Bigger Teacher Shortage

On paper there can't be a U.S. pub- lic-schoolteacher shortage. Each year the nation's colleges turn out 200,000 graduates qualified for teaching, and 150,000 take jobs. That is 50,000 more than the net loss from teachers who retire or quit. Since the school population is growing at about 1,000,000 a year, these graduates should provide one new teacher for every 20 children--an admirable ratio. Yet as schools opened this month, the teacher shortage was the worst since World War II.

Caught aback, the National Education Association made an emergency survey, pegged the nationwide shortage at 72,500 teachers, all but 6,500 of them needed in elementary schools. The figure seems conservative, since New York alone reported a statewide deficiency of 12,000 certified teachers, Texas 10,300, Illinois and Michigan 5,000 each. Missouri has almost three times as many vacancies as last year.

Shocks in Chicago. Some big-city systems had a tough time opening. Chicago had 600 vacancies on opening day, still needs 300 teachers, mainly in its Negro neighborhoods. Part of the problem was that 300 new teachers "took our jobs, then found others they preferred and didn't notify us," says Acting Superintendent Thaddeus Lubera. Cleveland hired 650 new teachers, still faced a shortage of 235. It began hiring any college graduates, even if they could teach only one period a day, yet wound up with 50 jobs filled by substitutes and retired teachers who, by law, must quit within 60 days or lose their pensions. Kansas City's director of school personnel, Robert Ward, says it takes about 50 telephone calls to find five substitutes when a regular teacher is sick--and on some days 150 are absent.

Lonely rural areas, where starting salaries can run $4,000 a year or less, are in even greater trouble. With so many jobs available, teachers can choose where they want to live. San Francisco, Los. Angeles and Miami are not shorthanded, but California's hot San Joaquin Valley and Florida's rural Marion County are desperately advertising for help. The rich Long Island suburb of Hempstead, on the other hand, pays new teachers $6,400, had 3,000 applications for fewer than 40 openings.

Recruiting from Tunisia. Although elementary-school teachers are needed most, specialists in such high school subjects as mathematics, science and women's physical education are also scarce. The shortage of high school industrial-arts teachers is "horrendous," says Ohio State Superintendent Martin Essex. Colleges produce few vocational teachers these days, and anyone with mechanical skills can easily triple his teaching salary in industry.

To plug the teaching gap, Detroit has sent assistant principals and guidance counselors into 102 of its classrooms.

Nebraska's Bellevue district, near Omaha, has refused to let teachers break contracts until replacements are found. Districts in Georgia and Massachusetts have turned to what they call "two for one" or "platoon" systems, in which two teachers, often housewives with degrees, are hired for each vacancy and each works only half a day. Maine is seeking teachers from Tunisia, Greece and Turkey in a "reverse Peace Corps."

New York City's Superintendent Bernard Donovan sent recruiters south to hire 60 Negroes displaced by the closing of Negro schools under integration plans, and got 2,000 other teachers by offering inexperienced B.A. holders free summer education courses at N.Y.U.

The Boerne, Tex., school board hired two Roman Catholic Benedictine sisters to teach math and English, now faces petitions from Protestants who claim that the sisters' habits constitute "silent, striking teaching of sectarian religion."

Federal Impact. The most direct cause of the new shortage, ironically, is the sudden proliferation of federal programs designed to aid education. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, aimed mainly at helping kids from poor neighborhoods catch up to their more affluent peers, created 60,000 extra fulltime teaching jobs for this school year. These teachers are, of course, still teaching, and in tasks where the schools are weakest: small-class remedial work in the three Rs, guidance counseling, tutoring. But they leave vacancies in regular classrooms.

In addition, the Peace Corps has 5,400 teachers overseas, the federal Job Corps employs 1,720 teachers, and the fulltime Head Start program is expected to need 12,000 teachers. Another drain is the draft. Texas education officials contend that their teacher shortage just matches the number hired by federal programs. Indianapolis shifted 49 faculty members into anti-poverty jobs--and faced 46 vacancies when school opened. John Desmond, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, argues that "it is asinine to assign teachers to special programs while regular classrooms are unfilled."

Inverted Prestige. While the sudden impact of federal programs can be largely blamed for this year's troubles, long-range pressures are also squeezing the teaching profession. College graduates who choose teaching are turning in increasing numbers to jobs with the greatest prestige, those in colleges and high schools, leaving a growing grammar school gap. High school teachers tend to move up to junior colleges, which employ more than 65,000 as compared with 26,000 five years ago. Contending that elementary teachers have a far more profound influence on students than college teachers, James E. Russell, secretary of the N.E.A.'s Educational Policies Commission, charges that "the prestige hierarchy in education is inverted--and when we finally treat the elementary school as our first priority, we will have a true revolution in American education."

Yet the basic problem is that teaching salaries in most public schools are not competitive with jobs in industry and government requiring lesser skills. One Office of Education official estimates that 1,000,000 teachers have been lured away by higher salaries alone. A justifiable desire for higher pay, greater prestige and a stronger voice in their own profession is leading to a new militancy among teachers. School boards and taxpayers can either try to fulfill these desires or prepare for even worse shortages ahead. Within five years, the babies of all those postwar babies will be ready for kindergarten.

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