A 'tsunami' of Boomer teacher retirements is on the horizon

[Are_grits_groceries]

More than half the nation's teachers are Baby Boomers ages 50 and older and eligible for retirement over the next decade, a report says today. It warns that a retirement "tsunami" could rob schools of valuable experience.

The report by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future calls for school administrators to take immediate action to lower attrition rates and establish programs that pass along valuable information from teaching veterans to new teachers.

"We face a tsunami in the shift of the future of the teachers' workforce," says Tom Carroll, president of the commission, who co-wrote the report. "Over the next five or six years, we could lose over a third of our teachers."

Co-author and director of strategic initiatives Elizabeth Foster agrees: "Whether this big retirement tsunami hits in the next two or three years, or whether the economy keeps them around for a little bit longer, it's coming."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-04-06-teachers-retiring_N.htm?csp=34
(Interactive map at site with state by state % of teachers over 50)

A change is gonna come. The hiring and training of new teachers to replace the boomers will affect education for decades.

[54anickel]

1. Funny how almost every other "industry" loves high attrition since they see boomers as dead weight,

old school, behind the times in skills - social as well as work related. They seem to want the "new" business degreed people.

[silverojo]

3. LOL, the boomers did just that to my parents' generation

Although every society seems to toss the elderly out when they're deemed "no longer useful", boomers came up with new and inventive ways to screen out older people, screwing them out of jobs. For instance, my mother was applying for a job at Prudential life insurance in 1987, and one of the things you had to know for your employment test was New Math. New Math, of course, began to be taught in the 1960's, meaning that all pre-boomer generations were immediately weeded out of the running. Nice method of age discrimination, dancing around the edges of illegality.

So why are boomers surprised that this is being done to them? Do boomers think they're the only generation that's ever gotten old? It's the same cycle that's been going on for millennia, yet when it happens to the boomers it's suddenly headline news. ALL older people have valuable skills to share, but boomers sure didn't care about that during their Yuppie stage, when people 50+ were still ready, willing, and able to work.

When will boomers stop thinking of themselves as boomers, and start thinking of themselves as human beings, as ordinary as the rest of us who are born, grow up, grow old, and eventually die? No matter how many of them were born during one time period, that doesn't make them any more special than people born before or after those years. We're all equal.

[bmbmd]

5. These teachers aren't forced out.

They choose to retire because they are eligible, and their retirement benefits are almost as good as there salary. One of the best reasons I know to teach.

[54anickel]

6. I don't believe that all boomers think that way, it's more of a corporate culture that, until

the recent globalization, has been unique to to US - Humans recognized simply as supplying labor, just another commodity cog in the wheel to maximize profitability.

[Possumpoint]

2. A Sluggish Economy

may redirect recent college graduates into teaching. Job openings otherwise seem to be scarce. Some or most may have to return to school to get the proper accreditation.

[KharmaTrain]

4. Also A New Generation Of Teachers On The Horizon

I have two children who are already teaching and several other relatives who've chosen this path in recent years just for the reasons this article cited. They may not get as rich as those who went on to become lawyers or accountants or doctors, but they both found jobs right out of school and are more interested in the job security. That's more than I can for my "field" that has totally imploded.

There are many great programs underway to recruit the next generation of teachers. The Golden Apple program has been real aggressive in encouraging young people to get into teaching and to support them through college.

The problem are with the "adults"...the administrators and politicians who continue to use schools as a political football...where teachers are stuck in poor conditions or with all sorts of unfunded mandates that take away from connecting with students and parents only to score points for some big wig or another.

[GreenPartyVoter]

7. This assumes that they can afford to retire. I think we will find that the case

of older teachers not retiring will continue to happen. We had so few teaching jobs in my state that a friend sent out something like 400 applications to get 3 interviews. There were people with teaching degrees working whatever job they could find because there were no positions open. My mother had a teacher's aide in her room that had a Master's Degree because that was the closest she could come to a job in her field of work.

Might be different in other parts of the country, of course. I can only speak to what I have observed around me and even then this information is a few years old now. Maybe things have changed when I wasn't looking.