Chapter 13 Notes

What Are Your Job Options in Education?

Teaching is a large occupation, representing 4 percent of the entire civilian work force in the United States. There are more than twice as many K-12 teachers as registered nurses and five times as many teachers as either lawyers or professor sin this country.

Certain job-hunting strategies will increase your chances of locating the right job for you. You may have to spend considerable time and energy preparing materials for your job search.

Licensure requirements differ from state to state for both general and specialized areas of teaching.

A wide variety of careers are available to people trained as teachers. If you are unable to secure a teaching position or wish to change careers after you have teaching experience, the skills you have acquired in teacher education can be transferred to related occupational areas.

No matter what the states of the job market at a particular moment, there has never been a surplus of good teachers. Better-prepared teachers will find it easier to find employment and will improve both the teaching profession and its public image.

  Many people believe there will be a shortage of teachers in the near future. Of course, estimates of shortages are based on rapidly changing situations that are influenced by unpredictable factors.

Obviously, when more students are enrolled in schools, more teachers are needed. The good news is that enrollments in public and private schools reached 55.6 million students in 2007 and are projected to increase to 58.1 million in 2015. In the United States, enrollments in secondary schools will increase by about 3 percent through 2015, while enrollments in elementary schools will increase by 7 percent over this same period. The number of classroom teachers is expected to increase almost 400,000 over the next decade, increasing from 3.6 million in 2007 to almost 4 million by 2015.

Rural America traditionally has encountered difficulty attracting and holding onto teachers because of lower salaries and a more sedate lifestyle than that sought by many young teachers. Not enough qualified teachers are willing to teach in urban and rural schools, particularly those serving low-income students or students of color. 

 There have been and continue to be chronic national teacher shortages in certain subjects, including speech pathology; special education (all areas); bilingual education; audiology; mathematics; science (physics, chemistry, earth and physical science, biology); and English as a second language. There is some surplus of teachers in elementary education, health and physical education, and social studies.

 Interestingly, there is a demand for male teachers at the elementary school level, where they account for less than 10 percent of the teaching force. The shortage of minority teachers deprives both White and minority students of positive role models. There are many alternative careers for people who are trained as teachers but who elect not to teach in schools.