Job Opportunity

WANTED: College graduate. Must be willing to put up with extra year of bullcrap classes before starting job and incompetent, unprofessional bosses who micromanage your work and make you spend so much time proving you're doing your job that it's impossible for you to actually do your job. Compensation: $25,000 a year, including benefits.

Would YOU apply for that job? If you got the job, would you take it? If not, would it just be because of the pay figure, or would it be because the crap you'd have to put up with is just not worth the money?

So why is this any surprise to anyone? [emphasis added]

...Districts across the state saw an 11 percent turnover rate last year.

When surveyed about hiring new teachers, most school districts reported "some" or "extreme" difficulty, especially in math, science and special education.

That's partly because Utah's educator supply can't keep pace. State colleges and universities have produced flat or declining numbers of new teachers for years, despite recent legislation allowing alternative routes to licensing and the addition of four new colleges of education, Sperry reported.

And although an average of 79 percent of Utah education graduates take jobs in Utah schools, many leave within their first few years, the study suggested. Last year the state minted nearly 2,600 new teachers, but saw more than 1,000 teachers leave after fewer than five years on the job.

And why the hell does everyone but the Utah Foundation seem to think it's just about the money? Yeah, money's cool, but you'd have to pay me well into six figures for it to be worth it to have to deal with the kind of unintelligent seat-warmers they have nowadays in half the administrative posts. As I was pointing out to FH last night, these people knew what the compensation was when they signed up for the job, so the ones that are turned off by the low pay alone aren't the ones turning over, they're the ones not signing on in the first place. The ones turning over are the ones who discover the pay isn't worth the crap they have to put up with. (as well, of course, as the ones whose life circumstances change, but that could hardly account for all of them.)