May 29, 2002
There's a principle in business that gets a lot of play in these days of disposable workers: One way to get rid of people is to make the job undesirable.
This has worked in medicine, where efforts to rid medical facilities of registered nurses worked so well that not only are nurses quitting in droves, but few people want to enter the field.
A few years ago, the crisis in public education was figuring out how to get rid of teachers, not attract them. In Palm Beach County, teachers and school administrators were offered all sorts of incentives to retire, and new teachers were lured to the area, then laid off.
This had a rather serious impact on the number of people who wanted to be teachers, and I worked in the news business alongside people who had been teachers but decided that they'd rather work in the private sector, with adults, not in the schools.
Today, we're recruiting teachers from just about every country on the planet, and maybe we'll be recruiting from Mars and the planets around Alpha Centauri soon, to bring teachers to Florida. Those who condemn the lack of competition in education forget that we're competing to attract the best teachers not only with other states but with other career fields.
Even those politicians who condemn anyone who works in the public schools as an "edu-crat" whine in the next breath about where to go to find 30,000 new teachers to criticize, condemn and blame for all of society's problems.
In an economic downturn, it's easy and tempting to treat people like dirt and offer them poverty wages, expensive health benefits that cover very little and working conditions that are dangerous, while telling people they're lucky to have a job.
That's the future in the private sector that most business leaders and politicians dream of seeing, but there are the hidden costs of such policies in jobs that are not as desirable.
Even when you discount the lack of tangible rewards for teaching, having to hear and read the negative rhetoric emanating not only from Tallahassee but also from people who only know about the schools from what they read in the paper or see on the news and never from actually visiting a school has to be disheartening. No wonder people avoid teaching, and no wonder so few people want to be teachers.
Sure, there are incompetent teachers out there, and those who are in it for the money, but there also are incompetent business leaders and politicians out there who also are in it for the money and the power.
What many people need to learn is to respect teachers, especially those who stick with the profession and try their darndest, in an era of standardized testing, mealy-mouthed politicians and massive funding cuts, to give students some measure of an education, even when the whole rest of society is working against them.
That isn't a substitute for money, which teachers also deserve, but it's a start to making the profession respectable and desirable.
Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com.
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