Teaching Candidates Aplenty, but the Jobs Are Few

The New York Times reports:

In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as Colorado and California. The Port Washington district on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.

Even hard-to-fill specialties are no longer so hard to fill. Jericho, N.Y., has 963 people to choose from for five spots in special education, more than twice as many as in past years. In Connecticut, chemistry and physics jobs in Hartford that normally attract no more than five candidates have 110 and 51, respectively.

The recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof: superintendents, education professors and job-seekers say that teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression. Amid state and local budget cuts, cash-poor urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles, which used to hire thousands of young people every spring, have taken down the help wanted signs.

Even upscale suburban districts are bracing for huge levels of layoffs — school officials and union leaders estimate than more than 150,000 teachers nationwide could lose their jobs next year, far more than any other time, including the last major financial crisis of the 1970s.

Yet the federal government still wants to subsidize more people to go to college to become teachers!