Pennsylvania teacher glut

Pennsylvania colleges and universities produce far too many teachers for available jobs each year, forcing thousands of young people to leave the state in search of work, according to The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Which begs the question, if there's such a glut of teachers, why are teachers in Pennsylvania paid so much money? The law of supply-and-demand is obviously not at play when it comes to personnel costs for school districts.

And why should anyone support Gov. Ed Rendell's plan to legalize video poker machines help college students pay for tuition when many of those graduates will end up leaving the state after they earn their degrees?

From the article by Craig Smith:

Thousands of graduates from Pennsylvania's 95 teaching colleges and universities every year must leave the state to find their first job. In fact, fewer than half of the state's 15,000 new teachers will find in-state jobs.

"Kids who want to go teach in their home district aren't being realistic. You have to spread your wings a little bit," said Jay Hertzog, dean of the College of Education at Slippery Rock University.

Salary and benefits are a big attraction for Pennsylvania teachers. They are reasons teachers tend to stay here, often working for 30 years or more before retiring.

The average teacher salary in Pennsylvania is about $54,000; Virginia's average teacher salary, for instance, is about $43,000, according to teacherportal.com, a Web site that tracks teacher salaries.

"It is a tough market in Pennsylvania. The market is just saturated," said Donna Skundrich, human resources manager for the Shaler Area School District.

Almost 124,000 teachers were employed in the state's 3,287 schools in the 2006-2007 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Education.

Read the full story at the newspaper's Web site.