Hawaii Teachers

Education is one of the important requirements in developing one’s self and in achieving a goal. Similarly, teachers play an important role towards the achievement of quality education. Yet, Hawaii is facing a big shortage of teachers despite the efforts of the Department of Education to employ more teachers in different schools in the state. The shortage of teachers in the State of Hawaii has been an educational problem, and along with it are the factors like insufficient salaries for teachers, complicated requirements in getting a teacher’s license in Hawaii and the high cost of living resulting in such phenomenon. These impede the quality of education in the State of Hawaii. Teaching is the noblest profession; however, the salaries for …show more content…
According to HTSB, in order to acquire a teacher’s license in the state of Hawaii, one should complete a state- approved teacher preparation program and a bachelor’s degree or higher. With this requirement, even though an applicant has a degree in education, this does not guarantee a license unless the degree is a state- approved. Hence, most applicants would rather look for another job than going back to school just to comply with the state approved program requirement. A more convenient option is to apply as substitute teachers as they already acquire a degree. In contrast, not all substitute teachers majored in education, but also they have different degrees which are not related to education. The drawback of the later on education is not meeting the main objective of No Child Left Behind Act policy which is to provide all children with a fair, equal, and substantial opportunity to achieve a high-quality education. In other words, some substitute teachers who are hired by the schools and even offered long term employment have no enough knowledge and familiarity with teaching. Being said, some of them do not offer a good quality instruction to the students. In fact, most of the times some students do not pay attention to substitute teachers. For substitute teachers who only do the job in a daily basis, there is no continuous learning in the part of …show more content…
It is sad to say that most locals also are leaving their home state because they think that they cannot cope with the living standard in Hawaii. Subsequently, they prefer to go to other state because of the various job opportunities in other states and at least more affordable home and cost of living. These realities influence the lack of local teachers in Hawaii. To fill in the gaps, the Department of Education extends their effort to recruit qualified teachers from different states in the country. They fly to the mainland to recruit out of state teachers who are qualified. They even have outstanding offers in order to convince out of state teachers to come to Hawaii and extend their hand in transforming the education in Hawaii. However some of these hired qualified teachers come to Hawaii and teach for a short period of time after the realization that the state itself is expensive. Most of them go back to the mainland resulting to the same educational phenomenon. The factors affecting the shortage of teachers in Hawaii need to be addressed. These factors have the same denominator which is the unsatisfactory salary teachers receive in every paycheck. This boils down to the incompatibility of teacher’s salary and the high cost of living condition in Hawaii. With the low salary, teachers feel that they cannot meet the expense of commodities and housing. Hence, there should be an