The Mississippi Legislature is taking aim at teacher pay raises this year, something lawmakers say is a first step in addressing the stateâs critical teacher shortage.
But even if educators do see a pay increase this year, there is a bigger issue in solving what is considered one of the biggest problems facing the state: no one knows the full scale of the crisis.
The Mississippi Department of Education does not track teacher vacancies, meaning state officials â lawmakers included â do not know how many unfilled teacher positions there are for individual districts or for the entire state.
In December 2019, Mississippi Today asked MDE how many teacher vacancies there were. A spokesperson said that MDE surveys for that information, but individual school districts arenât required to send it in.
COVID-19 upends classrooms and fewer people study to become teachers, but the Class of 2020 can’t wait to start MarketWatch 1/18/2021
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In early 2020, John Larson, the president of Oregon Education Association, the state’s teacher’s union, was preparing to head to Minneapolis for a national conference on what he and fellow teacher advocates were worried was becoming, as Larson put it, a “crisis:” Too few teachers to meet the needs of the nation’s schools.
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“We were going to meet and start talking about strategies for encouraging people to go into the teaching profession,” Larson said. Those tactics include fostering interest in teaching as a second career or creating an affordable path to a teaching license for professionals with an aptitude for teaching. “We have a lot of really talented instructional assistants in this state and oftentimes the only reason they’re not certified teachers is because they didn’t h
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