A few years ago, there was a nearly critical shortage of teachers in the United States -- especially among poorer and rural schools. But the recession in this country seems to have taken care of that. Instead of a shortage, there is now a glut of people trying to find employment as teachers.
In Texas, the Round Rock Independent School District recently had a need for 322 teachers. They received over 5,000 applications for those teaching jobs. They have also seen their pool of available substitute teachers double to around 1,200.
Why is this happening? The first reason is cutbacks in funds due to the recession. Many school districts are cutting back on the number of teachers they employ. The demand for teachers nationwide has declined in 60 out of 61 subjects. The only area in which jobs are still available is mathematics (although more special education teachers are also needed).
John Black, a deputy superintendent in Augusta (Kansas), says that not long ago "we were recruiting really, really hard just to get people to take a look at us and take a look at our profession. Now we have these great applicants wanting to teach, and we don't have jobs to offer them."
At the same time that schools are cutting back on teachers, many who had planned to retire or find other types of work are hanging on to their teaching jobs because of the recession. In addition, many who have been laid off from other jobs are trying to find teaching positions, and of course, the colleges are still pumping out education graduates. All of this has combined to create the current glut of teacher applicants.
I wouldn't expect the situation to get any better any time soon. The rest of the economy is still dumping more jobs each month, and even the most optimistic prognosticators expect the unemployment rate to keep rising for at least another year. This will just create even larger pools of applicants for the few jobs that are available.
But that's just for us peons. Remember, the recession is over for the rich (and the corporations)!!
It's worth mentioning that the RRISD serves a bedroom community near Austin. The Austin area is filled with indulgently educated people who arrived during the '90s to build the internet. That's pretty well sorted now. Austin has the best educated staffs of groceries, bars, restaurants and so forth of any place I've ever known. We really should have superlative schools throughout the area.
ReplyDeleteOf course, we'll somehow blow it.
I hope I can finally get certified before math teachers are in the same position. Fortunately, in my teaching program, only 2 out of 30 student teachers were getting middle grades certified. The rest were high school focused.
ReplyDeleteargggh!