WP,pg1: Schools Pinched In Hiring: Teacher Shortage Looms As Law Raises Bar and Boomer Women Retire

Schools Pinched In Hiring
Teacher Shortage Looms As Law Raises Bar and Boomer Women Retire
By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 24, 2007; Page A01

As hundreds of thousands of baby boomers retire and the No Child Left Behind law raises standards for new teachers, school systems across the country are facing a growing scarcity of qualified recruits.

A labor force that for generations cushioned teacher shortages and kept salaries relatively low is disappearing. Three-quarters of the nation's more than 3 million public school teachers are women, a figure that has changed little over four decades. But in that time, women have become more educated, with more career choices than ever. So far, schools are not faring well on the open market.

"It's not that you don't have some terrifically talented people going into teaching. You do," said Richard J. Murnane, an economist at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. "The issue is that you don't have enough. And many are the most likely to leave teaching, because they have lots of other opportunities."

A study co-written by Murnane and published this year reports that minorities and poor children are most likely to be taught by teachers with weak academic backgrounds or little preparation. Overall, the proportion of women who pursue teaching after college, as well as the caliber of recruits, has declined significantly since the 1960s.

The number of college-educated women in the United States tripled from 1964 to 2000, according to a 2004 study by University of Maryland economists, but the share of those graduates who became teachers dropped from 50 percent to 15 percent in the same time. And although in 1964 1 in 5 young female teachers graduated in the top 10 percent of her high school class, the ratio was closer to 1 in 10 by 2000....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/23/AR2007062301394.html?hpid=sec-education

At my son's elementary school, everyone, but the the highly-paid white-guy in charge that does nothing, is a woman. At my daughter's middle school, there is only a single male teacher, and he is the football and basketball coach. It's really sad that generally speaking, the only male role-model most of the youngs boys have at school is the male janitor. I would have thought the number would have been >90% rather than a tiny 75%.

The current hostility towards teachers means that the best people, especially men who have more career choices, will not become teachers. With the hatred the government and the 'Merican people have for education and for teachers, I know I would never want to be one.

How do we fix it? It will takes decades of rule by people that are not Republicans. Considering that locally the average age of a teacher is 27 (and I don't think it is too much higher than that nationally), that means that only 8 years of their life have been under reasonable rule. The other 19(!) have been under Republican rule.