Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Someone once asked baseball great Yogi Berra why he no longer went to Ruggeri’s, a St. Louis restaurant. He replied: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

The same reasoning is on display in the California public school system, where the state Department of Education, the California Teachers Association, and the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning continue to promote the notion of a “continuing” or “impending” teacher shortage.

CFTL is the Chicken Little of teacher shortages, and has been for many years. With thousands of teachers being laid off in the state, it’s getting harder and harder for the organization’s analysts to make that case. But they haven’t stopped trying, despite their own data showing a marked improvement in teacher qualifications and the undeniable evidence of few new teachers being able to find jobs, except in math and science.

Just like Yogi, CFTL president and executive director Margaret Gaston is afraid no one will enter teaching because it’s too crowded. “What we’re concerned about is when California begins to lift out of this economic crisis, is California going to have an adequate pool of teachers from which schools and districts can choose?” she said.

Gaston and the other California teacher shortage alarmists refuse to accept responsibility for their rhetoric. Because of seniority provisions in collective bargaining agreements, the teachers being laid off are the same ones who answered the clarion call for new teachers to fill the previous “shortage.” In the unlikely event that California ever finds itself without teachers to fill its classrooms, CDE, CTA and CFTL will have no one but themselves to blame.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 11:18 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.