Fix for teacher shortage is ... a 5-year study?

Astate legislator apparently doesn’t see what Arizona’s teachers have to complain about. They’re paid as well as teachers in Japan and South Korea, after all, and you don’t hear them complaining over in Asia. Faced with a dramatic teacher exodus, Rep. Mark Finchem, R-Oro Valley, is proposing … a study.

Specifically, a five-year study to determine why teachers are bolting Arizona’s classrooms in record numbers.

It seems Finchem isn’t convinced that Arizona’s bottom-of-the-barrel pay scale is a motive to quit. He’s not convinced teachers are leaving just because median pay is now 11 to 14 percent less than it was in 2001 when the cost of living is taken into account.

“We constantly hear that teachers leave because they are not paid enough, we cannot retain teachers because we don’t pay enough, but nobody has empirical data to act as proof that this is the case,” he wrote in an email to legislators this week. “I recently learned that teachers in highly productive and highly regarded teaching environments like Japan and S. Korea are paid about as much as teachers in Arizona.”

And, hey, our teachers are probably paid better than their counterparts in places like Syria and Somalia.

Finchem has a solution to the crisis that has left Arizona’s principals scrambling to find and hang onto quality people. He wants to conduct a Great Place to Work employee survey, used in the private sector to measure company culture. This week, he invited legislators to his teleconference with a vendor to talk about having educators participate in a “GPTW 5-year Project.”

“I would love to be in the camp that has proof, much more than in the camp that does not have a clue as to what really matters,” he wrote. “Why 5-years? It takes that long to verify that the actions we take in the future improve the system.”

Speaking of not having a clue, Finchem must have missed the recent study by the Morrison Institute. The one titled “Finding & Keeping Educators for Arizona’s Classrooms,” which examined state and federal data and surveyed teachers throughout Arizona. The one that concluded teachers are leaving the profession due to low pay and a belief that they aren’t supported. The one that found: » 22 percent of Arizona teachers hired between 2013 and 2015 quit after one year in a public-school classroom.

» 42 percent of teachers hired in 2013 were gone by 2016.

» 74 percent of schools are short on teachers.

» Arizona ranks 50th in the nation in pay for elementary-school teachers and 48th for high-school teachers.

“When we undervalue our educators, we undereducate our children,” concluded Steve Seleznow of the Arizona Community Foundation, which helped fund the study. “If we value the education our children receive, we must provide teachers compensation commensurate with those values.”

Or ... we can do a five-year study and hope there’s someone left to survey when our classrooms become ghost towns.