Back to school with a catastrophic teacher shortage
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2022
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
Today on “Post Reports,” why school districts across the country are facing a critical teacher shortage this fall. Plus, we meet some of the covid “super-dodgers.”
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As back-to-school season gets into full swing, many schools across the United States are still scrambling to hire teachers.Education reporter Hannah Natanson has been speaking with educators and administrators about why we’ve run out of people who are willing to teach and what this will mean for students.
Then, meet the “super-dodgers” – the people who have never gotten covid-19. After an overwhelming response when she looked for sources, reporter Ellen McCarthy spoke to several people who have impressively avoided the coronavirus – or so they thought.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | As summer is winding down and schools around the country are set to reopen in the next |
| 0:07.3 | couple of weeks, school districts are facing a crisis. |
| 0:11.6 | They don't have enough teachers. |
| 0:16.1 | According to Education Reporter Hannah Newtonson, some districts are short hundreds or even |
| 0:21.0 | thousands of educators. |
| 0:23.1 | There's some rural districts in Texas that are actually switching to a four day school |
| 0:26.9 | week in an effort to compensate for lack of staff. |
| 0:31.6 | In Arizona, they're hiring college students to teach K through 12 and Florida passed |
| 0:36.9 | a law that would allow military veterans to teach in the state without certification. |
| 0:41.7 | They just have to have been in military service for some number of years and have maintained |
| 0:47.1 | a 2.5 GPA over I believe 60 course credits. |
| 0:50.8 | If you talk to teachers, they'll tell you that these teacher shortages are not new. |
| 0:55.3 | About four years ago is when we started to see that there were teacher vacancies starting |
| 1:02.5 | to happen and then COVID happened and exposed just exposed everything. |
| 1:10.1 | Hannah has been talking with teachers and administrators about why this country has run |
| 1:15.7 | out of people who are willing to teach right now and what this will mean for kids. |
| 1:24.8 | So what we're effectively seeing is that at a moment where American students really need |
| 1:31.4 | good schooling because they're still struggling to recover from pandemic induced gaps in social |
| 1:39.0 | and emotional and fundamentally academic learning that they would have gotten normally in |
| 1:44.4 | a normal year, we have the fewest teachers available that we've seen in a long while |
| 1:50.8 | and the consequences for students are going to be that they're not going to catch up |
| 1:56.0 | and in some cases they're going to slip further behind. |
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