Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Teaching unattractive

Who'd want to teach where your main challenge is to get kids to sit down?

The retirement of thousands of baby boomer teachers coupled with the departure of younger teachers frustrated by the stress of working in low-performing schools is fueling a crisis in teacher turnover that is costing school districts substantial amounts of money as they scramble to fill their ranks for the fall term.

Superintendents and recruiters across the nation say the challenge of putting a qualified teacher in every classroom is heightened in subjects like math and science and is a particular struggle in high-poverty schools, where the turnover is highest. Thousands of classes in such schools have opened with substitute teachers in recent years.

Here in Guilford County, N.C., turnover had become so severe in some high-poverty schools that principals were hiring new teachers for nearly every class, every term. To staff its neediest schools before classes start on Aug. 28, recruiters have been advertising nationwide, organizing teacher fairs and offering one of the nation's largest recruitment bonuses, $10,000 to instructors who sign up to teach Algebra I. [How about reintroducing discipline? Controlling a roomful of monkeys is difficult-to-impossible without extensive discipline options] "We had schools where we didn't have a single certified math teacher," said Terry Grier, the schools superintendent. "We needed an incentive, because we couldn't convince teachers to go to these schools without one."

Guilford County, which has 116 schools, is far from the only district to take this route as school systems compete to fill their ranks. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit policy group that seeks to encourage better teaching, said hundreds of districts were offering recruitment incentives this summer.

Officials in New York, which has the nation's largest school system, said they had recruited about 5,000 new teachers by mid-August, attracting those certified in math, science and special education with a housing incentive that can include $5,000 for a down payment. New York also offers subsidies through its teaching fellows program, which recruits midcareer professionals from fields like health care, law and finance. The money helps defer the cost of study for a master's degree. The city expects to hire at least 1,300 additional teachers before school begins on Sept. 4, said Vicki Bernstein, director of teacher recruitment.

Los Angeles has offered teachers signing with low-performing schools a $5,000 bonus. The district, the second-largest in the country, had hired only about 500 of the 2,500 teachers it needed by Aug. 15 but hoped to begin classes fully staffed, said Deborah Ignagni, chief of teacher recruitment.

In Kansas, Alexa Posny, the state's education commissioner, said the schools had been working to fill "the largest number of vacancies" the state had ever faced. This is partly because of baby boomer retirements and partly because districts in Texas and elsewhere were offering recruitment bonuses and housing allowances, luring Kansas teachers away. "This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis," Ms. Posny said.

In June, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a nonprofit group that seeks to increase the retention of quality teachers, estimated from a survey of several districts that teacher turnover was costing the nation's districts some $7 billion annually for recruiting, hiring and training.

Demographers agree that education is one of the fields hardest hit by the departure of hundreds of thousands of baby boomers from the work force, particularly because a slowdown in hiring in the 1980s and 1990s raised the average age of the teaching profession. Still, they debate how serious the attrition will turn out to be. In New York, the wave of such retirements crested in the early years of this decade as teachers left well before they hit their 60s, without a disruptive teacher shortage, Ms. Bernstein said.

In other parts of the country, the retirement bulge is still approaching, because pension policies vary among states, said Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri. California is projecting that it will need 100,000 new teachers over the next decade from the retirement of the baby boomers alone.

Some educators say it is the confluence of such retirements with the departure of disillusioned young teachers that is creating the challenge. In addition, higher salaries in the business world and more opportunities for women are drawing away from the field recruits who might in another era have proved to be talented teachers with strong academic backgrounds.

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Standards tell a needed story

Five years ago, when the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) began ratcheting up education accountability standards, the pinch was first felt mainly in inner-city areas where the massive failures of public schools are most evident. Now affluent suburban school systems are coming under pressure and they don't like it one bit.

Nationwide, 20 percent of all public school districts failed to make adequate yearly progress last year, including more than a third of northern Virginia's widely hailed schools. The results aren't much better in Maryland where 56 schools in Prince George's County and 17 in Montgomery County failed for the second year in a row, leaving them subject to sanctions intended to help parents rescue their children from failing schools.

These dismal results illuminate the real story behind efforts earlier this year by local school boards in Virginia to be excused from NCLB rules requiring that all students take the same proficiency tests in reading and math. The tests set an essential benchmark against which all future efforts will be measured. Without the benchmark, progress can't be measured. The local boards backed down only when the feds threatened to withhold millions in federal funding.

Something is terribly wrong with public education when, despite spending more child than has ever before been spent in human history, anywhere from a quarter to half of the students in a school can't pass basic read and math tests. The unions that control public schools often blame the tests themselves, but these diagnostic tools were chosen by each state, not the federal government. What the unions most fear is that NCLB will provide undeniable objective proof that they - not the tests, not student or parent demographics, not even President Bush - are responsible for the scandal of American public schools.

The unions prefer subjective criteria to measure academic performance because the results are so easily manipulatable, especially to gullible parents. But such obfuscation long ago ceased being merely tiresome.

Third-graders shouldn't be expected to read Shakespeare or do trigonometry, but graduating seniors ought to be able to read at a third-grade level and solve third-grade math problems. That achieving such minimal proficiency has become so Herculean a task is a sad testament to the diminished state of public education in America.

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Australia: Government schools not so "free"

STATE schools have been warned not to use debt collectors to recover "voluntary" fees from parents. Draft regulations, obtained by The Australian, say parents should not be harassed or children humiliated because of a failure to pay materials fees or make voluntary contributions. The Victorian government policy follows controversy over what parents are expected to pay at state schools. There have been claims of parents being forced to pay up to $1000 in subject charges and students being humiliated if their parents could not pay. Other instances included students not being allowed to take home finished artwork, students being banned from excursions and others being embarrassed because they were not allowed a school diary until fees were paid.

The draft policy states that the Government only provides funding for "free instruction -- which is defined as the resources, materials and teaching of the "standard curriculum program". It says schools may charge fees to parents for "goods and services provided by the school". This can include textbooks, excursions and extra materials that students "consume" or take home, such as artwork. The draft regulations state that a school can charge a "voluntary" contribution but parents are not to be forced to pay it. "Payments and contributions are to be obtained without coercion or harassment," the document states. "It is not acceptable to send repeated requests for voluntary contributions beyond the initial notice to all parents." The regulations replace a 2004 policy which also instructed schools not to use debt collectors, threaten parents or humiliate students.

Victorian Council of School Organisations president Jacinta Cashen said the new regulations were much more explicit about what fees could be charged. "But the concern for us is the policing side," she said. "We know that previously schools have flouted the guidelines ... and in the past some have used debt collectors." Ms Cashen said the Victorian Government had failed to address the key issue. "If schools don't legitimately have enough money for free instruction, we should put more pressure on the Government for more funding," she said.

Victorian Association of State School Principals president Brian Burgess said he was pleased there had been an attempt to clear up confusion about fees. "There has been some lack of clarity about some of the issues regarding school materials charges," he said. Victorian Principals Association president Fred Ackerman said schools struggled to provide everything for students. "The system isn't funded at a sufficient level not to have to ask for charges," he said. "The books won't balance without a co-contribution from parents."

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