Schools Struggling to Lure Teachers as Shortage Worsens

When Susan Knight decided to become a teacher, some people thought she was crazy.

Her friends, she said, were intellectual snobs about teaching and warned that she would spend all her classroom time disciplining people. Professors were no more encouraging, warning that she wouldn’t make any money.

But Knight, who will begin her professional teaching career in September at Glendale High School, ignored the discouraging comments, and school officials are happy that she did.

When she earns her master’s degree this month at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, Knight will enter a pool of new teachers who will have little trouble finding jobs in Southern California. After a decade-long glut, teachers are once again in short supply and educators say the problem will grow worse before it gets better.

Study Foresees Shortage

According to a recent Rand Corp. study, by 1988 there will be enough new teachers to satisfy only 80% of the country’s demand. State education officials say California will be hard-pressed to find the 110,000 new teachers they predict will be needed over the next decade and foresee shortages in several fields, particularly in math, science and bilingual education.

The short-term picture is not much brighter. The giant Los Angeles Unified School District needs 2,500 teachers by September, primarily to fill vacancies in its southeastern and south-central regions. Northeast Los Angeles schools will also be hard hit, officials said, and about 500 teaching jobs are available in the district’s G and H regions, both of which serve such communities as Silver Lake, Highland Park, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Glassell Park, Eagle Rock and Atwater.

Even districts not in trouble now say it’s only a matter of time before the shortage hits them.

Consequently, many districts are intensively recruiting teachers for the first time in years--and not all are having an easy time.

For example, the predominantly Latino Bassett School District in the San Gabriel Valley has signed on with a Sacramento-based computer matching service to find 15 to 20 bilingual and special education teachers, said Fay Mason, assistant to the superintendent. Bilingual instructors are a critical need, she said, because 60% of Bassett’s 10,000 students speak limited or no English. To cope with the shortage, the district on an emergency basis has been hiring teachers who lack full certification while they complete their training.

Special Pay Raised

While Glendale Unified School District officials say they do not expect the current shortage of teachers to have an immediate effect on their ability to fill most job openings, they too are using the Sacramento service in an effort to find bilingual teachers. And the district last year raised the extra monthly pay that teachers receive if they are certified as bilingual instructors from $40 to $50.

Only 23 teachers now hold certificates to teach bilingual classes, and the district is strongly encouraging other teachers within the district to train for the certificate, Duncan said.

“Hispanic, Vietnamese, Korean--we need them all,” said Ruth Wilson, the district personnel assistant who in recent months has attended job fairs at several local colleges to recruit teachers. “Teachers who can teach in those languages can literally write their own ticket,” she said.

Better Salaries

Glendale officials say they have been able to recruit new teachers regularly because the district offers higher salaries and more other enticements than some other districts. Nonetheless, officials are concerned.

“What’s happened at other districts hasn’t hit us, at least not yet,” said Charles Duncan, director of personnel for Glendale schools. “But there are dire predictions out there, and that’s not very encouraging.”

In Glendale, the school district has about 60 openings for next fall, with science and math teachers also in high demand.

The expected reinstatement of the sixth period for seventh- and eighth-grade students has also sent Glendale recruiters scrambling for qualified teachers. District officials estimated that they will need 10 more teachers in various subjects to fill the additional class time if the tentative budget is adopted.

So the district has increased its personal contact with administrators at colleges and universities that train teachers and is attending more job fairs at the schools, Duncan said.

Although the state Legislature has provided the funds to increase starting salaries in most districts to at least $18,000 a year, some districts are still handicapped in recruiting, either by low teacher wages or by the prospect of inner-city teaching.

Development Opportunities

Begining teachers in Glendale earn $19,084. And Glendale prides itself on offering schools relatively free of problems of the inner city.

Recruiters also stress the district’s solid academic reputation and staff development opportunities, a factor that lured Knight to Glendale after she heard of a UCLA writing program that is available to district teachers. She had received offers from Burbank and Pasadena, where she had been working as a student teacher, before she accepted Glendale’s offer.

“The benefits of teaching are less material to me,” said Knight, an English teacher who said she loves to write and welcomes the opportunity to sharpen her skills at UCLA. “I think it’s important for teachers to continually research their subject matter.”

Special Inducements

Glendale recruiters hired Knight after talking with her at a job fair earlier this year at California State University, Long Beach. Glendale officials have limited their recruiting to local colleges. But to find teachers, recruiters from several local districts are making the rounds of college campuses up and down the state, armed with new brochures extolling the virtues of their districts. Some are searching in other states and even in other countries.

Some districts are offering special inducements to attract recruits. For instance, most districts give transferring teachers a maximum of five years credit for previous experience, forcing teachers with more experience to take a salary cut if they want to be hired. Now the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Whittier Union High School District offer full credit for previous experience.

The reasons for the teacher shortage are complex. But a major factor is that, after a decade of declining enrollments, the elementary school rolls are beginning to swell again with the offspring of the baby-boom generation.

Reasons for Decline

However, the number of teachers graduating from schools of education has declined precipitously the past several years. A joint study of the Los Angeles County superintendent of schools and the California State University system found that teacher training programs in California and the rest of the nation are producing 50% fewer teachers now than in 1971.

Educators say the decline was partly a response to the teacher surpluses that characterized the 1970s. However, studies show that the profession lost many potential teachers to more lucrative occupations. In particular, academically talented women stopped flocking to teaching in the numbers they once did because of widening opportunities in other fields.

A check of education schools at seven major private and public colleges and universities in the Los Angeles area shows that about 1,200 new teachers are graduating this year--not nearly enough to satisfy local needs. Although most of those schools report increased enrollment in teacher-training programs for the first time in three years, observers say it will be some time before supply equals demand.

At the same time, retirements are beginning to take a toll. Many teachers who were hired after World War II--during the last shortage--are approaching retirement age.

Finally, ironically, the education reform movement of the last few years also is contributing to the shortfall. The state Legislature now requires all teacher candidates to pass a basic skills test. In 1983, the first year the test was administered, more than one-third failed; last year, about one-quarter failed.

District recruiters seem as worried about hanging on to teachers once they are hired as they are about finding enough of them. Teacher dropouts are another factor in the shortage, and many new teachers tend to leave the profession within the first four years on the job, said Bill Lawson, president of the Whittier School Employees Assn.

Other educators say that school districts need to step up efforts to encourage talented high school students to become teachers.

“That’s my next step,” said Rose B. Bard, assistant superintendent of the Alhambra City and High School District. “What I sense among students is a declining esteem for being a teacher. We’ve got to turn that around.”