We Need To Stop Talking About The Teacher Shortage
News of a teacher shortage across the nation has been pummeling us for years now, right up through a story yesterday in the Panama City News Herald about an “extreme” teacher shortage.
Fewer students in teacher prep programs. Thousands of unfilled teacher vacancies in state after state.
But we need to stop calling it a teacher shortage.
You can’t solve a problem starting with the wrong diagnosis. If I can’t buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn’t mean there’s an automobile shortage. If I can’t get a fine dining meal for a buck, that doesn’t mean there’s a food shortage. And if appropriately skilled humans don’t want to work for me under the conditions I’ve set, that doesn’t mean there’s a human shortage.
Calling the situation a “teacher shortage” suggests something like a crop failure or a hijacker grabbing truckloads before they can get to market. It suggests that there simply aren’t enough people out there who could do the job.
There is no reason to believe that is true. But pretending that it is true sets up justification for a variety of bad “solutions” to the CONTINUE READING: We Need To Stop Talking About The Teacher Shortage
