed, perhaps even uneducated, and therefore cheap, scabs to fill teaching positions.
Of course, in the meantime, opportunity abounds for those seeking 125-thousand dollar jobs purportedly created to attract and retain qualified teachers.
Remember the steps?
First, they attacked your right to competitive elections by saddling the state with extreme gerrymandering.
Next, they attacked your right to vote by requiring ID laws and outlawing college student’s voting where they live.
Next, they attacked your right to just be who you are with elevating ‘religion’ with RFRA.
Now, they are attacking your right to a ‘free’ and common education by basically selling the schools off to the highest bidders.
Can we say, “WHOA”!
The problem is that teachers should have taken the lead against the Taj Mahal K-12 building that occurred over the last twenty years. Most of the tax hikes have had to deal with sports facilities. Yes, it would be nice to go to work in luxury, but at the same time there is just so much taxation people can take, and even afford. Making taxes an additional few hundred dollars a year and constantly trying to increase it every other year or so, will only take money out of the economy, or drive households into more debt as they refuse to stop living the “American lifestyle.”
Universities are just as bad, constantly tearing out hundreds of thousands of dollars of remodeling every handful of years just to keep things trendy and new looking. Of course they claim they need to do this to attract students, which is true to some extent, but this constant building and remodeling comes with yearly hikes in tuition.
If education is the main goal, then maybe it is time to let the community and private entities deal with the sports and extra curricular activities of the young folks and let schools focus on just education. People will claim “We need sports in schools, look at the obesity rates!” I would ask how many more millions do we need? How many more palatial gladiator stadiums do we need to build? Stuff like that was minimal decades ago, and yet we had a lower percentage of people who were obese. So we have tossed millions upon millions into sports stuff and yet obesity rates still went up.
Do you have any facts to back up your assertions? How many public schools in Indiana have Taj Mahal facilities? What teachers (other than coaches, perhaps) have asked for said facilities? What is Taj Mahal? Air conditioning? Clean bathrooms? A decent kitchen?
In a stunning act of blissful ignorance, Indiana lawmakers have called for a study on the teacher shortage. The story, as reported on WFYI (http://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/indiana-lawmakers-ask-for-study-on-cause-of-teacher-shortage) reported that Senate Education Committee Chairman Denis Kruse and House Education Chairman Robert Behning said they thought “it would be wise” to do the study. The comments following the story are worth reading for their straightforward insight which could save the legislature the cost of doing such a study.
So, if I choose to blow my brains out with a shotgun, should someone investigate how I died? I think it would be appropriate to investigate the motivations of why I chose to die instead. In the instance of the demise of public education in Indiana, such a study group might be wise to start with the committee chairmen.
I assume they’ll use this as an excuse to push for putting more non-teachers in schools, pretending that people don’t have to learn how to teach before teaching.
Stuart and Dog, I heard about the legislative “study” committee on WBOI. Like you gentlemen, I find it rather comical that the legislature would need to “study” teacher shortages which are a direct result of their anti-public education policies. The news story said the the committee would study how other countries prepare and retain teachers. Will they follow Finland or follow Somalia?
And, Doug, we already know that when you hire nonteachers for the classroom, the maximum stay is around three years, which they use for their CV before moving on–at least the ones who don’t crash and burn before then. Then the state will then have the reason to conduct a study to determine why so many teachers are leaving education in Indiana.
I would write my representative about this obvious problem if I believed he was actually open to information that may not fit his preconceived notions of reality.
Sorry, but I do not perceive of licensed “teachers” as intellectuals. I think of licensed teaching as a state sanctioned monopoly.
The typical licensed Math teacher does not have a Masters degree in Math. Instead he has a Masters in the mechanics of Education.
The Education curriculum appears to be embedded with political indoctrination.
As a group, teachers are neither high-powered intellectuals nor do they see themselves as part of a “state sanctioned monopoly”. Taken as a group, they probably constitute the best educated people in your community (hospital workers are trained, not educated) who are, best of all, civic-minded folks who are focused on preparing children for the future. A school, after all, serves many purposes, including socialization, teaching citizenship and academic content. One of the worst things schools could do would be to simply teach more narcissism. It would be nice, I guess, to have high powered individuals, but as the saying goes, “Once I know how much you care, I will care about how much you know”. Once people forget that these people constitute a great resource to the community and respect them for who they are, the community automatically aspires to be greater than it is. Not a bad package.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the requirements for math teacher, if I ever have, but I believe that a math teacher has taken a whole lot more math, and understands more math, than he/she will ever have to teach. If the math teachers can challenge and inspire students to follow math unafraid, they have done their work.
You might arrange to visit an excellent school in your area. Even at your age, whatever that may be, you will learn a lot.
Sorry, but I have to take exception to this “hospital workers are trained, not educated.”