[Vision2020] More Idaho teachers leave profession

[Donovan Arnold]

The problem with trying to keep smart teachers in Idaho is that smart teachers know it is not smart to stay in Idaho as a teacher. God never intended one man or one woman to care for 35 children at a time, but the Idaho Legislature demands it. How unChristian of them. 
 
Donovan J. Arnold

From: Kenneth Marcy <kmmos1 at frontier.com>
To: Vision2020 discussions <vision2020 at moscow.com> 
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2012 3:41 PM
Subject: [Vision2020] More Idaho teachers leave profession


More Idaho teachers leave profession
by Associated PressKTVB.COMPosted 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."

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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

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