- The myth of America’s teacher shortage, like your older brother’s stories about alligators in the sewers and malevolent hitchhikers stalking the roadways, poses an intriguing question: If we’re going to invent fanciful stories for our own amusement, why do they have to be scary ones? In an in-depth piece for Chalkbeat Indiana, Shaina Cavazos debunks ominous reports of a teacher deficit in the Hoosier State with a lot of the same data and arguments that contradict the broader notion of a national shortage. While some districts are facing a lack of qualified applicants, our education schools are still pumping out way more graduates than there are open positions for them to fill. Longer-term trends—the perennial difficulty of attracting young educators to rural areas and the gradual retirement of the Baby Boom workforce—generally account for those anecdotal reports of professional scarcity, but macro-level teacher employment has actually increased over the last ten years. Maybe now we can get back to more pressing problems, like exorcising the ghost of Elvis Presley.
- Nobody likes the fellow who shows up early for work every day. Smug at his desk, he’s already dutifully responding to his emails while the rest of us stagger in from the horrors of school drop-offs and dysfunctional public transportation. Arnold Anderson, on the other hand, must be the most beloved teacher in his school (at least among his colleagues): The New Jersey teacher managed to hold on to his job after tallying more than a hundred tardy notices in just two years! The arbitrator in the case, even while allowing him to remain employed on technical grounds, groused that Anderson’s students deserved his “very best efforts for the entire period, and not merely that remaining portion of the period following [his] chronically late arrivals.” Anderson, meanwhile, blamed his breezy approach to punctuality on an excessive love of breakfast. Maybe he can enjoy an IHOP platter on the way to his night shift whenever the state comes to its senses and fires him.
- The benefits of a college education are numerous and well publicized. A four-year degree from a competitive school confers enormous employment and earning advantages to its owner, and the excitement of higher learning can open the minds of students to life paths they’d never previously considered. But as Fordham has preached for years, and as the New Yorker’s John Cassidy reaffirms, this country is making a disastrous mistake if it relies solely on the promise of college to combat growing inequality or enhance our competitiveness in the world economy. Put very simply, the wage premium of college graduates has been eroding for years, and our single-minded “college-for-all” focus has led us to neglect worthy alternatives like CTE and workplace apprenticeships. And even if four-year programs were the right option for every American child, our K–12 system has shown absolutely no capacity to prepare them for it.
