“Teachers are in High Demand, Classes Start Soon!,” says one ad. “Get a teaching degree for a rewarding future,” says another.

Teachers – those that cause learning – are NOT in high demand. Warm bodies that can be manipulated by the system are in high demand. Don’t these same individuals know that more than 60% of new teachers never last 5 years?

Article after article, for at least the past ten years, has come out saying that American Education is bad and getting worse. The decline continues.

Schools are hiring anyone who has a bachelor’s degree (and even less in some places) to teach any subject. A man earned a degree in English, and became a physics teacher at one high school. Another man was trained for reading and became the teacher of physics in another high school. At yet a third school a man was hired to teach chemistry, but had never taken a chemistry course in his whole life.

Schools do hire those with years of experience and even PhD’s, but when they realize that these expert professionals know how to do their jobs and don’t need “help” from the administration, they are often “let go.” In one case, a man who taught math for 30 years, and had a nearly 100% success rate among his AP Calculus students on the annual exam, was booted without so much as a “thank you.” Another teacher with 3 years experience in geometry took his place. In another district, a PhD in his field was the only doctorate hired that year, and was the only PhD in his new school. In spite of excellent annual evaluations and vast years of teaching experience, he lasted 5 days and was sent packing. A district not far from there hired a PhD to teach chemistry, and yet, he was sent away before the first quarter ended; another teacher in low level math became the new chemistry teacher.

When I was going through school, I admired, respected, and looked up to my teachers. I sometimes didn’t like them at all, but they did have my attention and by golly, I did learn. Student’s didn’t dare “act up” or refuse to learn. Today if a teacher even looks cross eyed at a student, he is in danger of parents filing a lawsuit. Students today, for the most part, don’t admire or respect their teachers. In fact, they look down on them. When a “cool” teacher does come along that the students like, he ends up with a very short tenure. There are exceptions, of course, but too many of these kinds of events are happening now.

Most of those people who could be the same kind of quality teacher of yesteryear have left the field, or the never enter it. Thus, schools must lower their standards more and more. A local high school advertised in June for a new science teacher. As of mid-September, they still didn’t have one. We’re just past Thanksgiving and almost half an academic year has passed, and that high school is still without a science teacher. And all of this in spite of having standards so low that an orangutan could get hired.