Will Hawaii Have Enough Teachers?
Teachers union president Wil Okabe is concerned that relatively low teacher salaries in Hawaii will make it difficult to continue attracting new teachers from the mainland.
The state has a , which means the state needs to hire as many as 1,600 teachers per year.
The turnover rate for some analysts at the , because it could indicate a retention problem.
But two years ago the department saw a drop in turnover, from roughly 1,600 in 2007-2008 to a little more than 1,300 in the 2008-2009 school year. Data for last year will not be available until late summer.
The Hawaii Department of Education credits the decline to programs designed to provide support for new teachers, said communications director Sandy Goya. There is no problem recruiting teachers from the mainland, she said.
of the department’s 1,328 new hires for the 2008-2009 school year graduated from out-of-state colleges. The most recent estimates show that the University of Hawaii at Manoa College of Education graduates represent approximately 30 percent of the department’s new hires each year. Another 15 percent came from other in-state colleges.
The number of teacher students enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Education College has been on the rise for the last five years or so, said Christine Sorensen, dean of the college. Last year the college of education , ranging from bachelor’s degrees in education to Ph.D’s — .
Sorensen could not speak to the university’s ability to supply all the teachers the public school system may need in the future. Because of budget cuts, the college of education certainly is not growing right now, she said. In fact it’s struggling to maintain its current program size.
“Is there a big enough population or pool here to draw from for new teachers?” asked Sorensen rhetorically. “Can you recruit enough teachers from Hawaii alone? It’s going to be hard, especially for areas like math and science.”
Board of Education Chairman Garrett Toguchi said he thinks pay levels make it difficult to recruit good people locally, as well as nationally.
“One way to address this issue is by hiring locally: motivating and encouraging our students to pursue teaching as a career and enrolling in our local universities,” he said. “We know we have the talent here at home. For example, Hawaii’s 2009 Milken Educator, Lisa-Anne Tsuruda, earned her teaching credentials at UH-Manoa, as did Waianae Intermediate Vice Principal Bernadine Taaca, who was named Hawaii’s Top Vice Principal in March.
“Teachers should be able to make more money as determined by the market. A school looking for an excellent math teacher should be allowed to pay a premium (to compete) to an excellent math teacher, they should be allowed to offer signing incentives, performance incentives and periodic contracts (all on top of the union minimum). This is no different from the NFL or NBA, both of which have unions.”
It is possible the department’s turnover rate could be due to salaries that compete well locally but not nationally, said Michael Griffith, a financial analyst with the Education Commission of the States in Denver.
“Your salary could be competitive compared to the region, but not enough to bring in and keep people from the outside, or the mainland,” Griffith said. “So one question is, ‘are your salaries high enough to get a sufficient number of qualified applicants?’ Not just ‘are they fine for the region?’ but ‘are they sufficient to bring in talented people from the outside?'”
