Dr. Dobb's Journal December 2002
From the Department of Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining, hard times in high tech have been a boon to education, at least in California, which is suffering from a dearth of science and math teachers. The teacher shortage is so acute, in fact, that last year the state issued 2700 emergency permits for science teachers alone—that's about 20 percent of all the science teachers in the entire state. Furthermore, things don't appear to be any better down the road, with estimates pegging the state's need to hire approximately 25,000 new K-12 teachers per year for the next decade. This while state universities will only crank out 19,500 newly credentialed teachers per annum.
Throughout California, however, the job market continues to get its clock cleaned. For the past year, unemployment has hovered around 6 percent, up from about 4.7 percent two years ago. In real numbers, that translates into about 1 million lost jobs. Highly skilled, highly educated high-tech workers have been hit the hardest. San Jose, California's leading tech center with 280,842 jobs, lost 4961 high-tech jobs last year alone. San Francisco wasn't far behind with 2139 jobs down the tube, and Orange County with 1075. Earlier this year, more than 61,000 people in Santa Clara County (where San Jose resides), or 6.1 percent of the local work force, were looking for work.
In a classic case of killing two birds with one law, California made the Technology to Teacher Initiative a focal point of its Workplace Investment Act. Administered by the California Workforce Investment Board (http://www.calwia.org/) and based on the federal Workforce Investment Act of 1998, the Workforce Investment Board advises state government in planning, coordinating, and monitoring the provisions of the state's workforce development programs and services. More specifically, the board addresses issues involving tax incentives, education, technology and innovation, transportation, energy, and workforce development. The Technology to Teacher Initiative (http://www.tech2teacher.org/) falls under the auspices of workforce development and is a program designed to retrain and place laid-off high-tech professionals as math and science teachers. Funded by a miserly (at least compared to other state-funded programs) $1.6 million state grant, the program provides money for tuition, books, testing fees, and counseling for laid-off tech workers who want to get teaching certification.
The program was designed to accommodate up to 200 participants. Applicants for Technology to Teacher programs must have a four-year college degree, pass the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST), and provide proof of competency in their subject matter. Furthermore, participants must enroll in a university program leading to teacher credentials.
The $1.6 million grant was divvied up among five local workforce investment areas throughout the state—one agency in Southern California and four in Northern California. The largest grant—$536,000—was given to the North Valley Job Training Center in Sunnyvale (in the heart of Silicon Valley), which has been the area most affected by high-tech lay-offs and unemployment. To date, nearly all of the statewide slots have been filled.
Of course, getting good teachers is one thing, while keeping them is quite another. School officials have every right to be concerned that former tech workers might return to private-sector tech jobs paying at minimum $20,000 more per year. But then, retaining good teachers is a problem not limited to former high-tech workers. Nationwide, K-12 teacher turnover rates average about 13 percent a year, with some districts experiencing turnover rates as high as 30 percent. The reasons for the high turnover range from poor pay, classroom overcrowding, and decaying facilities, to low prestige and, at times, dangerous working conditions. The bottom line is that high teacher turnover is not only disruptive to the educational process, but unnecessarily expensive to taxpayers who must pay to train new teachers year in and year out. School districts can help themselves by addressing this issue before trying to attract replacements.
Clearly, California's Technology to Teachers program is a good first step that should be adopted nationwide—but it is only a first step. You could also argue that allocating only a piddly $1.6 million to such fundamental issues as unemployment and education is disingenuous. After all, California, with its $98 billion budget and $1.309 trillion gross product, has the sixth largest economy in the world. Nevertheless, California's Technology to Teacher initiative is better than nothing—which is what most school boards and states around the country are doing.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com