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.
What did you think was going to happen, red state America?
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4 comments:
Sow rocks, get rocks.
I like the sound of that one. America has been sowing rocks ever since the convergence of forces that boosted Reagan into the White House, Bush the Lesser was a great big boulder squeezed out the national cloaca, and the Republican primary clown car is as chock full of pebbles and sand as a bronze age Danish burial mound.
No, no - THEIR kids are smarter than everyone else's kids - it'll be those OTHER kids who get left behind. Besides, there's all those on-line schools... and who needs those liberal egghead professors teaching kids silly ideas like evolution, biology, chemistry,...
MOOCS! MOOCS! MOOCS!
All he has to do is gather all the university eggheads, shell out fifteen hundred dollars each to tape their standard lectures, then FIRE THE LOT OF THEM and offer university classes free to anyone with a youtube connection. Problem solved, brilliant in its simplicity, sell that surplus college building for pennies on the dollar: right up Pence's alley.
One wonders how he'll manage to keep his sweet sweet academic sinecure, but no doubt he has a cunning scheme to provide for himself and his buddies.
Keep in mind these are the people who think god, not education, is the solution to everything. It's working as intended to pretty much anyone at all levels of the Republican party.
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