Next door in Indiana, Mike Pence and Mitch Daniels and their major cuts to education have had a nasty secondary effect: since Republicans have demonized schoolteachers as greedy, evil union thugs for years now, the Hoosier State can’t find enough qualified applicants to fill needed teaching positions.
School districts across Indiana are having trouble finding people to fill open teaching positions as the number of first-time teacher licenses issued by the state has dropped by 63 percent in recent years.
The Indiana Department of Education reports the state issued 16,578 licenses to first-time teachers, including teachers with licenses in multiple subject areas, in the 2009-2010 school year. That number dropped to 6,174 for the 2013-14 school year, the most recent for which data were available, the Greensburg Daily News reported.
The dwindling pool of educators is raising alarm in some school districts as they struggle to fill open positions, especially in math, science and foreign languages.
And of course these shortages are going to continue for some time as people don’t want to go to college in order to be teachers anymore. Can you blame them after the way Republicans treat education?
“It has become a real struggle,” Decatur County Community Schools Superintendent Johnny Budd told the Greensburg Daily News. “The pool of applicants is definitely dried up.”
School leaders say state funding constraints, testing pressures and a blame-the-teachers mentality have steered people away from education as a career.
Many education programs have seen their enrollments drop in recent years.
Enrollment in Ball State University’s elementary and kindergarten teacher-preparation programs has fallen 45 percent in the last decade. Other schools are reporting similar declines.
Denise Collins, associate dean with the College of Education at Indiana State University, said enrollment there has fallen 7 percent, and the number of students completing an education degree has dropped 13 percent.
Demand for qualified teachers is higher than ever, and yet across the country we’re seeing school districts in red states slashing salaries, removing tenure protections, and driving teachers into retirement. Now there aren’t enough teachers to fill those teaching jobs. In a just world, with a shortage of qualified workers in a sector of the economy, salaries would go up in order to attract new workers. But since these are teachers, we should probably cut more from the education budget because really, why should state employees be paid anyway?
What did you think was going to happen, red state America?
Corner Stone
Opportunity!
For-profit two year programs to certify n00b teachers! Who then get to teach in charter schools for $11 an hour. With no benefits because they are contractors, you see.
Uber, but for education.
Keith G
Uberize teaching?
Edit
F/U Corner Stone!!
Corner Stone
@Keith G: Is that shorthand for “Follow Up”?
Belafon
@Corner Stone: They’ll just eliminate the college requirement, then they can’t just pay minimum wage. And, since your teacher can also serve you lunches at lunchtime, they can pay the restaurant rate and the teacher can have a tip jar on her desk.
gian
Kansas has the same problem but with a brain drain to Missouri
Pee Cee
We won’t pay you as a professional, we won’t let you teach your courses like a professional due to the ridiculous test-prep culture, and we’ll tell you it’s all your fault and fire you if your students don’t earn ever-increasing test scores. Oh, and you have to pay for all this expensive college education before we’ll even look at your application.
Wait! Come back! Don’t you want to be a teacher?
Facebones
This is what they voted for. Enjoy the libertarian paradise.
trollhattan
@Corner Stone:
Fun University. The first all-voucher institute of higher learning.
Corner Stone
@Keith G: You want to read some really dystopian rationalization shit? Check this out about the coming service workforce:
The Rise of the Uncollared Worker
“The uncollared worker is a new class of worker — born out of the Great Recession and the ubiquity of mobile technology — that makes a living by leveraging their time, and sometimes their assets, on marketplaces like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft. These uncollared workers work independently, but collectively offer a singular service — like hotel, transportation, or delivery.”
trollhattan
@Pee Cee:
Forgot, “And your union is bad, m’kay?”
Benw
Well, for-profit schools with no unions or necessary teacher credentials or restrictions on how little they can pay teachers could always fill the gap, I suppose.
Corner Stone
@gian:
***Shutters***
Cacti
The establishment GOP’s fear of Trump has become so palpable, no less than Rupert Murdoch has taken to the Twitters to dispute him on Mexican-Americans.
