Practically everybody who was ever a child remembers some form of the old cliché, “Don’t go away mad — just go away.” That adage was once popular enough that heavy metal group Mötley Crüe manipulated it into a hit breakup song, with the title “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away).”
The phrase has become sort of axiomatic with California’s wannabe teachers. Because of the current state budget crises, teachers are fleeing the premises in droves and they’re justified in leaving pissed off.
As a result of billions of dollars being lopped from public education, the state sent out roughly 24,000 “pink slip” warnings in March that “teachers, librarians, nurses and others” should anticipate receiving walking papers soon, according to a recent Los Angeles Times article.
The article states, “New teachers hoping to find positions near their homes are being forced to seek work in other parts of California, across the United States, even overseas….”
One educational job clearinghouse, www.edjoin.org (cited in the Times report) lists that, of about 14,000 available vacant statewide positions, only 8,400 are for teaching positions.
That’s hardly a tasty worm on the fishhook to attract the approximately 25,000 idealistic, newly-credentialed teaching candidates into already understaffed, under-funded and under-nurtured classrooms — at least in California where educational jobs are evaporating faster than rainwater in the Mojave Desert.
Cal State Long Beach will credential more than 1,200 teachers this year. With nearly 700 educational graduates grabbing diplomas last week, it’s easy to see that if these new teachers want to walk into classrooms, they might have to settle for a long stroll up to a foreign chalkboard.
Like sharks following a blood trail, other states have started a feeding frenzy by running ad campaigns offering bonus packages and, more importantly, jobs to prospective teachers.
One Texas school district, touting its “more affordable cost of living,” has billboards in San Diego that read “Your Future is in Our Classroom.” The system is promising $44,500 starting salaries, $3,000 signing bonuses and stipends for teachers willing to abandon California, according to an earlier L.A. Times article.
Off-site competitors running newspaper ads and snapping up billboard space include Arizona, Virginia, Hawaii, Kansas and Nevada, to name but a few. They have been contacting teachers unions and sending recruiters to financially-strapped school districts with hard to refuse pie-in-the-sky allure.
All are hoping to suck teaching hopefuls out of the state’s inventory to stock their own shelves.
This bleak, transient trend for up and coming teachers has some college advisers encouraging students to grab opportunities elsewhere and hope that a slot will open up back in California when the state’s economy is righted.
The dreams of prospective teachers shouldn’t be so ambiguously or arbitrarily planned.
Others are being told to take the option of working as “long-term substitutes,” accepting assignments that offer no health insurance or benefits, and can be paid as low as $100-per-day.
That doesn’t seem like much of a socioeconomic inducement for years invested in pursuing one’s aspirations, either. In fact, it’s reprehensible that the state’s educational system will be forced to operate in a near vacuum.
The current 300,000-plus teacher head count will drop drastically during the next decade, with nearly one-third of the now-employed teachers expected to be lost through attrition and retirement.
The saddest part of this tragic template is that the ones who will be hit the hardest will be low-income and minority children.
Solutions to the budget crisis aren’t easy because the state’s leadership is fragmented and can’t seem to agree on, well, anything. Whether the long-term fix is through increasing sales tax or cutting corporate welfare, it’s apparent that if innovation isn’t used to mend the broken system, creativity and dedication to educating will be crammed into suitcases and shipped off of the property.
The childhood admonition was always meant as a snide comment to complacency. With the educational system in its current disarray, the future of our state may leave no other option than for teachers to go away mad.
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