Mass retirement of teachers will turn education on its head
The landscape of education is destined to change. With baby boomers reaching retirement age in mass numbers over the coming decade, the public education system will experience a tremendous shock to its system. In the past, the public education system has been able to trudge through with inefficient teacher recruitment and retention practices, awful pay, and an overall lack of political interest.
While young teacher attrition rates continue to climb and an unprecedented wave of retirement looms over us, our educational system has no choice but to file chapter 11 and restructure.
“Over 50 percent of the nation’s teachers and principals are Baby Boomers. During the next four years we could lose a third of our most accomplished educators to retirement. The wave of departures will peak during the 2010‐11 school year, when over one hundred thousand veteran teachers could leave. In less than a decade more than half of today’s teachers – 1.7 million – could be gone.”
- National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, April 2009 article
For new teachers, or those considering digging deeper into their profession as educators by earning a master’s degree in education, this upcoming shake-up in the world of public education may be a good thing.
We are currently barely hanging on with our antiquated teacher recruitment and retention practices. Most likely, what is holding our system together with some semblance of productivity is our older generation of teachers. The baby boomers are individuals who entered the profession when the name “Teacher” had the connotation of a proper, respectable profession. And with such a distinction combined with the idea that a teacher can have a significant, direct impact on the world, many highly capable individuals were entering the profession.
However, over the last twenty years as this distinction has wavered and plunged into obscurity, much fewer highly capable individuals have thought of teaching as an attractive career possibility. So, it looks like the coming few years could be rather bleak as a large percentage of teachers retire and take with them an even larger percentage of the industry’s true talent.
So, is there a bright side, you ask? Of course! With the reality of our current educational system finally catching up with us (similar to the absurd leveraging of debt that hurled us into our financial crisis), we are in the midst of reaping what we have sowed. It will be increasingly apparent that the work environment will need to change so that new teachers will have much better experiences and be enticed to stay in there chosen profession. Whether this change will occur with greater salaries, greater mentoring programs, more contemporary assessment practices, or perhaps new methods of management stolen from other, more productive industries, be assured, it will change.
With all this being said, you might ask yourself who would want to enter this profession?! Well, those who want to make a change in a child’s life would. When all is considered, now is certainly a much better time to consider entering the teaching profession than any time over the last 20 years. We are poised to make significant changes within public education, and at this point, any change will certainly have to be a positive one for those entering the profession. We have no other choice!
If you are interested in becoming a teacher, request information from schools offering teaching degree programs.