It's a teacher's market for those in critical areas

Black Collegian, Oct 1994 by Glenn, Gwendolyn

For the past 24 years, Richard Wark has spent several months each year travelling to more than 100 colleges, universities, and job fairs around the country, recruiting teachers for schools in Georgia's DeKalb County. This year he's especially interested in finding math, science, special education (learning disabled/behaviorally disabled), and speech therapy majors. And even though DeKalb, a suburb of Atlanta, is offering beginner teachers $4,000 more than the national average of $23,000, he still finds many positions in critical areas hard to fill.

"It's war out there. Everyone's competing for the same individuals," Wark says.

Comments like that are music to the ears of many seeking jobs in education. However, landing that dream job depends on whether you fall within the critical categories Wark speaks of.

It is estimated that nationally there are between 150,000 and 200,000 job openings for teachers this year. The U.S. Labor Department is predicting a 1.5 percent growth rate annually in the field over the next 10 years.

DEMAND FOR TEACHERS OF COLOR

People of color, especially African Americans, are being aggressively recruited for these positions. According to figures from the National Education Association (NEA), only eight percent of the nation's 2.8 million public school teachers are African-American. Many of these teachers are employed in urban centers such as Chicago and New York, where minority enrollments are high. However, even in the inner cities, 65 percent of the teachers are White. According to Recruiting New Teachers (RNT) official Segun Eubanks, more than 40 percent of the school districts in this country are all White, in spite of the fact that student populations are becoming more diverse. What some find particularly disturbing is that 74 percent of African-American teachers have taught for 20 years or more. As they retire, they are not being replaced with other minorities.

Cheryl Felix Swinton, who has taught high school home economics at Burke High School, a predominantly African-American school in Charleston, South Carolina, is seeing the change evolve. "Just last year our faculty was 75 percent Black. Now it's dropped to less than 50 percent because many teachers retired and the new hirees are White. Only two Black teachers were hired out of about 25," Swinton says. Swinton believes it will be hard to attract minorities in large numbers to Charleston, where the salary for first-year teachers is only $20,000. Swinton, who now makes $37,000 as a career counselor for a Charleston magnate school, says, "Low salaries are why Black parents have over the years tried to dissuade us from going into teaching as other fields opened up. My mom, who was a teacher, didn't want me to teach because of the low pay."

Nationally, the average public school teacher's salary is slightly over $35,000, with ranges from $48,000 and $46,000 in Connecticut and Alaska to $24,000 to $26,000 in South Dakota, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Although they cannot offer higher salaries, some recruiters try to lure critical-need teachers with incentives such as free utilities, housing payments, and other discounts. African Americans definitely fall into the critical-need category and are being heavily recruited in communities all over the country, with African-American males being in the greatest demand, according to Dr. Nathaniel Jackson, senior program officer at the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) in Atlanta.

"Minorities who pass teacher certification are in high demand. Deans tell me they don't have minority students they cannot place, but they have to sometimes go to the jobs--and some don't want to leave home."

THE RELOCATION FACTOR

This conflict is one that Dr. Mary Dilworth, senior research director at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, also has observed. "I can't think of any community that wouldn't need African Americans...but many teachers want to go to schools [in communities] where they grew up and aren't willing to travel. For example, Washington state (where salaries average nearly $36,000)...has looked for African-American teachers through me, but the students aren't willing to go there," Dilworth says.

The relocation factor is stressed by many recruiters because a job seeker's degree may be in a field that is in demand only in certain areas. For example, Eubanks advises anyone planning to teach elementary education in the suburbs to rethink those goals because, according to the NEA, 59 percent of all teachers are in elementary education. "Elementary education nationally is saturated," Eubanks says.

According to Eubanks, African-American males are about the only educators in high demand in this area. However, there is a shortage of elementary education teachers in Alaska, one of the higher paying regions of the country with salaries averaging more than $46,000. Another example is the speech field. According to RNT, most school systems are well staffed in this area, with the extreme Northeastern area being an exception. Salaries there average from the mid-thirties in Vermont to the high forties in Connecticut.