Why teachers can’t hotfoot it out of Kansas fast enough
Teachers can’t hotfoot it out of Kansas fast enough, creating a substantial shortage expected only to get much worse. Why?
Well, there’s the low pay. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average teaching salary in 2012-2013 (the latest year for which data were available, in constant 2012-2013 dollars), was $47,464, lower than the pay in all but seven states (Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and West Virginia), though not by much in most of them.
Last year, job protections were cut by state lawmakers, who have also sought to reduce collective-bargaining rights for public employees.
Then there’s the severe underfunding for public education by the administration of Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, so much of a problem that some school districts closed early this past school year because they didn’t have the cash to keep operating. This story by Huffington Post, quoted Tim Hallacy, superintendent of Silver Lake Schools, as saying:
“I find it increasingly difficult to convince young people that education is a profession worth considering, and I have some veterans who think about leaving. In the next three years I think we’ll have maybe the worst teacher shortage in the country — I think most of that is self-inflicted.”
This June, a three-member district court panel ruled that parts of a new state school financing law violated the Kansas Constitution by allowing inequitable distribution of more than $4 billion in annual education funding. It ordered the state to give $54 million back to the public schools, though that part of the ruling was stayed indefinitely by the Kansas Supreme Court which quickly took up the issue. Now, the state’s entire funding formula for public education is up in the air.
And there’s more. According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, the Kansas Board of Education decided in July to allow six school systems — including two of the largest in the state — to hire unlicensed teachers to ease the shortage. (Let the irony sink in for a minute.) Specifically, the newspaper reported:
The measure will waive the state’s licensure regulations for a group of districts called the Coalition of Innovative Districts, a program that the Legislature established in 2013 based on model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council.
(Yes, ALEC, an organization that writes “model legislation” on a variety of topics that conservative legislators use in states to make new laws that promote privatization, strikes again. Under this legislation, districts can ignore most laws and regulations — including union contracts — that other public schools in a state must follow.)
Some Kansas educators and others tried to dissuade the board from taking this action, including James Neff, a chemistry teacher from Manhattan United School District 383, which the Capital-Journal quoted as saying that there is more to teaching than just knowing subject material. He was quoted as saying, “A subject matter specialist is just a subject matter specialist, but a Why teachers can’t hotfoot it out of Kansas fast enough - The Washington Post:
