How immigration reform could help alleviate teacher shortages.

• Author: Johnson, Kirk A.
• Position: Education

BEFORE EACH SCHOOL YEAR begins, there is a predictable barrage of news stories lamenting the lack of qualified public school teachers, especially in the hard-to-fill areas of math and science. The shortage of math and science teachers is not a new problem, and it is not localized in a handful of random areas. Indeed, this is a persistent issue that has been reported on an annual basis throughout the U.S. The issue has become more pressing in recent years because of the requirements for highly qualified teachers under the No Child Left Behind Act.

While some researchers have questioned whether the overall teacher shortage simply is a function of the "revolving door" (i.e., instructors simply changing jobs between teaching posts from one year to the next), growing evidence suggests that there is an actual shortage of math and science teachers to fill open positions. The National Research Council insists that the shortage is so daunting that individuals with Ph.D.s should be recruited into elementary and secondary classrooms to teach these technical subjects.

While there are a number of potential reasons for the shortage, one of the more plausible is economic: In the market for individuals with math and science skills, the teaching profession generally does not compensate as competitively as other fields. Even after adjusting for the additional time off for summer vacation, entry-level pay for technical math and science teachers can lag behind the entry-level compensation for technical disciplines in the private sector. An editorial in The Indianapolis Star put it bluntly: "A drug company chemist earning $60,000 a year would be reluctant to take a $32,000-a-year entry-level teaching job."

One strategy is to increase teaching compensation through incentive pay and thereby lure current math and science professionals away from business and industry. However, the union-based contracts found in many public school districts typically do not allow incentive pay. In fact, frustration with rigid teaching contracts prompted former IBM Chief Executive Officer Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., to write: "The heart of the problem is the arcane way we recruit and prepare teachers, along with the lockstep single salary schedule--which says a teacher equals a teacher equals a teacher, no matter how desperately society may need a certain skill set and no matter how well a teacher performs in the classroom. That's senseless, yet it's still the norm in the teaching...