Does a Teaching Degree = Unemployable?

Never before has the United States needed a future workforce, educated and skilled enough to bring back our competitive edge and earn enough to pay down the massive government and private debt of the last generation. We’re down; Asian labor is providing the same skills at vastly reduced cost. Our present is a disaster, and our future is looking bleak.

What a horrific time for school districts to pare back their teaching staff to meet budget cuts resulting from a severely eroding tax base. What a terrible time to increase class size, cut programs and defer much-needed maintenance in our school systems. “The recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof. Superintendents, education professors and people seeking work say teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression. Amid state and local budget cuts, cash-poor urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles, which once hired thousands of young people every spring, have taken down the help-wanted sign. & nbsp;

“Even upscale suburban districts are preparing for huge levels of layoffs. School officials and union leaders estimate that more than 150,000 teachers nationwide could lose their jobs next year, far more than any other time, including the last major financial crisis of the 1970s.” The May 19^th New York Times. Graduates are taking additional courses to train for jobs where there is still some demand… like nursing. Others land, depressed, to live with their parents until the job market shakes out or a miracle – one that truly is nowhere in sight – appears. Most of the few openings that occur are in places like new charter schools and virtually none in the cash-strapped cities where most of the graduates attended college.

For the young men and women who went to college with the dream of becoming a teacher to shape minds and perform one of society’s most critical functions – preparing the young to build and live in the future – they now face a total lack of demand for their services; just as the lenders who helped finance their educations are demanding the beginning of loan repayments some had hoped would have been forgiven by the public service careers they thought they were preparing for. It’s not just a waste; it’s a travesty.

The numbers are staggering. While the rest of America has five and half applicants for every job opening, young teachers face ten to one odds: “Teach for America, which places graduates from some of the nation’s top colleges in poor schools, has seen applications increase by nearly a third this year to 46,000 — for 4,500 slots. From Ivy League colleges alone, there are 1,688 would-be teachers.” The Times.

Our present is pretty sad; we are really hoping for a recovery sometime in the near future. If we have a future, and unless someone figures out how to raise the rapidly declining quality of our public schools pretty fast – just as the developing world is very, very quickly figuring out how to build those critical skills among their own children – that thing we will call the future will be exceptionally distressing.

I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly who is going to sound the wake-up call?