The highly regarded Public Policy Forum just released the final part of their major study, “Help Wanted,” which analyzed the current labor market trends in education and the fact that teachers are leaving the profession at an alarming rate. For example, in our four-county Milwaukee Metropolitan area, “the number of teachers leaving the workforce has increased 22.5% in recent years, and 53% of teachers who left did so prior reaching retirement age,” says Forum Senior Researcher Joe Yeado, the report’s lead author. At the same time, according to the report, the enrollment in the teacher preparation programs at our colleges and universities in Wisconsin is falling by almost 28% and more than 31% at our UW campuses. Across the nation, the enrollments fell more than 35% in just the five years between 2008-09 and 2013-14.
So why is this happening? One major factor if you talk to teachers and perspective teachers is the feeling that America just doesn’t respect teachers and in many ways doesn’t respect education in general. Actually this current and alarming crisis in the teacher shortage has been a while in coming, and the recent recession had a real impact on bringing this issue to the fore as it has had a major impact on so many other aspects of our lives. America is the world’s leading capitalist country and as a capitalist country, we pay a higher price for the things that we value. Teachers, despite the fact that many have advanced degrees, are paid rather poorly relative to other professionals and teachers in other advanced capitalist countries like Germany, Japan or South Korea. What are we telling our teachers? Furthermore, in recent years, certain right-wing politicians have found it popular to “bash” teachers and somehow make teachers and the unions that represent them our enemy. (Remember Scott Walker’s Act 10.)
What used to be a very respected profession is now undervalued and actually vilified. Unfortunately, it is not only teachers but education in general that is often scorned. According to the most recent polls, a third of the U.S. population still does not believe in climate change or science in general, including a large number of our members of Congress and they are proud of their ignorance. If education, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, hopes of living a richer cultural and intellectual life, dreams of working to make the world a better place through education, and desires to learn to think critically, for example, are not valued, then for too many individuals a college education has been reduced to just a glorified vocational training program to hopefully increase one’s lifetime earning capacity. When that becomes the case, it is simply an analysis of the numbers, a crude cost/benefit analysis where the only factor is money. So then, some argue, does it make sense to become a teacher now that tuition has increased significantly in the past several years? Should you spend four years at a college or university and miss four years of earning capacity, incur the costs of tuition, books, etc. and leave four years later with about $30,000 in debt to enter a profession that is undervalued and not respected by society?
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Obviously, Wisconsin and America need a well-educated citizenry, and that means we again need more of the best and brightest to become teachers and stay in the classroom for a few decades. Other states like Massachusetts saw some real improvements in their educational system, after a Republican governor, William Weld, worked with a Democratic-dominated Legislature in the early 1990s to create a more equitable and rational state funding source for education and when local school districts used that money in a wise manner. If there are more educational resources in the classrooms including monies to increase teachers’ salaries, the status of the profession will rise and attract additional talent and we will begin to see things spiral upward. Yes, it will cost some money, but good education costs money. Furthermore the better our education system becomes, the fewer climate change deniers we’ll have.
