“Virginia had more than 3,500 full-time teacher vacancies for the 2022-2023 school year, which is about a 4.5% rate”
"Iteach is working in 11 states, according to its website: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. "
“Teachers of Tomorrow, is working in nine states”
“for-profit credentialing firms tout their ability to get people into classrooms within a year or 18 months, depending on when they begin.”
"Iteach advertises that its cost for a complete program is $4,399, plus a $99 enrollment fee. Teachers of Tomorrow’s program costs about $5,000.
By contrast, annual average tuition at a four-year institution in education can range from $9,193 at an in-state school to $26,543 at an out-of-state school, according to the website College Tuition Compare, an independent college evaluation site. Elite institutions are higher. Graduate tuition ranges from $10,806 annually to $19,796, the site found."
If you look at the way that teachers are treated in many of those states, I am not surprised they cannot find qualified teachers to fill their classrooms. I stopped taking accepting student teachers in the 1980s. When I began teaching 6th graders I in the mid 1990s, I discouraged them to consider teaching as a career. I could see the direction things were going and did not want to be responsible for anyone going into the soul sucking profession that teaching was becoming. From talking with the teachers that I know who are still in the classroom, it has only gotten worse since I retired a dozen years ago.
You have parents second-guessing how classrooms should be run, how students should be taught, because they don’t trust how colleges are teaching teachers how to teach. Why would anyone want to be in that profession anymore is beyond me. And it’s very sad. And not good for the country.
Going on my 28th year in the classroom and what you are saying is dead on. It got worse during and after the pandemic. Behavior problems increased and parents are typically against the teacher when it comes to any type of discipline. Wish I had stayed in the engineering program back in college.
Read it and weep for the USA’s comparative idiocy:
While visiting some of my Finnish friends in a medium sized city I watched them dash across a busy street during a sleet storm to literally bow before and thank one of their second grade teachers…
Some schools in the Houston Indpendent School District are “solving” at least part of this problem by getting rid of librarians, and turning the libraries into discipline centers instead. Madness. I hate what is happening to my state.
Teachers are college graduates and smart. Covid etc causes stresses. When job opportunities are abundant you are not surprised to see teachers trying a new career.
Japan has started to provide private lecture series for certain courses on line for highschool students. The top teachers can make as much as $1mil a year. It’s an all the above problem but the right incentives need to be there to encourage talent to enter the field.
The Masters programs for education, when compared to other masters programs, draws the candidates on average with the lowest academic scores. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation took hard look at public education in modeling their own private efforts abroad. Unfortunately, they came away with more of what not to do than successful practices to apply elsewhere. Shockingly, one of the biggest takeaways was that the public education system rarely studies its own successful teachers and their practices to shape training and mentoring of the next generation of educators.
Thing about on-line “education” is that public school seems to be as much about teaching conformity, as facts. Can’t monitor the spawn’s thought process well enough when he’s sitting at home. at a computer. He might start developing wokie ideas, that a computer scored test of a computerized training program, might not reveal.
Besides, if the spawn are learning by themselves, at home. then the High School football and basketball farm systems collapse, shich causes the college athletic programs to collapse, and the NFL and NBA “JCs” will need to start developing their own players…OH, the burden!!!
/sarcasm
Of course, if more kids are encouraged to drop out of school, and enter the workforce, at a younger age, that reduces the need for teachers.
This pic cracks me up. The Gov has just signed a law repealing the requirement for a work permit for kids under 16. The kids do not look overjoyed.
One of the objectives of having kids “in class” is also general socialization. The kids are not ONLY meeting the same types of people as their family and friends. Much wider range of kids from various parts of the US, different religions, and so on. Which is also why some parents choose private schools…
No schools, no taxes needed to fund them. For example, NC schools do not issue books to students. Kids go to school, but it is to be able to get taught by teachers, ask questions, etc. Books are ALL “online”. There is also NO HOMEWORK. It is a “learn or else” system.
No physical buildings, but the producers of the canned lessons, like K-12, are entitled to a fat profit, right?
But there is still the question of the impact on the NFL and NBA of losing their free-to-them, tax supported high school and college farm system. The mob must have it’s circuses.
A long time. The problem of “drift” seems to get worse, not better with each iteration.
The researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley said the deterioration is an example of a phenomenon known to AI developers as drift, where attempts to improve one part of the enormously complex AI models make other parts of the models perform worse.
“Changing it in one direction can worsen it in other directions,” said James Zou, a Stanford professor who is affiliated with the school’s AI lab and is one of the authors of the new research. “It makes it very challenging to consistently improve.”
Note: “a long time” doesn’t mean “forever”, but it isn’t as easy as slapping together a curriculum and having kids sit in front of it. The AI will have to be able to answer questions, give background sometimes, and do other things that teachers typically do. Also who is going to go to the principal’s office when a machine tells you to?
Ever hear of the UFC? No minimum age AND no formal training required. It is ONE thing: ENTERTAINMENT. So, FAR lower costs for the JCs and an essentially self-replenishing supply of stupid losers in perpetuity.
I’m a math teacher. The great irony they don’t mention in the article is most of the best research for what causes great teaching is coming out of the USA. . Yet we create a system where teachers are distrusted as if they are children themselves.
I find the implication that machine are better teachers appalling. Human interaction with human teachers has to be a plus. Cold mechanical response is not equivalent.
Yes machines can make teachers more efficient. But humans still respond to humans. Teachers cannot be eliminated!!!
. Yet we create a system where teachers are distrusted as if they are children themselves.