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<h1 class="entry-title">More Idaho teachers leave profession</h1>
<div id="storyInfoHolder"> <span class="vcard author">
<p class="fn">by Associated Press</p>
</span> <span class="source-org vcard">
<p class="org fn">KTVB.COM</p>
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<p class="published dtstamp" title="2012-09-29t01:04:06z">Posted
on September 29, 2012 at 2:04 PM</p>
<p class="updated dtstamp" title="2012-09-29t01:21:54z"> Updated
today at 2:21 PM </p>
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<p>"BOISE -- More Idaho teachers left the profession last year, but
state officials say they've also certificated more educators.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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."<br>
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================<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
Ken<br>
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