Leaving the Field (teachers disappearing)

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This Star Tribune article by Erin Golden should put the shivers into all of us for several reasons.

• Only half of our State’s licensed teachers are teaching,
• Some rural school districts are receiving as few as six applications for open teaching positions where they used to find 100,
• More than a third of districts were unable to fill teaching positions in the 2019-2020 school year,
• About a third of teachers quit teaching within the first five years on the job (a long term trend),
• This data is pre-COVID (projections for the 2021 year will likely be worse as the politics & realities of the pandemic become known)
• It appears there is little available data as to why so many teachers are not in the classroom or sending in applications to fill vacant teaching positions.  We  don’t know why and more troubling, it could be that there may be a question about the State Legislature’s willingness to spend 25-50 thousand dollars to find out why teachers are leaving.

This nation was successful because it thought education a critical element in creating a productive society. Disappearing teachers are a very big part of the serious problems facing this institution today.

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Impossible Questions & Painful Statistics

We have many big problems as a nation today and all of them require an educated public to make decisions wise enough to solve them.

KARA reports on children’s issues

This article submitted by CASA volunteer Mike Tikkanen

(From the Star Tribune Article);

A new report from the state’s licensing board found that the teacher shortage spans public schools in urban, suburban and rural communities and is the result of multiple factors. Among them: Just half of Minnesota teachers with a professional license are working in the classroom, and there’s been a significant dip in the number of new teachers entering the profession. The problem is so widespread that more than a third of districts reported they were unable to fill teaching positions they’d budgeted for in the 2019-20 school year.

#teachers

#education

#statistics