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Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2001

In a 90-minute panel discussion at the National Press Club, eight experts tossed about ideas for better pay and working conditions and outside recruitment but came to no single conclusion.

Although the title of the panel was "The Urban Teacher Shortage: Will It Go Away?" there was not even agreement that there was a teacher shortage.

Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said: "In general we do not have a teacher shortage. …We have a distribution problem."

He said there were 3 million people teaching in the United States, and 6 million more with teaching credentials, with 100,000 teachers graduating every year.

With baby boomers reaching retirement age there will be a flood of new teachers needed, he said, with a shortage in the secondary schools, not so much in the elementary schools.

"We are going to need more single-subject teachers. We don't need more multiple-subject teachers. We need teachers in persistent area of shortages: math, science, special education, bilingual education," he said.

Southern states and dense urban areas also will have a need, he said.

Carlos Ponce, who oversees human resources for the Chicago school district, the nation's third largest, said it has recruited abroad for the teachers it needs.

Ponce said it has been certified as having a shortage of math and science teachers, which has allowed the Immigration and Naturalization Service to issue visas to fill those needs.

For this year, Chicago is hiring 3,000 teachers, an increase of 34 percent from the 1999-2000 year. However, in certain areas, such as English, history and early-childhood education, they have more candidates than vacancies. For example, they have 1,474 candidates to fill 116 vacancies in English, Ponce said, and 242 candidates to fill eight open history slots, but not enough candidates to fill physics or earth-science vacancies.

Chicago, he said, is concentrating on retaining teachers. Last year it lost 1,759 teachers, more than one-half from resignations. Of the reasons given from resignations, 60 percent said it was because of lack of support from principals, and 46 percent said schools were poorly run.

Ponce said, "We really don't respect teachers" and often treat them as glorified baby sitters.

Shirley Schwartz, director of special projects of the Council of Great City Schools, said "There is indeed a teacher shortage.

"It is true. It is a dual problem for us, a recruitment problem and a retention problem," he said. "Why? Working conditions, lower salaries lack of recognition, all the things you hear about over and over."

She said other problems include certification and licensing, as well as late budget approvals. Federal programs mandating a reduction in class size create "a greater demand for teachers, and the teachers just aren't there."

One problem, several panel members said, was certification and the problems teachers had moving from one state to another. Loveless said one approach to tackling teacher shortages would be to make licenses easier to transfer, to expand the routes to certification and to make pensions portable as well, while making salaries more uniform between states.

Asked by moderator Joe David, a former teacher and author of "The Fire Within" and "Teacher of the Year," if there is a need for more computers in the classrooms, most panel members agreed that computers were useful tools. But they said they could not replace teachers, and school districts should not be judged by how many schools they have hooked to computers.

Ponce said, "I think the most important test of the urban school system is to get their students to read." Unfortunately he said, teacher training has minimal requirements on teaching reading.

"Here again we have a mismatch in terms of skills and demand of what our school systems need," said Ponce.

Asked to define a qualified teacher, the panel had several responses.

David Haselkorn, president of the non-profit Recruiting News Teachers, said each state defines it differently.

He said the National Commission on Teaching America's Future defines a good teacher as one "who is both well-versed in subject matter that they teach … and equally well versed in how to teach the children."

Loveless said he felt a good teacher is "a teacher that actually teaches children something and one who teaches children things that are important. It doesn't matter if that person has taken a number of education courses." He said he has taken his share of courses and "most of them were a complete waste of time. They had nothing to do with whether or not I taught or the quality of my instruction."

Most agreed that the traditional college of education was not the only way to get certification and other alternative routes should be considered. Robert Rice, with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Teachers Project, which tries to find ways to increase regional mobility of teachers from Virginia to Pennsylvania, said certification, while sometimes a problem for public school teaching, is a system of accountability to the public that pays the bill.

"There has to be some accountability and that is the best measure they have," he said.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

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