Shortage Of Qualified , Licensed Teachers In The U.S. Essays

Shortage Of Qualified , Licensed Teachers In The U.S. There is a large and rapidly increasing shortage of qualified, licensed teachers in the United States. This affects every parent and every child. Each year an increasing number of children are in classrooms with and unlicensed, unqualified teacher. There are many reasons for this shortage, but unless we figure out how to regulate this problem this shortage will continue to exist. My girlfriend believes that If the teachers salary was raised it would dramatically increase the interest in teaching. Lets face it we are a money based society. The 1998-99 academic year salary was $25,735 a year,(Fair Teachers Pay Association) far less than the salary for other college graduates. My friend works at Bell Atlantic Mobile and makes $40,000 a year without a college education, key words without a college education. The public does not want thirty students in a class anymore. Class size reduction to fifteen or twenty students per class is becoming more popular as the research begins to show lifelong gains for students in smaller classes. By making the class size smaller the schools are in immediate need of teachers the government just throws a body in front of a classroom and excepts it to work. This is only poring more gasoline on the fire, how will I expect my kids to get a good education when this kind of negligence is happening. The thing that bothers me the most is that we do have enough qualified teachers in the country to fill every classroom. The problem is that a lot of them are ex teachers who left teaching for a better paying job. The F.T.P.A. did a survey on what it would take for the ex teachers to come back to teaching. The results to the survey showed that the desired salary the wanted came out to $63,495 a year. I plan on talking to my local political candidates to push these views in office. if we continue to push the facts in their face they have to do something about it. I also think that schools that know they have a teacher or teachers who are not qualified should stage a temporary boycott to support the parents and children who must deal with this problem. Whether people choose to disregard the statistics, there is no doubt going to be a huge shortage of teachers in the immediate future. The only way to avoid this is to attract and keep more qualified teachers than the present system allows. Education