Recruit good teachers by helping to pay their tuition

Last Friday afternoon I found a great hair stylist, although there is not much “stylin” about my hair. I figure I’m just lucky to have it at my age. Ingrid knew what she was doing, and even diplomatically trimmed the areas that drive middle aged men crazy — eyebrows, nose, ears, nostrils — you get the picture.

Between snips and snaps, Ingrid and I shared information about what we did. She started at age 17 at Kansas University — a little too young, it turns out. So after a year, she dropped out. Then she figured out that one way to make a living was as a hair stylist. I asked her what she would like to do if she could choose. Her response: be an algebra teacher. She was pretty good at math. But at age 31, she couldn’t really figure out a way to go back to school and pay for it. Besides, she wondered, would students take a teacher like her seriously?

I told her definitely yes. After all, who better to inspire students to learn math, especially girls, than a highly tattooed, somewhat pierced, Star Wars T-shirt wearing, smart and articulate, female high school teacher? So I encouraged her to think about how she could become a teacher. We need people like her teaching our kids. The big wave of baby-boom teachers is about to crash on the beachhead of retirement, while the K-12 school population continues to grow. And who are we as a society to deny someone a life-changing and socially important career, especially when they are going to be teaching for a good 25 years?

But when the rubber hits the road, the first thing standing in the way is the hard reality of education finances. (Looking down the road, another stop sign is that as a beginning teacher, even with a master’s degree, Ingrid would be earning just $39,000.) Ingrid needs three years of higher education to get her bachelor’s degree and another 15 months or so for her master’s in education. Starting with tuition, at $6,385 a year, we’re talking about more than $19,000 to get to her bachelor’s. She does OK with her hair business, so no financial aid for her. Then she needs five quarters to get her master’s. That’s over $15,000 for tuition. So to start with, Ingrid is looking at more than $34,000 in tuition. This doesn’t even count how she is going to pay living expenses those five-plus years — her rent, her food, her computer, her health care.

That’s the barrier standing in the way of middle class workers trying to better themselves and seek out a new career. Ingrid’s hair cutting chair is less than a mile from the University of Washington main campus, but it might as well be in Timbuktu.

We need more teachers, so how about we figure out a way to waive the tuition for people who commit themselves to gaining the academic credentials and then moving into public K-12 education? For every year teaching they would work off one year of tuition. Could we afford to provide this support for people who want to teach? The real question is: Can we afford not to provide incentives to bring more people into the teaching field? We need about 3,400 new teachers each year through 2012. In middle schools and high schools, demand for teachers will grow by 15 percent between 2004 and 2014. We already have a shortage of math teachers. It’s going to grow worse with the retirement of hundreds of math teachers in the coming years.

So coming back to Ingrid, do we want to encourage her to go back to school so she can teach? Of course. Will she, with a $34,000 barrier between her and that possibility? Probably not. But if she was willing to trade one year of teaching for one year of tuition, we might have a deal. If 1,000 people signed up to go back to school so they could become teachers, and the state agreed to waive their annual tuition for each year they taught, it would cost about $7 million a year. When you think about our kids and our state, that’s not a small price to pay — it’s a good investment in the future. And it would mean that I will eventually have to find someone else to cut my hair!

John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (www.eoionline.org ), writes every other Wednesday. Write to him in care of the institute at 1900 Northlake Way, Suite 237, Seattle, WA 98103. His e-mail address is john@eoionline.org.