State needs 20,000 teachers

A population boom. The class size amendment. Education officials say they've done the math, and it adds up to more teachers.

©Associated Press
February 19, 2003

JACKSONVILLE -- Florida needs to hire 20,000 more teachers before August because of the class size amendment, a growing number of students, and teacher retirements and transfers, the state Board of Education heard Tuesday.

The number could be affected by how the Legislature deals with the class size amendment, but education officials think 5,000 to 7,000 new teachers will be needed to meet its requirement of reducing the average number of students by two in each classroom in the next school year.

On top of that, about 15,000 teachers will be needed just to handle Florida's growing population and replace teachers retiring or resigning, said Bill Edmonds, a spokesman for the Board of Education.

"Those are the challenges ahead of us. They are coming very quickly. Next August will be here before we know it," said Jim Horne, the state's education commissioner.

The board decided to hold a workshop within the month on the recruiting of a corps of new teachers. "It is a critical issue," Horne said.

Horne said the state's universities are producing about 4,000 teachers a year, and only about 3,500 of those stay in the state. "Clearly, there are not enough in the pipeline," he said.

Horne said it used to be easy to recruit teachers from other states, but now there is fierce competition for top-quality teachers.

"There is an interstate war trying to recruit people back and forth," he said. "It is going to become increasingly difficult to just go over state lines and recruit teachers."

One way Florida is trying to deal with the shortage is with a program called alternative certification. Under it, a person with a bachelor's degree can go through a certification process to allow him to teach that subject, Horne said.

T. Willard Fair of Miami, the board's vice chairman, said he thought the class size amendment was a bad law that needed to be repealed. Horne said he couldn't comment on that issue.

"I believe it is all about teaching and teachers. I hope we don't lose sight of this and get into costly compliance and not get anything for it," he said.

Horne said there will be pressure to lower standards for new teachers, which he said should be resisted.

"I don't think we have any interest in lowering quality when the research is really clear that the quality of teaching in the classroom makes the biggest difference in academic achievement. The last thing we want to do is to have Bubba in the portable classroom teaching our kids to simply meet class size," he said.

The board also approved a monitoring plan for students who are kept in third grade because they fail to meet reading standards. It also okayed guidelines for reviewing charter school appeals.

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