DeSantis exacerbates teacher shortage

I’m guessing journalists won’t be included in the next batch of workers Ron DeSantis musters to remedy Florida’s teacher shortage.

We’re too woke for his Brave New Florida, although newspaper editors and the occasional reporter have a passable grasp of English grammar. The Florida Department of Education reports an urgent need for English teachers.

Too bad. I’ve long harbored a sadistic desire to force the lost art of sentence diagramming on modern-day kids. But old scribblers aren’t welcome.

Other categories of workers, however, will be added to the new state program that issues five-year teaching certificates to military veterans. Retired cops, fire fighters and paramedics may not be the ideal explainers of AP calculus, comparative literature, probability statistics or kinetic theory, but Gov. DeSantis also envisions them as schoolhouse guardians against leftie indoctrination.

DeSantis promises to sweeten the deal with

$4,000 signing bonuses, with another $1,000 for first responders who can teach courses in critical need of qualified teachers.

There’s no denying the crisis. The DOE’s Critical Shortage Areas Report, released earlier this month, warned that Florida entered this new school year down more than

9,000 teachers qualified to teach courses like English, math and science.

The FEA estimated that more than 450,000 students attended state schools last term without “full-time, certified teachers in their classrooms.”

Aside from the lack of certified teachers for specific classes, the state’s public schools struggled through last year with more than

4,300 outright vacancies. Meanwhile, Florida’s teacher colleges crank out barely a third of the graduates needed to offset retirements and resignations.

The shortage is real. But military vets and retired first responders can’t fix it.

The vets, even those who left college with only half the credits needed for graduation, have been offered five-year teaching certificates, which could become permanent if they earn a bachelor’s degree in the interim.

Trouble is, vets and first responders will suffer the same stressors and mediocre pay endured by conventional teachers. Chances are, they’ll be gone before their temporary certificates expire. According to the FEA, “Even before the COVID pandemic, 40% of Florida’s new teachers left the classroom within their first five years in the profession.” (Well above the national average.)

Although Florida boosted starting pay for new teachers to $47,500 annually — 16th best in the nation — Florida’s overall average teacher pay is an abysmal, $51,166.59, which makes us 48th in the nation. Our new state motto: “Thank God for Mississippi.”

An Economic Policy Institute study of teacher pay released Tuesday found that American teachers in general earn 23.5% less than the average college graduate. It’s worse for Florida, where teachers are paid 29.1% less than the average college grad.

After their bonus money has been spent, some of it for classroom supplies, vets and first responders will begin to realize they’ve been suckered into jobs with low pay and less respect.

Teachers don’t expect to get rich, but nowadays lousy wages come with too many other aggravations. All those experts in the state legislature have devised mandates, prohibitions and test regimes that reduce professional educators to automatons.

Right-wing activists like Moms for Liberty have organized around the specious myth that teachers have been secretly indoctrinating children with critical race theory and convincing kids to switch genders. They’re waiting for that gotcha moment when they nab some teacher alluding to racial inequities or human sexuality.

It’s not just frothing vigilantes hounding teachers out of the profession. Florida’s governor has discovered a causal relationship between smearing public education and appearing on Fox News.

On Tuesday, in New Port Richey to announce the first responder initiative, DeSantis veered into an ad hominem attack on teacher colleges as woke-infested “magnets of ideology.” He said schools of education (72 Florida colleges and universities offer teacher degrees) were turning students into “cogs in some indoctrination machine.”

He said his administration “battled a lot of ideologies in the classroom.” He promised Florida would not be consumed by “some type of woke dumpster fire.”

His rhetorical excess excites his base, but it won’t encourage teachers, many of them grads of “magnets of ideology,” to stick around.

DeSantis also said his plan will allow school districts to hire Americans rather than “go with a foreigner over somebody that’s from our community.”

A day later — such unfortunate timing — the Sun-Sentinel reported that the Broward School District had hired 102 certified teachers from the Philippines to fill crucial vacancies.

Uh-oh. Were the Broward hires a logistical necessity or a commie woke dumpster fire? The governor won’t be pleased.