Linda Lyon, recent President of the Arizona SchoolBoards Association, describes the low funding and legislative hostility that has created a teacher shortage in Arizona. The legislature’s answer to the teacher shortage: lower standards to fill empty classroom.
Pay is not the only reason teachers are fleeing classrooms. They also cite inadequate public respect and increased accountability without appropriate support. In Arizona specifically, contributing factors include 25% of our certified teachers being retirement eligible, a grading system for schools that still relies heavily on standardized tests, a GOP-led Legislature that is very pro-school choice if not openly hostile to public district education and their teachers, and the lack of respect for the teaching profession demonstrated by the dumbing down of teacher qualification requirements.
Arizona began this dumbing down in 2017. According to AZCentral.com, since the 2015–2016 school year, “nearly 7,200 teaching certificates have been issued to teachers who aren’t fully trained to lead a classroom. In just three years, the number of Arizona teaching certificates that allow someone to teach full-time without completing formal training has increased by more than 400 percent according to state Department of Education data analyzed by The Arizona Republic. For the 2017–18 school year, that added up to 3,286 certificates issued to untrained teachers and by 47 days into the 2018–2019 school year, 1,404 certificates had been issued to untrained teachers while 3,141 were issue standard certificates.”
That last 1,404 certificates issued for the current school year is probably the most instructive, because this is after the 10 percent raises for teachers the #RedforEd movement garnered in 2018. So, less than one-third of the way into the school year, the state has issued almost half as many certificates to untrained teachers as the entire previous year. In other words, despite the 10% pay increase, Arizona districts are having even more difficulty attracting professional teachers into their classrooms.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sadly, this is not surprising to me, and it is not restricted to Arizona. A few years ago, I left the classroom out of sheer exhaustion, and after a period of rest, I decided to help other teachers who were similarly exhausted and in need of making a career change. Since 2013, I have been assisting teachers to figure out what transferable skills they have that they can use in the business world or non-profit sector. On a macro level, I feel bad about helping people leave. We NEED good teachers.
On the other hand, a burned out, an unhappy teacher isn’t going to be good for kids. I have decided that life is too short to stay in a job that is no longer fulfilling or fun. The fun was sucked out of teaching a long time ago, and while it can be immensely fulfilling on occasion, those occasions come less and less often, I fear. This problem that has been identified in Arizona is a national crisis that no one is addressing except that they are letting anyone with a pulse teach, disregarding the training that good teachers need to be successful.
You hit the nail on the head: teaching used to be really FUN. Perhaps that’s the most devastating feeling for teachers, being forced to lose that aspect of the job.
Every time someone like Putin reads about what the Washington and state capitals’ elite are doing to America’s public schools, he must celebrate by going for a horseback ride without a shirt on because it makes him feel more virile. I wonder how many golden showers he has participated in.
The best way to destroy a country is to destroy its public education system and/or make sure that country never has a public education system that serves all of its children.
Once those accountable, transparent public schools are gone, the ranks of the uneducated will grow and they will become underpaid paid slaves/serfs without any power and the only lifestyle choices will be to live an honest suffering life in poverty or a dishonest life making money illegally, like Trump, until the elite’s legal system catches you and sends you to one of their dismal, for-profit prisons, not one of those country club prisons for the rare, very few elites that get caught that the public pays for, not the billionaires. Even when a millionaire/billionaire, like Trump, goes to one of the country club prisons, the working class pays for that too.
Do the wealthy pay for anything with money they actually earned by working like the 99% work?
I worked for a long time in the only profession that gets less respect than teaching–stay-at-home-mom. When the youngest of four reached school age, I went back to teaching part-time as a substitute for nine years. By the time I went full time as a paraprofessional in special ed, I knew the curriculum at the middle/jr high backwards and forwards. When I finally got my courage up to use my certification in special ed as a teacher, I got cancer. I worked through it and after three years of job sharing, the district let me go, I now suspect because I was a health liability since I had been promised the next full time opening. I don’t care how great your district is or was, just as in business the bottom line rules. Non- tenured teachers are particularly disposable. Respect? Give me a break!
Arizona is headed down the toilet.
A person would have to be crazy to move there.
My nephew and his wife and children just moved to Tucson, AZ. He is in the Air Force, and is stationed at Davis-Monthan AFB. His previous duty was as a recruiter in Connecticut.
He thinks Tucson is a paradise. He can ride his bicycle to work. Because he is military, his children are eligible for the ESA program. He and his wife, will be selecting the school of their choice, and their children will NOT be compelled to attend public schools.
Jonathan is not crazy.
What’s wrong with the public school?
I am not qualified to comment about the public schools in Tucson Arizona. Read my post carefully. I stated that my grandnephew and grandniece, will not be compelled to attend the public schools.
The public schools adjacent to the air base, may be fine and appropriate for their children. I honestly don’t know.
My nephew and his wife will be able to select the appropriate schools for their children. They may send one child to public school, and home-school the other.
The choice will be theirs, since he qualifies for the ESA.
Tucson is paradise if strip malls are your idea of Shangri La.
Charles, tell this alleged “sane” military friend/acquaintance of yours that Tuscon-area air quality is the worst in five years. SOME paradise that is unless he came from someplace worse.
The Arizona Daily Star published that story in June 2017.
https://tucson.com/news/local/tucson-area-air-quality-the-worst-in-five-years/article_ec43b2b5-e02b-57f7-8ec3-c5ec7a90bea7.html
This Jonathan you talk about MIGHT not be crazy, but he his probably IGNORANT about what is going on in the US to disrupt public education and cause endless chaos that supports wealth growth (greed at the top), racism, and segregation not only by race but by socioeconomic levels.
We do not know this un-crazy, stable Jonathan (your claim). Since almost half of enlisted troops in the military and 30-percent of officers support Trump (these ratios are more than two years old and might not be accurate now that Trump has attacked and insulted three successful and popular generals: Mattis, McChrystal, and Kelly), does this Jonathan support Trump?
@Lloyd. Nothing “alleged” about it. The individual is my nephew, he is an E-6 in the Air Force. He has just completed a tour as a recruiter in Connecticut.
He much prefers Tucson, over what he had to experience over the last two years.
Does your nephew support Trump?
I do not know his politics, and I do not care.
Then you do not know if your nephew is sane or not.
Are you sure the Republicans in Arizona have toilets? I thought they only had outhouses about a hundred foot walk behind their one room cabins.
They crap in their aquifer, which is Tucson s primary water supply — and which is being quickly diminished.
Like Tombstone, which is just a little ways south, Tucson is destined to eventually dry up and blow away like a tumbleweed on the desert winds.
If it is indeed paradise (those who know about it’s current meth and crime related epidemic might debate that), it is a short lived paradise.
Already on the Tombstone track sooner than later. Last summer a NYT mag article noted water-hoggers flock to AZ for complete lack of regs. Big tracts of Sulphur Springs valley (just 74 mis from Tucson & right over aquifer) have been sold to middle-Eastern ag exporters of water-hungry crops like almond trees. They came to AZ after exhausting 20,000-yr Middle Eastern aquifers in just 30 yrs. Folks who live nearby are reduced to buying water off trucks, sharing wash-water w/ nbrs, unable to sell off, leaving area bankrupt/ impoverished.
They tell ordinary people to conserve water (under threat of stiff fines), so there will be water for more development, which uses far more water (for golf courses, outside misting systems for restaurants and the like)
The irony is not lost on some of us who have lived in Tucson, where development is completely out of control.