The Future of Teaching and Teachers

 You are going to hear a lot of contradictory discussions about the teaching profession in the coming weeks and months. On the one hand, you will hear about the impending teacher shortage, where thousands of teachers will be retiring in the near future leaving scads of positions vacate. 

On the other hand, you will hear about younger teachers finding it more and more difficult to find positions in some areas of education or the number of teachers who are being laid-off from their positions due to financial constraints and cutbacks brought on by the recent issues with the economy. See one story about this issue here from the LA Times.

This seeming contradiction is a warning cry for me, and I hope for all of us involved in education, which is in fact everyone. Here is the issue, more teachers who are near or at the retirement age are choosing to stay in the classrooms, pushing back their retirements. This is a great thing as many of these teachers are the best and we would benefit greatly from them staying in the classroom a few more years. The problem comes from the cutting of the younger teachers. We are eliminating the leadership core who in a few years would be responsible for the grooming of the next generation of teachers. When the retirements do commence say in 5 years,, we will not have a solid leadership core of experienced teachers for the rush of novice teachers to depend on.

A second problem comes from the recruitment of future teachers. If you hear stories over and over in the news, from your friends, or in your community about how difficult it will be to get a job, how likely are you to enter the teaching training programs, especially as a undergraduate? As these prospective teachers fail to the wayside, they will be replaced more and more by alternatively trained teachers and career changers. While both of these groups offer a great value to schools, I would not be in favor of these two groups becoming the dominant means of teacher preparation. The idea of teacher as a researching professional would be replaced with the teacher as a skilled technician who needs only to be exposed to the skills of the trade. Who will be the next generation of school leaders?

We need to make sure, no matter the situation we are in today, that we do not "eat the seeds" of the teaching profession. We need to make sure the future leaders are being groomed and grow within the profession and not rely only of alternative teacher preparation as the future leadership structure.