Public Schools: 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."