Don’t listen to them Donald! Keeping demagoguing the bigots.
eric
poorly educated students make better sheep; thus, feature, not a bug.
Corner Stone
@trollhattan:
Fully U! We voucherize your education then we scrip your working life! Cradle to Grave, just For U!
Bobby Thomson
@gian: which is a huge embarrassment when you consider the two states’ history.
Bubblegum Tate
In the minds of wingnuts, this is a victory. Fewer teachers? Fewer students going to college? That means more charter schools and no more LIEbrul indoctrination! It’s the conservative dream!
Bill Arnold
@Corner Stone:
That’s just evil. (To me) Middle-class is about a certain minimum of stability, like not regularly having wide income shifts from month to month or week to week. It’s about being more than a week away from destitution.
Keith G
@Corner Stone: That’s my role.
Back years ago, when I growing up in the hinterlands outside of Toledo OH, we were 60 miles from the Indiana line. The nicest thing that we could say about that state is that it had three decent universities and a race track.
After a bit of progress, the GOP leadership there seems destined to erode any promise that state has had.
boatboy_srq
@eric: Ayuh.
@Cacti: A little late there, Mr. Murdoch, after foisting O’Reilly, Beck et al on the US for decades, who said exactly the same things but in some tone of dogwhistle. Sux when you hear it in plain Ahmurrcan, don’t it?
Corner Stone
@Bill Arnold:
But wait! This is an opportunity! A way for you to set the “what” and “when” of your work! No more evil JIT bosses determining when you show up and for how long!
You get to use your car, your home (if you have one) and probably your minor child – all for profit whenever you decide!
Keith G
@Corner Stone: I will read.
Note that we were typing about this early this AM and I was mentioning this same issue that you are pointing to.
Gin & Tonic
@Corner Stone: Heh.
OzarkHillbilly
Sounds to me like everything is going according to plan.
Elizabelle
@Corner Stone: from your link (dystopian is right):
It’s 21st century taking in washing. Now with more multitasking.
Is that the future you want for your kids? Delivery hounds? Downstairs staff without even having the downstairs?
Brachiator
JFC! There really isn’t a problem here. Kids only have to read the Bible. That’s all the edjumakation they need.
What’s that? You need teachers to teach kids how to read? You just need a few pastors and dedicated volunteers to read appropriate Bible passages.
More seriously, how have state officials responded to the decline in teacher applications?
@Corner Stone
Oddly enough, a lot of people in the tech world seem to love the idea of uncollared workers. They see this as simply disrupting old business models and making things cheaper and more efficient for everyone else.
Also, I suspect that the scandal waiting to happen is a massive under-reporting of income related to some of these services. And again, here, there is often a weird libertarian view that these apps and tech services should be free of any interaction with the government, and this includes regulation and taxation.
raven
I have a friend who WAS an education professor. She came here from UW Madison and her next stop is Micronesia and the Peace Corps. She was pissed off 24 hours a day, not only at the system, but at the students as well.
Rommie
Home schooin’ (like Jesus intended!) and Online classes. Athletic kids can get on the travelling team gravy train. The Poors can walk to the evil government Public Schools full of “those” people.
And that satire is far closer to the truth than it should be in a “civilized” society. SMH.
piratedan
happening in Arizona too… teachers leaving for better gigs elsewhere…. It’s really strange, that after you demonize folks after a while, they simply stop trying to deal with you and leave……
Pee Cee
@trollhattan:
Probably forgot it because there aren’t teacher’s unions in these here parts. Red state.
Zandar
Can’t wait to see which GOP 2016’er first floats the trial balloon that not everybody deserves a K-12 education and that taxpayers have better things to spend money on than “those people” who will just “end up in prison anyway”.
RSA
I think you’re forgetting about all the writers of letters to the editor in Indiana newspapers, complaining about teachers’ unions, the cushy hours that teachers have, and the low standards for teacher performance. Why, I’ll bet there are legions of them applying for substitute teaching positions right now, for the chance to apply their hard-won, practical, real-world expertise to the classroom. Right?
