Two Million New Teachers Needed in the Next 10 Years! Or Is It the Last 10 Years?

Communiqué for the Week of November 12, 2007: To subscribe to the e-mail version, simply send a request to EducationIntel@aol.com. It's all handled by human beings, not e-mail autobots, so plain English works fine! 1) Two Million New Teachers Needed in the Next 10 Years! Or Is It the Last 10 Years? NEA Executive Director John Wilson visited South Dakota last week, prompting a local newspaper story with the lede, "The head of the National Education Association says the nation is facing an unprecedented teacher shortage, with as many as two million new teachers needed within the next decade." Wilson, naturally, believes it is time for Americans to "step up to the plate and invest in education." But it's hard to take Wilson seriously if he really believes the situation is unprecedented, since NEA has been making the "two million new teachers in 10 years" claim for, well, almost 10 years. Exhibit A is this September 20, 1998 op-ed from NEA President Bob Chase, who foresees a calamity as "a tidal wave of teacher retirements creates a need for two million new teachers over the next decade." As you might expect, what constitutes a "new teacher" does not lend itself so neatly to such sound-bites, since a teacher who transfers from District A to District B is a "new teacher" for District B. Nevertheless, researchers recognize the importance of properly defining terms, and reports such as this one, excerpted in Education Statistics Quarterly, examine all the angles. I deliberately chose it because it was written by William J. Hussar in 1999, and it is titled "Predicting the Need for Newly Hired Teachers in the United States to 2008-09." Accounting for a number of variables, Hussar concluded that America would need between 1.7 million and 2.7 million new teachers by 2008-09. He expected about 75,000 teachers per year to retire. Now if the National Center for Education Statistics will provide me with a substantial grant, I'll be more than happy to compare Hussar's 1999 predictions of newly hired teachers with the actual numbers. However, I don't think it's necessary. Because one of two things must have happened: a) the projections were off, and so Wilson's for the next 10 years are probably also off; or b) they were correct, and somehow the United States managed to hire the required number of teachers. Indeed, it appears we did better than that, since by NEA's own accounting we have 500,000 more K-12 teachers than we had 10 years ago.