I recommend THE BLACK COLLEGIAN, as well as its electronic version, THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online, to all my students, undergraduate and graduate, minority and majority alike, because of its real world approach to careers and self-development. It takes a practical, no-nonsense, tough love approach to career preparation for collegians, one which the following perceptions, I hope, reinforce. Though these perceptions are offered mainly to undergraduate education majors, they may resonate with non-majors and with general readers as well. They too should consider careers in education, for it is never too late to consider a career in education. In fact, state teacher-certification authorities, recognizing the need for and interest in bringing into classrooms highly motivated, talented, and experienced professionals, who did not major in education, have begun to make careers in teaching much easier for such professionals through alternative teacher certification programs. But first, a word about job opportunities in education followed by some practical advice on the self-development these opportunities require.  

Job Opportunities in Education: the Good News 

Employers hiring Class of 1998 graduates expect a six percent increase in job opportunities this year over last. For more details, see Educational Services in The Job Outlook for the Class of 1998 in this issue of THE BLACK COLLEGIAN. Education is one of a handful of economic sectors that will account for most of that increase. Between now and 2005, three industries (education, health and business services) will provide nearly half the total growth in wage and salary jobs. One out of every eight new positions will be education-related. For education majors and prospective career changers, that's the good news. 

American education is beginning to experience what David Haselkorn, president of Recruiting New Teachers, Inc., calls the demographic double whammy of rising student enrollments ~ accelerating teacher retirements. In Projections of Education Statistics to 2007, the National Center for Education Statistics predicts that rising enrollments, combined with increased education revenue from state sources and lower pupil-teacher ratios, will create the need for 350,000 new teaching positions between now and 2007. 

That 350,000 seems to be a pretty safe minimum. To it add the two million teachers Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley and the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future think will be needed in the next decade to replace an aging teaching force (one-third of the U.S. teacher corps has been teaching 20 years or more). We would then be looking at 2.3 million new job openings in the next ten years, a most promising prospect for those pursuing teaching careers. Let's take a closer look at some of the piece parts of these projections. 

The baby boomlet or the baby-boom echo is what demographers call the 20-year rise in births that started in the mid-1970s. Recently, many of these births have been by older parents who deferred marriage and child-bearing until their thirties and beyond. As Caroline Hendrie notes in Knocking at the Doors, after bottoming out at 3.1 million in 1973, births in the United States rose to four million by 1989 and hovered above that level for five years. The only other time in U.S. history that annual births exceeded that benchmark was from 1954 to 1964, a boom that triggered an explosion in school construction and teacher hiring through the 1960s and early '70s. Immigration, too, is fueling growth, as many districts, notably in California, New York, Texas, and in large inland cities like Chicago, cope with a steady stream of families from abroad. To accommodate this enrollment surge, says the National Center for Education Statistics; the nation will need 6,600 more schools over the next decade. 

Graduate School, the Not-So-Good News? 

In education, it's easy to find oneself in the right church but in the wrong pew, that is, to have teaching skills that don't match up with job openings. Today, entry into the profession in many cases and advancement in most require college work beyond the bachelor's degree (48 percent of all teachers, pre-K to 12th grade have advanced degrees, as do 79 percent of education administrators). In planning your teaching career, you will want to note carefully the following demographic indicators that determine what skills employers will be looking for. Simply put, job opportunities track these demographics.  

Areas of Growth 

Between 1995 and 2007, total elementary and secondary school enrollment, public and private, will increase seven percent to 54.3 million students. But for elementary and secondary schools this growth will be uneven. K-8 enrollment will grow three percent to 38.0 million, compared with grades 9-12 enrollment, which will soar 19 percent to 16.3 million. Since most of this growth will be in the middle and upper grades, rather than in the primary years, prospective teachers will want to be familiar with growth projections in the regions where they would like to find work. 

Where will this enrollment growth occur? Broadly speaking, the greatest increases will be in the Western and Southern regions, where public school enrollment, for example. will rise 17 percent and nine percent, respectively. For the Northeastern region, on the other hand, growth will be about three percent, while a one- percent decrease from 1995 levels is expected in the Midwest. (Detailed projections can usually be obtained from the individual states, most of which list their education departments on the Internet.) 

