> is there shortage of teachers in USA?

No, there is a steady stream of teachers being fed into the maw of public education. The pay is low and job security is terrible until you get tenure. My wife was a teacher; I have heard horror stories.

You get paid based on a combination of how much money you earn your employer and how easy you are to replace. Schools get paid by taxes, and there are a ton of them produced every year. So, the pay is abysmal.

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throwawaytea 4 hours ago | parent [-]

My gf makes about $90k a year, tons of time off, at 35 years old in a California public school. If she wasn't a teacher, she admits she'd probably be a cop or 911 dispatcher, because government gigs are what her entire extended family recommends. She has trouble adding 50 cents to 75 cents, but luckily she only teaches English and social studies to middle schoolers.

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bijowo1676 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I have a kid who just graduated elementary and is about to enter Middle school.

Your post actually explains why every single classmate of my daughter has enrolled in private middle school ($50k+ tuition), despite being in the best school district (Palo Alto School District).

Apparently public middle schools are really bad in California, but you can still find decent high and elementary schools

All top private middle schools in the bay are oversubscribed and cannot accomodate everyone, and require ridiculous exams and admission process that rivals Ivy League, situation is really bad, and demand for good teachers is infinite

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saltyoldman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What happened was there were a lot of boomers that taught my generation in the bay area. So when I was in high school around 94-98 the teachers were typically 40-50ish year old boomer generation. These people were pretty good at teaching. Mostly white. As generation X started getting into the game, and bureaucratic processes the introduced "core" and "new math". Both pretty bad. I was in the middle of the transition so I did get pre-new-math as well.

What happened next? Well pretty much all of us got jobs at Google, Apple and other places. The only way for any of us to have stayed in teaching would have been major compromises. We decimated the teaching industry because it didn't realize the salaries these companies were waiting to pay us. They had no chance.

	▲	bijowo1676 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This situation rhymes with manufacturing jobs in the midwest. Industrial and manufscturing jobs were offshored to Asia and Americans had zero chance to be price competitive relative to East-Asian labor The diff is that Midwest didnt have Apple and Google to fall back on, they only had fentanyl to cope with their situation. But now the situation is so bad, you cant even find talent in US even if you are willing to pay for it. Asian countries have better integrated supply chains that make manufacturing two to three orders cheaper than in US. And nobody knows how to solve it, but there is only one solution. End the USD as a global reserve currency, so that manufacturing in US has more power again, relative to financial industry. I dont see any other option long term