It seems daily that we are hearing of more and more school districts laying off teachers. In a time when people are talking about major education reform, how in the world can we be getting rid of young teachers. In almost every major school district in the country, they have been talking about the drastic amounts of teachers that will be needed in the next 10 years. One teaching agency states that over 2 million teachers will be needed over the next 10 years. Where are these teachers going to come from?

Follow up:

In California alone they laid off over 30,000 teachers last month! The most concerning fact about the layoffs is the age of the majority of teachers that are being laid off. As this article states, younger teachers that are new to the profession are the teachers that are being laid off. Does this make sense? It seems to me that it would make more sense to lay off the teachers that are the not-so-good teachers regardless of age. As the article states, this is easier said than done because of the tenure laws. The tenure laws make it very difficult for school districts to lay off or fire bad teachers. Instead, the young teaching pool is being let go just because they do not have tenure. In my opinion this is heading towards disaster. It is going to make it more difficult to attract people to teaching when there is not any job security regardless of how good of a teacher you are. It is a scary situation when how long you have been teaching is the only factor that determines if you get to keep your job or not. These tenure laws have long been fought for by teacher's unions to protect teacher's, but how are they protecting teachers now? There needs to be some adjustments made that would allow for the best teacher's to be the ones that are keeping their jobs, not the ones that have been teaching the longest. I would encourage you to contact your local government officials and any of the teacher's unions and ask them to make some changes to the current laws that are getting rid of the future teaching stars of this country. If things don't change, the education system is heading towards disaster.