By region, the three leading enrollment-growth states and their percent increases are California (22 percent), Arizona (20 percent) and Nevada (20 percent) in the West; Texas (15 percent), Georgia (16 percent), and North Carolina (13 percent) in the South; Maine (eight percent), New Jersey (seven percent), and Massachusetts (six percent) in the Northeast, and Indiana (five percent), Illinois (four percent), and Missouri (one percent) in the Midwest. A word of caution: Since these are growth-rate percentages, job seekers will want to size up the actual number of job openings as well, not just regional and state growth rates. 

No doubt the most graphic illustration of how enrollment drives teaching jobs is the fact that 210,000 new teaching jobs, six out of every 10 of the 350,000 new jobs between now and 2007, will be at the secondary school level. Here the driver is the 19 percent surge anticipated in high school enrollment mentioned above. Even though elementary teachers will comprise the same percentage of the teacher corps in 2007 that they do now, roughly 60 percent, only 40 percent of the new jobs, not 60 percent, will go to elementary teachers - a point worth considering when picking a master's concentration within education. 

High school teachers, then, will be in higher demand than elementary teachers. With that caution in mind, though, I should note that the growth rate of new teacher jobs in elementary education (eight percent) would far out pace the growth rate of elementary enrollment (three percent). 

As for teacher salaries and job satisfaction, the outlook is positive. Salaries are projected to increase four percent in constant (inflation adjusted) dollars between 1995 and 2007, reflecting an anticipated 18 percent constant dollar boost in per-pupil expenditures. In constant dollars, the Center for Education Statistics reports, the average public school teacher's annual salary has recovered from the decline of the 1970s. 

Salaries for Teachers 

Nationally, says the American Federation of Teachers, the average K-12 teacher's salary in 1995-96 was $37,643 (high: Connecticut, $50,938; low: South Dakota, $26,369). The average beginning teacher's salary (BA degree) was $24,507 (high: Alaska, $34,800; low: North Dakota, $18,225). 

Profile of the Profession 

In America's Teachers: Profile of a Profession, 1993-94, the Center for Education Statistics observes, based on a number of measures of teacher satisfaction, teachers were more satisfied with their work in 1993-94 than they had been in 1987-88. For example, whereas about one-third of 1987-88 teachers reported that they would certainly be willing to become teachers again, 40 percent of 1993-94 teachers reported so.  

Among policy analysts, opinion is divided as to whether the looming teacher shortage is a real crisis, manufactured one, or simply a workforce situation manageable by smarter government approaches. As Dr. Chester Finn, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, muses in Education Week, other than yesterday's birthrate, governors and legislators are the main shapers of today's demand for teachers. They're also the people who make the rules for who can teach, thus profoundly shaping the supply as well. Through their potent influence on both the demand for and the supply of teachers, policymakers could eradicate all threat of teacher shortages in the years ahead. But, that means breaking some crockery in the education shop: recognizing that ever-smaller class sizes are a costly and ineffectual recipe for improved student performance, unlocking more classroom doors to unconventionally prepared people, allowing for more charter schools and other attractive education workplaces, and cracking the education monopoly. Dr. Finn and his colleagues, however, do not deny Education Secretary Riley's contention that we may indeed find ourselves replacing up to two million teachers in the next ten years, an auspicious forecast for students planning teaching careers. 

Practical Advice on Self-Development 

I have seen education up close for 16 years, from the external perspective of manager of College Relations for the former Illinois Bell, and now from the internal perspective of a senior lecturer at two universities. I am concerned that many educators and aspiring teachers appear to be underinformed (not uninformed) about their own profession. In an age professing to value inclusiveness, to celebrate diversity, and to hear all the voices, I find some teachers unaware of the breadth of divergent viewpoints on current education issues, be they political or pedagogical issues. Especially worrisome is what appears to be a self-imposed isolation from the education perspectives of the American public in general and the business community in particular. To clarify this remark, let me cite two recent studies by the nonpartisan public-opinion research and education organization Public Agenda. In Different Drummers: How Teachers of Teachers View Public Education, Public Agenda reports that nearly 80 percent of education professors think that the public's approach toward learning is outmoded and mistaken. Contrary to concerns that typical Americans voiced in earlier Public Agenda polls, few education professors (only 37 percent) think that maintaining discipline and order in the classroom is an absolutely essential value for prospective teachers. Nineteen percent think that stressing grammar as well as correct spelling and punctuation are essential values, and only 12 percent think that expecting students to be on time and polite are absolutely essential values for prospective teachers. 

Sixty-four percent of education professors think that schools should avoid academic competition. Fifty percent support giving students involved in team projects group, rather than individual, grades. Says Deborah Wadsworth, Public Agenda executive director, The disconnect between what the professors want and what most parents, teachers, business leaders and students say they need is often staggering. Their prescriptions for the public schools may appear to many Americans to be a type of rarified blindness, given the public's concerns about school safety and discipline, and whether high school graduates have even basic skills. In their self-development plans, education professionals will want to assure themselves that they are hearing all voices, including stakeholders at the end of the education pipeline, voices of consumers such as the employer community. Educators need to know about another disquieting Public Agenda opinion survey presented in Getting By: What American Teenagers Really Think About Their Schools. Half of teens in public schools today, says Executive Director Wadsworth, told us their schools fail to challenge them to do their best. Students across the country spoke out about how little work they do to earn acceptable grades and, consequently, how boring and meaningless their classes are. Central to their learning, students repeatedly told us, are their classroom teachers. The students seem to be crying out for the adults in their lives to take a stand and inspire them to do more.  

Getting By notes that minority youngsters, African-American teens particularly, are more likely to consider lack of order and discipline, along with poor teaching, as serious problems in their school environments. And contrary to some conventional wisdom, Public Agenda observes, minority youngsters are less dismissive of traditional academic coursework than their white counterpoints. In fact, African-American teens are more likely than white students to say that subjects such as history, science, and math are important to learn. Minority teens, both African-American and Hispanic, are more likely than white students to consider a strong academic background as the chief component of future career success.  

From my experience as a teacher of teachers, stakeholder surveys like these (there are countless others) are not getting the full attention they deserve. To the extent that they are overlooked, to that extent the education professional is underinformed is depriving him or her of that inclusive range of viewpoints needed for an impartial evaluation of education policies and programs. 

For Education Majors Who Surf the Net 

For those of you Internet surfing, I've bookmarked a long list of mainstream and alternative voices in American education reform. One website I strongly recommend, particularly to anyone working on a self-development plan in education, is the Education Excellence Network, a project of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. There you'll find links to over sixty organizations, to fifteen think tanks, to just about every federal and state education department, and to nearly 20 print and electronic publications. This site may leave you overwhelmed, but never underinformed. Another must bookmark site is Education Week on the Web, chronicling the American public-education establishment in all its size, scope and political complexity. 

Prospectus  

Let me close with some sobering observations from Student Performance Today, a new Brookings Institution report by Dr. Diane Ravitch: The education reform movement that began in the early 1980s must be graded incomplete. Many states increased graduation requirements and raised standards. Enrollments rose in mathematics and science. Despite some improvements, however, academic performance has been mainly flat over the past 25 years and the performance gaps between racial groups remain large. The quest for higher student performance is likely to be stymied by the large proportion of poorly prepared teachers.  

Thirty-six percent of public school teachers have neither an undergraduate major nor a minor in their main teaching field. Among social studies teachers, 59 percent are teaching subjects they have not studied. In science, math, and English, the percentages of unqualified teachers are 40, 34, and 25 percent, respectively. Sad to say, this problem is most acute in schools enrolling more than 40 percent of their students from low-income families. Forty-seven percent of teachers in such schools are teaching outside the fields for which they prepared. 

For those of you who will be entering the teaching profession, it should be clear from these grim statistics that your self-development plans will need sharp focusing to ensure you are developing teaching skills in subject areas that are in demand. With its reach broadened to include not only college students, but career professionals as well, THE BLACK COLLEGIAN and THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online should be valuable planning resources as you chart your professional destiny. 

Additional Information 

Alternative Teacher Certification: A State-by-State Analysis 1997 describes in detail the programs each state offers to persons who already have at least a bachelor's degree and are seeking to become licensed to teach. It is a roadmap to what is going on in each of the states regarding alternative teacher certification. It includes contact people with addresses and phone numbers for each state.