President Obama’s dream of creating an “army of new teachers” that he passionately advocated during his election campaign has been shattered, especially in California.
Instead of adding new brigades to its teaching corps, California is laying them off – by the tens of thousands.
This year there are 16,000 fewer teachers in the classroom than there were last year. And school districts have just given pink slips to another 26,000. Depending on what happens in the next few months, a majority of those will not be back in the classroom in the fall.
What is clear is that at a time when California should be preparing for its future teaching force, the state is moving in just the opposite direction.
California for years faced a looming shortage of teachers. Most estimates projected that California would need 100,000 new teachers over the next decade, to replace the huge numbers of teachers from California’s 305,000-strong - and heavily baby boomer - teaching force who are expected to retire in the next decade.
During much of the past decade, California was falling behind, as fewer and fewer prospective teachers signed up for teacher preparation programs.
As the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning points out, the number of enrollees in teacher preparation programs dropped by a third, from 77,000 in 2002 to less than 52,000 in 2007. Between the 2007-08 and 2008-09 school years, the number of first- and second-year teachers dropped from 35,000 to 28,000 in schools across the state.
Now, California's budget crisis has had one unexpected outcome: it has yielded a short-term surplus of teachers. But that won't ease the long term demands to produce more of them.
California has long been a tough place for teachers, according to Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at Stanford, and top education advisor to President Obama during his campaign for the White House.
"The yo-yo budgeting, with uncertainties every year, not only about whether you’ll have a job, but how big your class size will be, or will you have books,” she told me months ago. “California is a very difficult place to teach, much more difficult than in most other states across the country.”
And that was before a new round of layoff notices threatened to push thousands more teachers, especially younger ones who are first in line to get pink slips, out of the classroom altogether.
Comments
via Twitter