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International Business Machines Corp. [IBM], worried the United States is losing its competitive edge, will financially back employees who want to leave the company to become math and science teachers.
…
Up to 100 IBM employees will be eligible for the program in its trial phase. The goal is to help fill shortfalls in the nation’s teaching ranks, a problem expected to grow with the retirement of today’s educators. …

If selected, the employees would be allowed to take a leave of absence from the company, which includes full benefits and up to half their salary, depending on length of service. In addition, the employees could get up to $15,000 in tuition reimbursements and stipends while they seek teaching credentials and begin student-teaching.

IBM pushes math and science education, CNN Technology, Friday, September 16, 2005

When I first read this, I was impressed. It sounded like a terrific idea.

Then I read on…

From then on, the IBM people would become school employees — the program will encourage them to work in public schools but they can go private if they wish — and leave Big Blue’s payroll.

And therein lies the rub.

School teachers are treated poorly in this country. For one thing, they are not
paid at all in proportion to the value of what they do. The September issue of
Readers’ Digest contains an article by a teacher who took a year off to teach
one 10-year-old boy to read. That teacher didn’t have any classes that year. He
wasn’t on the school payroll. But he said that the job he took waiting tables
at night paid better than the teaching job would have.

Ouch.

There’s another article in the same RD issue that discusses overachieving parents. It points out that many teachers leave schools after one or two years, not because of
the low pay or administrative silliness, but because they are tired of dealing
with overprotective, overachieving parents. I know a woman who left teaching because of the parents.

Then there are the summers. In what other career are the employees all forced to look for other work 3 months out of every year?

I had hoped, when I first started reading the article, that IBM had plans to subsidize teachers.
Now, that would be an interesting idea.

What if corporations took it upon themselves to keep a certain number of teachers on their payrolls as part-time employees? The teaching employees would draw salary from the corporation; they would teach in a local school while also working on low-priority projects for the company.

Certainly their salaries wouldn’t be equivalent to that of full-time employees of the corporation, but the pay would be better than a “typical” teacher’s salary. The employee/teachers would have the support of the corporation as well as a guaranteed summer job (like an internship in reverse).

I’ve read some stories about experiments in converting schools to corporations. What if we started involving existing corporations in our schools? (The corporation could get a tax incentive.)

After all, today’s students are tomorrow’s employees. Wouldn’t it behoove those corporations to have a hand in training those employees sooner?