Exclusive: Job Search Companies Partner With Biden Administration To Help Fill Teacher Shortages

Joe Biden’s administration will partner with several major job search companies to try to address teacher shortages that have plagued many of the country’s school districts. Moves aim to increase the profession over time, which is currently under threat.

According to a White House memo only distributed to USA Today, the companies will devise ways schools and universities can recruit and hire teachers and for work hopefuls with teaching positions to explore.

ZipRecruiter is launching an online job portal specifically for K-12 schools. Indeed will be holding virtual hiring fairs for educators and other staff across the country.

And Handshake, which helps college students find jobs, is creating new methods for sharing job openings with undergraduate students in education, including a virtual event in October for college students interested in the field of education.

The shortage of talents in the education sector is known as a national emergency that could contribute to the inability of the coming generation of Americans to succeed in our students, said Ian Siegel, CEO of ZipRecruiter.

This will require an “all hands on deck” effort. Our nation’s youths are depending on us, and all of us need to rise to the challenge.

First lady Jill Biden, a longtime college professor, is expected to host an event at the White House Wednesday on the teacher shortage to announce a partnership with various officials.

She will be joined by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, other administration officials, governors, and executives from Recruiter, Handshake, and Indeed.

Education and Labor departments will work together to initiate educators and local government officials in a letter next week encouraging the use of funds provided in the American Rescue Plan, the bill for which was passed in 2021, to enhance teacher salaries.

The Federal Government allocated $130 billion to schools tied to the Rescue Act, and state and local governments also received an additional .350 billion in direct funding.

The U.S. Labor Department said it was allocating $100 million toward a new round of apprenticeship grants to the education sector.

The White House is also taking initiatives to strengthen the pipeline into teaching through partnerships between states and the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the country’s two largest teacher’s unions.

Instruction programs designed to broaden nontraditional opportunities in the profession draw significant interest among prospective educators of color.

AFT President Randi Weingarten pointed to Houston; Nashua, New Hampshire; and New Mexico as places where teacher pay and residency expansion have increased teacher numbers and helped alleviate teacher shortages.

Earlier this week, these curricula ought to be the rule rather than the exception, she asserted. Educators merely need the tools, trust, conditions, and compensation to do their jobs and stay in their jobs.

It is not possible to identify the status of teacher vacancies in real time; comprehensive data sets can’t be found.

Schools have significantly grown their enrollments of social workers, counselors, and nurses, as examples.

Many of these job vacancies have stemmed from problems prior to the pandemic and disproportionately affected areas of high minority student populations or children living in poverty.

Meanwhile, another study identified persistent and extremely widespread shortages of nonteaching personnel, such as bus drivers and custodians.

Cardona said a “teacher respect issue” in a Meet the Press interview Sunday was the cause that their teacher shortage.

He said that graduates of teacher training programs earn about 33 percent more than the average special education teacher and that teachers have noticed a $29 hourly wage increase after inflation over the last 25 years.

The primary focus must be on removing barriers that often come in the way of people of color and low-income individuals from pursuing careers as teachers.

One of the major challenges for boys to enter full-time teacher preparation programs is the cost of tuition.

Finding alternative pathways, such as residency programs, that can allow participants to earn income when they train for their careers is typical.

Actually, the same experts agree that teachers who remain in the training course should receive equal consideration as those who leave.

Meanwhile, the proportion of educators who declare high-intensity demands on their job to be worth it has been steadily decreasing since the start of the pandemic. Read more articles on rozyjos

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