The great national teacher shortage is easing.
After long struggles to employ enough adequately trained teachers, school districts across the country this year received a windfall of applicants. Some systems that previously had relied heavily on day-to-day substitutes even had the luxury of turning away fully credentialed instructors.
The weakened economy is drawing people to the relative stability of teaching from such battered fields as technology and business management, according to school districts and teachers groups. Also helping, they say, are more aggressive recruitment campaigns, pay hikes and the steep rise of alternative credential programs, which make it easier and faster for people with college degrees to become teachers.
"It's a convergence of very active recruiting with a down economy," said Tom Carroll, executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a nonprofit group dedicated to improving the quality of teaching.
But he warned that it's too early to claim that the shortage is over. There is still a need for educators in math, science and special education. The attrition rate for new teachers has been very high. Plus, he added, interest in teaching may dwindle when the economy rebounds.
"School districts should not breathe easy. They should see this as an opportunity to attract more qualified teachers into classrooms," he said.
Among the new crop of teachers is Reginald Grant, 47, former owner of a software company in San Diego. He left the struggling computer field in May after he saw a teacher recruitment billboard for an alternative program. He is now an English teacher at Gompers Middle School in South Los Angeles.
The technology market, he said, was soft. "Like everyone else, I had success and failures. I had reached my mecca in terms of those things. The bottom line was, I wanted to make a change."
Grant said he wanted to mentor students. He applied online to the New Teacher Project, a national program that seeks mid-career professionals. He spent last summer attending training classes and working as an intern in a middle school classroom, alongside another teacher. Then he was unleashed to head his own classroom.
By the end of his first day of school in the fall, he thought, "What have I gotten myself into?" But midway through his first year, he maintains that it is "one of the best moves I have ever made in my life. Every day I reach kids."
Around the country, the number of such alternative teacher training programs rose over the last two decades from just eight to 122, according to C. Emily Feistritzer, of the National Center for Education Information in Washington. Nearly 25,000 teachers in 45 states were funneled into the system in 2002 this way, she said.
Many of these programs put mid-career adults like Grant or recent college graduates without education backgrounds on the fast track to teaching credentials with a method that resembles boot camp: a few weeks or months of intensive training before being assigned to teach under a mentor's guidance. They continue to take classes nights and weekends. Because those recruits usually receive less training than is provided in the traditional education degree program, some education experts question whether those programs lower the bar too much for hiring.
For school districts, the bigger question is: How many of these new teachers will stay?
According to a recent report released by the National Commission, which examined teacher retention rates from 1987 to 2000, almost a third of new teachers leave the classroom after three years, and nearly 50% leave after five years. The report cited the main reasons for this churn rate as poor working conditions, training and pay and stated that the problem had gotten worse during that time.
Melinda Anderson, a spokeswoman for the National Education Assn. union, said that if districts do not solve this "revolving door situation, simply hiring people this year and stamping this as 'problem solved' is way too premature."
Hillary Meister, for example, turned to teaching last year after she could not land a job in journalism. Desperate to find work and eager to help youths, Meister leaped into teaching high school English in a rural school district in Florida and enrolled in an alternative training program.
But less than a year into the job, she burned out and quit.
"The internship did not prepare me for what I faced in the classroom," she said. "You end up working an 80-hour work week, on top of overcrowded classrooms. They don't pay teachers enough to go through that stuff. That's why it's harder and harder for them to keep new teachers."
