Is there a Silver Lining to be seen in the Shortage in Teaching Positions there is Today?
When small school districts around the country happen to put up an advertisement for a couple of new teaching positions these days, they are often surprised to find about a thousand applicants showing up for each advertised position. Some of those applications come from teaching graduates who live all the way across the country. No one's ever seen this kind of struggle for teaching jobs as long as they can remember. If you wonder if those teaching hopefuls made the mistake of training for subjects that were not as much in demand, it doesn't really pan out that way. Most of the teaching graduates around who seem to be trying desperately hard for employment now hedged their bets and trained in hard-to-find specialties. The specialties are in complete oversupply too. Even teaching positions in special-education have hopeful teaching graduates applying about 200 to each spot in rural New York. In Connecticut, openings in school districts for teachers in chemistry and physics that used to get no more than a couple of candidates to each opening, have at least 100 scrabbling for jobs there aren't.
Teaching was always the profession that was recession-proof. It was the fallback career. You needed to send your children to school no matter how poor you were, and all the services that went into running a school, were considered completely protected in any economic environment. And yet, here we are in a recession, and we have the worst employment market for teachers in 80 years. School districts are cutting budgets, and even large metropolitan areas like New York City that were meccas for new teaching graduates each year are no longer able to help. Even districts that are upscale and should be better provided for, ae laying off teachers at rates no one has ever seen before. More than 100,000 teachers will lose their jobs next year. No matter where you turn in the country, anyone applying for teaching positions feels nothing but desperation; to see an exalted profession reduced to having dozens of candidates scrabbling for one opening is often heartbreaking to those who have seen better times.
A friend of mine who graduated from the Teachers College at Columbia has been unemployed for six months now, ever since she graduated. She has sent out about three dozen resumes; they call her in for demonstration lessons; but her chances are usually slim. She's usually one among hundreds of candidates with somilar resume. She has now moved in with her parents, and has taken up private tutoring for cash. You know it's alarming when at jobs fairs for teachers, teaching graduates show up from two years ago, and they still haven't found a job. The openings for teaching openings are down by half at a time when we should be seeing them rising to keep up with a rising population. Your best bet if you are looking for a teaching position now would be to try a charter school.
No one actually wants to leave their home state and travel far across the country for a job; but even poorly paying teaching positions attract candidates from all over now. Another friend of mine who is a teaching hopeful finally gave up after two years looking for a job as a high school teacher. All she got for her trouble was a substitute teacher position making $70 a day. She's given up teaching now and is heading into nursing.
At least, schools have a great deal of choice now; and this kind of oversupply should raise standards. Graduates with anything lower than a 3.3 grade point average are usually rejected in the selection process. There are top teaching graduates now accepting teaching positions at schools in poor underfunded districts. If you have to see an upside to everything, this could be the upside to this sad situation.
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