Teacher shortage

On Sunday, the AJC ran a series of columns on a supposed "teacher shortage". I have not had a chance to read them all yet, but the first one I read was written by Jim Hubbard, who is the president of the Georgia Association of Educators.

The topic here is second-career teachers. These are people who have left a career to take up teaching. The basic tenor of the column was that 2nd career teachers may have experience doing something else, but they will not be able to be teachers unless they are re-educated themselves, as he puts it "these new teachers must be grounded in the preparation for the reality of our classrooms." This is necessary "no matter how well-versed they are in their real-life subject matter."

And I'm not sure what he means by these teachers will need to "slant pedagogy for more diverse learners." But if I had to guess I'd say he means don't actually expect anyone to learn from you, and certainly don't do anything so rash as to fail someone.

Of course, he also wants these new teachers to join the union.

Oh, and one last thing: "While we will never be in favor of any compensation package based solely on performance, we are very much open to the discussion and study of compensation models where performance could be a part of an overall package of educator pay."

A second column discusses a proposed pay change, where low-supply high-demand teachers like physics and calculus teachers would get paid more. Here's a few telling quotes:

“All teachers are special,” said Kelly Henson, executive secretary for the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, which presented the study to legislators. “We are not suggesting that differentiated pay only be extended to math and science teachers, but that is the right place to start.”

“You are slapping the other teachers in the face by saying you are not worth as much as science and math teachers,” said Barbara Wilson, co-president of the Gwinnett Association of Educators, who has a doctorate in language arts.

Once again, someone fails to understand that supply-and-demand applies to labor, and compounds the error by equating wages with value as a human-being.

Virtually any literate adult can teach a child how to read, to understand the parts of speech, and how to communicate. This is clearly evidenced by the number of children who learned to speak and read before they enter school. Far fewer people understand calculus or physics or chemistry well enough to effectively teach it to someone else. It should be plain then that the pool of "qualified" 3rd grade language arts teachers is much larger than the pool of qualified biology teachers. In fact, I would suspect that any math or science teacher at Ms. Wilson's school could effectively teach her class, while I was suspect that the opposite is not the case.