Okay, maybe not.
Corner Stone
@Elizabelle:
What the piece comes right to the edge of saying is the true way the .01% see the future. They are too busy to do the menial chores of life so they pit the rest of us against one another to do their washing, food prep, etc. Yes, it’s essentially Downton Abbey without the roof provided over your head.
We all trade our time for something. They just want us to trade our time to them for nothing.
Pee Cee
@Zandar:
Don’t some of them already support child labor?
Elizabelle
@Keith G: They’ve opened that NY Times story on the gig economy to reader comments. Should be interesting.
Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anxieties
boatboy_srq
@Facebones:Red State Ahmurrca does seem committed to meeting MS/LA standards and not settling for anything better.
Corner Stone
@Keith G: Thought you were a fan of Uber, or at least Uber-Neutral?
BGinCHI
Expat Hoosier here. Was in my native state a few weekends ago. Pence is yoogely unpopular.
He’s going down like Larry Craig at a cock convention in the next election. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Gin & Tonic
@RSA: applying for substitute teaching positions
Here in blue-state New England, a median substitute teacher’s salary is a princely $85/day. While the school year is 180 days, you cannot work more than 134 of them or you have to be taken on FTE status. So that works out to $11,390 per annum, which is below the FPL for a single person.
Patricia Kayden
@Facebones: Yep. Votes matter.
Corner Stone
@Keith G: Missed that. I was out hooking for a few extra bucks for the kids education fund.
Frankensteinbeck
Everyone would get to keep their children at home, under a watchful eye and a brutally applied stick, so they’ll learn to love Jesus and hate The Negro just like their parents do. That’s been the point from the beginning.
Patricia Kayden
@piratedan: Sad that the poorer students, who are really the ones impacted by all this cutting public education nonsense, can’t just pick up and go to more education-friendly states or attend private schools in red states.
trollhattan
@Pee Cee:
That makes me doubly-sad, although it probably eliminates angry letters to the editor complaining about “union thug teachers” like we get in the people’s republic of Californistan. Evidently, teachers’ unions are repressing ginormous corporations with their giant thug-cash warchests. (I wish I were making that up.)
Tyro
There seems to be this weird concept among conservatives that teachers have non transferable skills and that the people who become teachers have no other options other than teaching. It turns out that if you demand people get a master’s degree and contend with a demanding workday, those people are capable of doing a LOT of other things. The only people left end up REALLY being those with no other options, who are exactly who you DONT want in the classroom.
Elizabelle
From the NYTimes story on Hillary’s big economic speech today (and it’s mostly a pretty good story). Hillary Clinton Blames Republicans for Promoting Inequality
Antiquated, maybe, but still needed. Final Clinton quote in the story: “Serious risks are emerging from institutions in the so-called shadow banking system.”
Bobby B.
I always thought it was weird that “Parks & Rec” was set in an Indiana town, knowing Amy Poelher’s political leanings. Wasn’t surprised that “The Middle” is set in Patricia Heaton’s flyover favorite.
Keith G
@Corner Stone: It is a profit maximizing enterprise. It is going to tend to behave in certain ways common to such enterprises. As such, watch them carefully and take advantage of opportunities presented.
My bestie drives for Uber when he is not at home or at his real job, Galleria area retail manager. The Uber income pays for a very nice, did I say nice, new car and tops off his several weeks away vacation fund. He drives the Washington corridor bidness, as well as trips around midtown most weekends when we are not out at it. Throw in some gentlemen’s club bounties, and he is home around 1 with some goodly scratch.
I know that that are Uber horror stories. He hasn’t come across one yet and we talk about this all the time.
And an edit:
@Corner Stone: I could suggest a few locations.
Elizabelle
@Tyro: Not the ONLY people. You have some people who are genuinely interested in educating young people, who care that kids and teens get a future (and maybe remember the excellent teachers they had), and who thrive on being around young people and seeing them learn.
