By and large, children passing from primary to secondary school can go from uncontrollable but cute to controllable (barely) but poisonous. The presence of either category of child can be an exasperating burden for teachers.
Shrink teacher salaries, then demand their attention at school board meetings dominated by parents and politicians who live to criticize any perceived failure to cherish their precious offspring. Do it in America, with a shrinking workforce exacerbated by its fear of immigrants.
It all adds up to a clarion call for disillusioned teachers: give up fencing with tiresomely exuberant youth and their over-protective parents. Take up basket weaving instead. It’s a theory that can explain a growing shortage of teachers in America, even without a national glut of basket weavers.
One solution to this problem? Affordable housing.
Underpaid, and over-harassed, a lack of affordable housing for supposedly professional educators has been a growing crisis for some years now. We featured an Axios article in 2019 which explored ways of dealing with this problem. Try: Who Can Afford To Battle The Modern SchoolChild?
Well Axios is back at in 2023 with a review of what appears to be a national ‘company town’ approach to education. Resource industries both nationally and internationally understand the necessity of social support to resource extraction enterprises. Want to extract gold, but you have no gold miners? Build a town to house them. Try this post from 2018: Miami Schools: A ‘Company Town’ Solution For Unaffordable Housing?
‘Company town’ thinking can be applied to ‘mining’ youth in order to produce skilled adults. Need educators to achieve this goal? Build the housing necessary for them to survive and prosper. Read more in Axios: Why schools across America are building teacher housing
