traxter said:
I think some of y'all just have completely unrealistic expectations of what is possible in terms of jobs and labor. I keep hearing that we just need to hire more Americans and pay them better and it will solve all our problems. And yeah, I agree, that money will generally solve the problem. The issue is we don't have a large enough supply to solve this with money.
If you start paying teachers more, it will take a few years for college students to start pursuing educational teaching pathways. And then in a few years perhaps some of those going into teaching would have otherwise gone into social work, or been research assistants, lab techs, or nurses. So now we have a shortage of those. We already have a shortage of many types of jobs.
Right now there are over 10,000 H1B physicians and thousands more on J1 visas. And then there are 10's of thousands, if not over 100,000 that were previous H1B/J1 that are now US citizens. It takes a minimum of 11 years after high school to become a fully licensed physician in the US. How do you replace thousands of physicians through an 11+ year training pipeline?
Fair enough point, but my contention is with your bolded. My wife graduated from A&m with a degree in sociology. We both graduated in May 2008, just after Lehman Brothers folded during the financial crisis and it took us about 8-9 months to find jobs. I found one in technology (Economics grad) and she got her emergency certification in education and taught middle school math.
After doing that for about 4 years, she moved on to be a middle school instructional coach and after doing that for 4 years, she pursued her Master's in Educational Leadership from Tceh (heh). Since then, she has been promoted several times in several different districts in the Austin area and is now a Director of Curriculum K-12 for 2 years now. She has moved her
district rating from a D to a B in 3 years, which is incredible progress.
The Asst. Super that she reports to is recommending and encouraging her to get her PhD from sip to further progress her career.
Wouldnt that be the trifecta? B.S. A&M, M.S. Tceh, PhD sip?
Anyway, my point is, you dont necessarily need the pipeline in Education grads to support an inflow to the field, all you need is smart, motivated people with a desire to do well and move up. I see bumper stickers on every truck saying how much they will pay for a commercial license, and the benefits, whatever. Do districts advertise emergency certifications in the same way? I would be there are a lot of laid off engineers that could easily pivot to the profession and do well in educating our children (and likely
less the kinds of teachers you produce by teaching them about Gender Unicorns in class, btw) -- but there seems to be no outreach. All people know about teacher is they get paid poorly, but in my wife's district, she could actually make a similar salary by going back into the classroom with all of the stipends set up for high achievers.
Zero reason that we need the out reach to go across the pacific/indian ocean. There are people here who can easily do the job.