A lot of education practice thrives to drive them out, but some are still there.
trollhattan
@Tyro:
Yeah, it’s truly sad. They’re teachers because they couldn’t learn a “real” profession. Now that I have a kid plowing through her public school years I have a new appreciation for them, the not-so-good along with the near-saintly. It’s a hard, vastly under-appreciated profession. And yes, a profession it is. Show me one MBA who works as hard (and buys office supplies out of his/her pocket because the “company simply can’t afford them”).
The Moar You Know
My wife’s a teacher.
Don’t go into teaching. The amount of time you spend doing your job is beyond the ability of most people to comprehend, and society, in return for you doing what is literally the most important job that exists, slashes your pay, guts your retirement, and brands you an enemy of civilization.
It was never a good job even at its best, and we are a long way from the days when it was at its best.
boatboy_srq
@Frankensteinbeck: That’s another Reichwing argument for “traditional marriage”, BTW: husband/wife pairs translate (in their heads) to “Mom stays home with the kids.” How many decades has it been since that was practical? They really do think that, if they turn off enough WF&A taps, the ’50s (the 1750s, that is) will automagically return.
sharl
Well, I hope there are at least a FEW public school teachers still available in Indiana to be yelled at when Gov. Christie comes to the state to campaign.
Corey
So Republicans instituted a ceiling on the price of teachers’ labor, and it did what price ceilings generally do: it created a shortage. Surprise, surprise.
chopper
and Walker just signed a budget getting rid of tenure in public universities. woo hoo.
Judge Crater
When you sell your soul to the “free market” you’d better be ready to work in the salt mines.
The utopia that these wing-nuts envision has been seen many times before: Dickensian England, Tsarist Russia, Latin American economies, etc. The wing-nuts want the freedom to sleep under bridges – the same freedom rich people have. The Uber Principal, that we are all independent cogs in the hug corporate machine, has ugly consequences for every worker. “For-profit” everything is life imitating art: Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.
SFAW
@Tyro:
Meanwhile, it’s the Wall Street types (or maybe the Rick Santelli types) who used to crow about how tough and smart they were, and that they kill what they eat, or vice versa, and that they could do the job of ANY of those bastards criticizing them, and DO IT BETTER, because they were just that fucking good at anything they do.
When, actually, it was the other way around: you take any set of competent professionals, brainwash all ethical behavior out of them, and they would wipe the floor with the Santelli-types. And, as an added bonus, the Santelli-types who got their asses kicked would be collecting unemployment until it ran out, then – if they were lucky – dig ditches.
Clueless fucking morons.
catclub
@Corner Stone: Fabulous Understanding
Omnes Omnibus
@chopper: I hate that fucker.
Bem
I’d say follow the money. Even republicans in my state that used to try to support education don’t anymore because out of state money is going to anti-public school candidates all over the state.
Where is that out of state money coming from, you ask? Why honest Americans that are just interested in the future of education is the answer you get. If you ACTUALLY LOOK, it’s from people and businesses that are in the for profit education ‘business’. Yes, big money is buying your kids education, hope you enjoy the ‘fruits’ of that endeavor Republican voters.
Corner Stone
@Keith G:
Actually, it’s Uber, but for hooking.
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
What a dumbshit question. This is not going to happen unless you get a Democratic Congress, and maybe not even then.
And even here, given changes in the economy and the banking industry since 1999, simply reinstating Glass-Steagall would not have much impact on the operation of banks.
Clinton might as well promise these fools unicorns.
Thanks for the link to the speech. I will check it out more later today.
Bill Arnold
@Corner Stone:
They’d actually prefer that we trade our time to them for negative compensation, but they’ll settle for zero as long as it isn’t too surly.
Keith G
@Corner Stone: Craigslist?
Linnaeus
@Corner Stone:
To add to what others have already noted, the “uncollared worker” and the “sharing economy” are just 19th century models of labor mediated by 21st century technology.
