A school is just a building. Without teachers, that building is no different from your public rest room. The problem with many school systems is finding qualified teachers. Why is it so hard? Why can't we find them? What do we have to do to find them? Once we do, how do we keep them? Not easy questions to answer. Everyone in the education system has theories to how to solve these problems. Some people even outside of the education system have their own theories. We'll be presenting some of them here. The major theory as to why it is so hard to find good teachers is because of the terrible pay system of public schools, which are notorious for underpaying their teachers. To understand the reason for this, one has to go back to the early days of teachers. Early on, teachers were women. Men went to work to earn the real money for the household and women who didn't want to sit at home and do nothing, went on to become teachers. Because women in general were paid less than men in all professions, teachers salaries were very low in comparison to other professions. To compound the problem was the fact that a public school was just that. It was not a private institution like a business. It was run and funded by the town or city in which it was located. Since these towns don't have much money, they can only pay teachers so much. This also contributes to low salaries. Given all of this, when a person graduates from college with a degree in math or science, when confronted with making $20,000 a year to start as a teacher or $30,000 a year working at a drug company, naturally, unless they have a great love for teaching, they are going to opt for the higher paying jobs. The teachers who actually end up teaching, with the exception of the really dedicated ones, are those who can't get jobs elsewhere. These teachers are probably not the brightest bulb in the pack. But even if a school system does attract a qualified teacher, eventually as they progress through their career and find that they're having problems paying their bills, they decide that they've had enough and move on to a higher paying job. That is why so many qualified teachers with years of experience are leaving the school systems. Some of the answers to these problems that education systems have come up with have been to offer new teachers incentives to go into teaching such as tuition reimbursement. This way a good part of the teacher's college expenses are paid for. With the rising cost of tuition, this has been a good incentive. Unfortunately, not all school systems offer this. Another thing schools do to attract qualified teachers is to try to get people from other industries such as pharmaceuticals and technical people such as chemists and engineers. To get these people they offer what is called alternative route where they don't have to go back to school to get a teacher's degree. Plus they start them higher up the pay scale than a first year teacher. In spite of what's being done, it is still difficult to find qualified teachers. No doubt more ideas will arise. Hopefully the day will come when the teacher shortage will be a thing of the past. |
