EDITORIAL: Why we have a teacher shortage in Indiana

Not one of them now plans to be a teacher.

We thought about these four college students this week as we reported that North Knox teachers will not be receiving any type of increase in their compensation next year because of the financial straits in which the corporation now finds itself.

Why North Knox officials must find a way to cut some $600,000 from the district budget remains something of a mystery.

If, as state officials claim, the “money follows the child,” then the school corporation would have had to have an enrollment decline of around 100 students to see its funding cut by $600,000.

At North Knox, 100 students is more or less a whole grade level, and obviously no one there misplaced the third grade — although third-graders do often seem to want to go missing.

Darrel Bobe may now be 50 years old, but he'd have noticed that the whole third grade was missing, that's for sure.

Also this week that “Blue Ribbon Commission on the Recruitment and Retention of Excellent Educators” met for the first time, perhaps not ironically on the same day that Glenda Ritz, the state superintendent for public schools, announced that the number of new teachers had again declined, by 21 percent.

Our sense is that the scheduled date for the meeting and the timed release of the news had been coordinated for political advantage.

Ritz, the lone Democrat in Mike Pence's Republican administration, has already announced that she is seeking re-election next year after earlier flirting with a possible run for her party's gubernatorial nomination and a potential head-to-head electoral battle with the governor.

The “Blue Ribbon Commission,” with all 49 of its members, is going to have another meeting on Oct. 5 “to evaluate and rate teacher recruitment ideas,” according to The Associated Press.

Frankly, we don't see how 49 people, Blue Ribbon or not, can agree on where to eat lunch let alone why fewer Hoosiers want to be teachers.

And sometime after that another committee, this one formed by a pair of Republican lawmakers, will also meet to discuss the same topic, although we expect the emphasis of the discussion will be different.

We asked our four college seniors what caused them to change their career goals and, to our surprise, money was not their main determinant, although it did have some influence.

Money always has an influence.

Two of the four had planned to become English teachers; one is now a marketing major and the other plans to pursue a career in design.

A third, whose original goal was to become an elementary teacher, has switched to informatics (readers will have to look it up), while the fourth, whose ambition from grade school had been to become a teacher and coach, is taking an extra year to finish up a degree in sports science.

Each cooled on education as a career because teaching, at least as it's being regulated in Indiana, didn't leave much room for individuality, that now it was too regimented, too restrictive — one likened a teacher today to being a data-entry clerk — and they wanted careers that allowed them more freedom, more opportunity for individual expression.

We've noticed that desire in young people today, a kind of entrepreneurial spirit, if not exactly to make money but to make their own way without too much outside, bureaucratic interference.

Our hunch is that we're not going to attract more Hoosiers to pursue teaching careers until we stop treating education as a political rag doll stuffed with the latest in bogus theories about how to measure success.

The oddest thing, to us, about all this partisan criticism of Indiana's public educational system and the need to “reform” it, is that it's being led by products of that very system — and apparently, at least in their own eyes, they turned out all right.