[Vision2020] More Idaho teachers leave profession

[Kenneth Marcy]

  More Idaho teachers leave profession

by Associated Press

KTVB.COM

Posted on September 29, 2012 at 2:04 PM

Updated today at 2:21 PM

"BOISE -- More Idaho teachers left the profession last year, but state 
officials say they've also certificated more educators.

Data obtained Friday by The Associated Press shows about 1,800 teachers 
left the profession for various reasons during the 2011-2012 school 
year. That's up from the previous year, when 1,300 teachers left, and 
the year before, when 700 departed.

The statewide teachers union attributed the increased exits last year to 
reforms that limited collective bargaining and job protections. Public 
schools chief Tom Luna countered that the recession was more likely the 
culprit.

While teachers left the profession in bigger numbers last year, Luna's 
department says there's also been a 25 percent increase in the issuance 
of teaching certificates and as a result, the number of certificated 
staff in schools is about the same."

================

Based on the 2008 number of full-time equivalent teachers in Idaho of 
15,148, a three-year turnover of 1,800 + 1,300 + 700 = 3,800 is equal to 
25.08 percent (3,800 / 15,148). If this turnover rate is maintained for 
the next nine years, there will have been a total teacher turnover in 
Idaho schools from the base three years ago.

I suppose it's possible Idaho might become an education recruiting 
convenience location for other states who know that after two or three 
years of modestly-paid Idaho experience, at least some Idaho teachers 
will be ready to move out-of-state and up the salary ladder in a new 
teaching position.

If Idaho has a relative plenty of positions that don't require lots of 
higher education, and for those positions that do require engineering, 
science, and other technical and professional skills, employers tend to 
hire from out-of-state, what is an Idaho graduate to do? Leave the 
state? Well, . . ., yeah.

So, just how effective is Idaho's higher education leadership? Teacher 
turnover up to rates that would get most managers probation, if not a 
pink slip, and high-quality graduates as likely to export themselves for 
employment as not.

Times are changing. I remember my mother saying that one of her 
strictest grade school teachers turned up in her school life again as a 
high school English teacher. So, I was not at all surprised when my 
fifth grade teacher turned out to be my high school freshman English 
teacher. Those were the days when a high school yearbook picture of the 
students who spent all twelve of their school years in the same local 
school district would have enough students in the photograph to fill up 
the outside entrance stairway into the high school auditorium.

We seem to be steadily moving from relatively more static social 
conditions to relatively more fluid social conditions. Perhaps we are 
observing an ongoing social climate warming within which the growing 
population is creating more pressure and raising the social temperature. 
Maybe Sartre was onto something when he suggested existentialism, and 
that, from a No Exit perspective, hell is other people.


Ken
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120929/9dd57879/attachment.html>