Logan Brown
This is taking place in North Carolina also. We went from having a solid and improving public school system with one of the largest % of National Board Certified Teachers to a group of people who are so angry and demoralized that South Carolina is an improvement. So the NC Senate’s grand idea is to take away pensions for anyone starting in State government after the new year, including teachers.
I do with that Gov. Hunt would return from Wilson/Avalon and save the state again. It’s time for the Once and Future Governor to arrive. As a moderate democrat, he is sane compared to McCroy and his band of thugs.
donnah
My youngest son is set to graduate from college with a degree in teaching music. He is a natural musician, but went the education route with the hopes of getting hired full time.
We’re in SW Ohio and there are teaching positions out there, but music and art are often the first classes cut. He will have student loans to pay back, and he wants to buy a car. It’s never been so difficult to get started.
Brachiator
@Corner Stone:
The weird thing is that there are tech journalists and others who see this simply as disrupting old business models, and eagerly embrace these apps and supporting technologies even if they result in unemployment and decreased income.
There is also a kind of faux libertarian glee attached to how they look at these technologies, since they want them to be free of interaction with government, especially when it comes to regulation and taxation.
catclub
@Elizabelle:
That wasn’t what the Fox headline said. !11!
Linnaeus
That was the plan all along.
rikyrah
thanks for the info, Zandar
gene108
@BGinCHI:
So which Republican are they going to vote in to replace him with?
Just because a Republican governor is unpopular does not mean the alternative is a Democrat.
Corner Stone
@Linnaeus:
It’s really that we should be on call 24/7 for the “on demand” service economy the wealthy can pay for.
Miss an Uber ride request? At the dollar cinema and can’t doordash deliver food? Have a cold so you can’t baby sit?
Welp, you’ll learn better than that when we downgrade your service ranking so you qualify for less per hour on these gigs in the future.
kindness
Seems as if the Free Market for teachers has bit the Repubs in their kiesters. Curious…..I thought they were all about the Free Market.
kped
I must say, this is bizarre to me, living in Ontario where our supply of teachers is far too high. The provincial government had to increase the length of Teacher college by a year, so that teachers would delay entering the workforce a year. Even then, a new teacher here has about 5-6 years of being a substitute teacher usually before they can secure a full time job. Older teachers just have no interest in retiring, the pay and benefits are too good (and the Ontario teachers have like the best pension in the world, so it’s not like these older teachers are afraid of retiring for fear of money. They just love the job).
Corner Stone
@Keith G: I like to think of it as an entrepreneurial take on advanced technology. Kind of a mix of Craigslist/Uber/AirBnB/Tailoring.
prufrock
@Tyro: Hey, the first part of your post just described my wife!
She is no longer a teacher, works less for more money.
SFAW
@kped:
So not only are they Moochers/Takers, but they’re also selfish in that they refuse to move aside to let the younger, harder-working-er teachers get work. If that ain’t un-American, I don’t know what is.
gene108
@Elizabelle:
Lehman Brothers and Bears-Stern never went into retail banking. Glass-Steigal would not have prevented any of their activities.
The Commodity Futures Modernization Act, on the other hand, barred regulations of derivatives and basically allowed Wall Street to weaponize financial instruments into CDO’s of mass destruction.
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
We still need something like Glass-Steagall, but just renewing it wouldn’t be enough. Glass-Steagall was designed to regulate the financial industry as it existed in the 1920s. Today, though, there are all kinds of new institutions that don’t fit into the categories we had back then, so we need to extend the basic principles to today’s situation.
gene108
@trollhattan:
Meh…maybe teachers should copy people in the private sector and state that if the company ain’t paying for it, it ain’t getting done…
I don’t know any white collar professionals, who’ll shell out money on their own to help what they think is the company’s mission.
Keith G
@Brachiator:
It has always been this way. Now technology has bought it a bit more out into the open.
My Dad’s dad’s business was an independent gunsmith with his own store in Toledo OH. Dad eventually ran it with his brother, but dad was the gunsmith – a good one. As the 50s moved into the 60s such boutique business were no longer in favor and incomes dropped. To help out, dad would subcontract work commissioned by local home insurers – repairing storm damage. That often entailed TV antenna (remember those) replacement, re-shingling roofs, light tree removal.
There was no internet, but Dad had a few connections and got quality jobs done quicker and cheaper than a regular contractor. I know the jobs were quality since as often as not I was there – initially as a 13 y.o. gofer brining 60 lb asphalt shingle bundles up a ladder, balancing them on my shoulder. Within a year, I was doing work on the roof.
He’d probably be arrested now days, but that is how we got by.
And that certainly helped a few years later in HS football.
the Conster
@Roger Moore:
The problem of financial weapons of mass destruction really got cooking when Wall Street firms went from being partnerships to going public, which allowed them to gamble large sums of other people’s money, abetted by the rating agencies who were captured by their “clients” on Wall Street.
Sherparick
@gian: Considering what is happening in Missouri, that really says a lot about Kansas.
Davis X. Machina
In ten years your high school will be an ex-big-box store, a T1 line, a whole lot of tablets, and some $11.50 ed-techs taking attendance and handing out detentions.
Everything else will be K12, Plato/Edmentum, Apex Learning, VHS…
Think of the savings!
Keith G
@gene108:
That teacher would be told to stop such behavior, yesterday. If that continued there are ways that school administrators have to make even a hellish year a million time more so.
Mike in NC
Wife’s best friend has taught for many years in NoVA and is about to retire. She researched teaching in NC and was appalled at how poorly teachers get paid. Tea Partiers in Raliegh want to eliminate public schools entirely. Art Pope and the Koch brothers don’t care.
A guy
Lol! I suspect the problem isn’t union bashing or cost cutting, it’s simply a lack of qualified teachers
RSA
@Gin & Tonic:
Wow. I knew things were bad, but not that bad.
Bill Arnold
@A guy:
Ah, supply and demand doesn’t apply in this case because freedomic argle jumbo.
(or – parody.)
gwangung
@Bill Arnold: Jeezus….at least the trolls back in my day gave minimal effort…..
Barry
@raven: “I have a friend who WAS an education professor. She came here from UW Madison and her next stop is Micronesia and the Peace Corps. She was pissed off 24 hours a day, not only at the system, but at the students as well.”
Why was she p-o’d at the students?
The Moar You Know
@gene108: Then your administrator dumps you into teaching a full load consisting of nothing but a full schedule of overcrowded sophomore English classes packed with nothing but Severely Emotionally Disturbed kids and second language learners. Have a nice year!
And…this happens! A lot!
The Moar You Know
@A guy: Wow, you must be a fucking rocket scientist with that brain of yours. No way you went to a public school. Or even a charter school. That kind of dimwittery comes at you straight from a private school.
Luther M. Siler
Here is how bad it has gotten: I was at Target the other day and randomly overheard a little girl, maybe all of six years old, tell her mother she wanted to be a teacher. I didn’t know either of them.
It took a physical act of will not to tell her to come up with a better idea. Like, I had to stop and get control of myself.
No one should teach in this state, and everyone who does is trying to get out.
SiubhanDuinne
@Corner Stone:
Ugh. Where is Steeplejack when we need him? (VDE, Omnes, and a host of others would also do the job.)
Chris
This sounds like a subspecies of a much more general phenomenon – employers all over America are bitching that they can’t find workers who are qualified and motivated anymore. We’ve had a couple threads about it here over the years.
catclub
@Luther M. Siler: Just tell her to move to Canada first – or Finland. Where teaching is a respected profession.
catclub
@Chris:
usually turns out to be along the lines of: “I cannot find a senior tool and die machinist to hire for only $15k/yr, no benefits.”
Which is the opposite of John McCain saying you cannot find people to pick fruit even at $50/hour (was it $50 or $100?)
Brachiator
@Keith G:
Great example. I’ve seen similar things happen to a number of boutique businesses.
But I think the Internet and apps and new tech introduce a level of scaling that accelerates the destruction of boutique businesses even as it creates a new kind of grey market economy.
BTW, your dad sounds like quite a guy. It must have been quite a challenge for him to adapt to economic changes; it was fortunate that he had skills and could adapt in some way.
lou
It gets better. Why would you want to get a job where you’re judged by other people’s work?
RSA
@Mike in NC:
The NEA has the numbers: NC ranked 47th among U.S. states for faculty salary in 2013-14, just short of 80% of the national average. NC ranked 51 in salary change between 2003-4 and 2013-14: -17.4% in real dollars. NC has the fifth lowest per-student expenditures. Students are still doing okay, from what I read, but will it last? It could be a disaster unfolding in slow motion.
trollhattan
@catclub:
The constant drumbeat for MOAR H1B visas derives from the same desire for yet more underpaid workers. “We can’t find qualified Americans!” Since wen did qualified get defined as “willing to work for undermarket wage and to under-report hours”?
SFAW
@catclub:
Same thing happened in high tech, used in no small part to push for more H-1B visas. Not that high tech employers would ever try to hire senior-level coders from Gujarat or Mumbai at $10/hour.
$15/hour, however, is another story.
ETA: Beaten to the punch, yet again. Thanks,
Obamatrollhattan!john fremont
@The Moar You Know: Yet every right winger tells me how teachers get three months off every year in the summer and how they don’t. Simply because the kids get let out they assume that the teachers are off too and the right wingers don’t want to hear none of it about planning, training seminars etc that teachers are required to attend in the summertime.
Keith G
@john fremont: Also remember that a teaching contract is essentially a per diem of, say, 190 days whose payment schedule is spread out over 12 months.
They get the summer off and they are not getting paid for the days that they are not at school.
boatboy_srq
@A guy: Well certainly, if you offer paltry salaries, no retirement planning, excessive hours, no job security and lots of public on-the-record career-bashing, there’s a good likelihood that there won’t be anyone particularly eager to take the positions – especially when the same training will merit job security, reasonable hours, favorable performance reviews and at least double the salary doing something else. But I’m sure you already thought of that.
boatboy_srq
@trollhattan: @SFAW: H1B is dogwhistle for “we can’t afford to part with our
dividendsbonusesrevenue if we intend toget 1%er-level richget bought by Google/Microsoft/Facebookretire by 30stay in business.”Mike G
Repuke strategy:
1. Demonize schoolteachers as greedy, evil union thugs
2. Grind their pay and conditions into the dust
3. Teachers leave the profession, new applicants decline
4. Quality of teaching inevitably declines
5. Republicans: “See how bad teachers are?”
6. Rinse, Repeat
7. Profit!
Kyle
@john fremont:
Funny, there are all these right-wingers who claim that teaching is so cushy and overpaid, yet none of them pursue careers in teaching.
mclaren
@Corner Stone:
No, Uber for education would be: “We’ll text message your smartphone to tell you if you’re going to teach a class today, and, if so, which one. And if your students don’t rate you highly enough, you don’t get paid.”
SFAW
@Kyle:
That’s because they’d find teaching to be such an easy job, that their ethical standards wouldn’t allow them to get paid so well for something that required such little effort/work.
.
.
.
Honestly, I crack myself up sometimes.
Jado
“What did you think was going to happen, red state America?”
They thought that the stupid mislead Teachers would finally have an epiphany and Pledge Allegiance the GOP and the Conservative Union for Which It Stands. They would fall on their knees and beg forgiveness, and work doubly hard without complaint in order to make up for their previous malfeasance.
They would become loyal Proles to Big Brother, and adopt the Two-Minute Hate as their mantra.
Emmanuel Goldstein Must Be Destroyed!!!
THIS is honestly what they thought would happen, because they believe that the current situation will be wonderfully rectified and everyone will be happy if only the Liberals finally convert and ADMIT the TRUTH.
They’re delusional. And nothing can convince them otherwise.
Mark my words, this teacher shortage will be blamed on Liberal well-poisoning and bad-mouthing. It is ALWAYS someone else’s fault.