Biden’s Secretary of Education Sounds Alarm on Teacher Shortage: ‘We’re At the Doorstep of a Crisis’
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona sounded the alarm on CNN this morning over a growing shortage of teachers nationwide.
On Tuesday’s New Day, Brianna Keilar introduced a montage of multiple teachers revealing their financial woes weighed against the increasing demands of the job in the last couple of years, mainly due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Are we at a crisis level here?” Keilar asked Cardona after the clip.
Cardona acknowledged the country is at the “doorstep of a crisis” and needs to take the teacher shortage seriously by offering more competitive salaries.
We’re at the doorstep of a crisis and if we don’t take it seriously, we’re going to be facing what we experienced during the Omicron spread where our teachers didn’t have Covid, but they had to quarantine and we had to keep our schools open. Look, across the country today, students are preparing, or are going into school for the first day. There’s so much promise, so much hope, and I’m excited about this school year, but we have to address this issue head on. We have to make sure our teachers are getting a competitive salary. Teachers make 20 percent less than college graduates in other professions.
Using Montana as an example, Cardona said the starting salary for a public school teacher there is $32,000.
“What are you going to do with that?” he said, adding that teachers working extra jobs to stay afloat is “unacceptable.”
According to the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, schools are facing 300,000 teacher and school staff vacancies as the school year is just beginning for most students.
Rebecca Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, has sounded direr than Cardona on the issue, saying it’s been a long time coming.
“We have been sounding the alarm for almost a decade and a half that we have a crisis in the number of students who are going into the teaching profession and the number of teachers who are leaving it,” Pringle told ABC.
Watch above via CNN
