State legislators pitch 3 ideas to combat California teacher shortage
State legislators unveiled three proposals on Tuesday to address California's teacher shortage.
The state Senate bills aim to improve recruitment of college students thinking about becoming teachers, increase mentorship of beginning teachers, and forgive student loans for teachers who work in high-need schools.
“The outlook across our state is bleak,” said State Senator Carol Liu (D-Pasadena) about the high demand for teachers and the low supply.
“Enrollment in our California teacher preparation programs has declined from 2001 to 2014 by 76 percent," she said. "With the future of our state and our students at stake, we cannot allow these trends to continue."
Liu’s bill would resurrect a program called CalTeach, which was eliminated in 2003 as a result of state budget cuts. The teacher credentialing process is often “complex and intimidating,” Liu said, and CalTeach helped college students understand how it worked while also explaining financial aid options.
State Senator Fran Pavley (D-Calabasas) authored SB 62 to reinstate a student loan forgiveness program for new teachers who teach for four years at a school with large numbers of disadvantaged students, or a rural school, or a school with a large number of emergency permits. The new teachers would also have to teach in a declared shortage area, and demonstrate financial need.
The third proposal, SB 933 authored by State Senator Ben Allen (D-West Los Angeles), would create matching grants for school districts to create or expand teacher residency programs.
It may take these and more efforts to turn around a widely held belief that teaching is a very unstable job. Until about five years ago, the most common news from school districts was how many teachers they were planning to layoff because of the recession.
“If I’m coming out of a college and I’m seeing this huge number of teachers that are on the market that have been laid off, I’m not going to go into teaching,” said Darren Knowles, assistant superintendent for human resources at Pomona Unified School District.
Knowles thinks the loan forgiveness proposal will help recruitment. He said Pomona Unified will fill about 35 teacher positions next year that opened due to retirements, relocations, and other reasons. And hiring won’t stop soon, he said, because 28 State legislators pitch 3 ideas to combat California teacher shortage | 89.3 KPCC: