”I was just at a conference of police chiefs,” said William Bratton, chief of police in Los Angeles, which has 720 openings. ”It was all everybody was talking about.”
Police officials and researchers say a confluence of demographic changes and social trends have precipitated the shortage. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have siphoned off public-service-minded people to the military. Hundreds of law enforcement officers have handed in their badges to take higher-paying positions in the booming homeland security industry.
And each year an increasingly large number of baby-boomer officers, hired in the 1970s, retires. The labor pool in the next generation is smaller, further cutting the number of prospective applicants.
The younger generation is better educated than its predecessor, so a career in policing, where the average starting salary is $32,000, is not as attractive as it was before.”(more…)
And this…
“Data suggest that the lowest achieving students are five times more likely than higher achieving students to have under-prepared teachers through their school careers.
“There has been great progress in a short period of time, but I think everyone would agree that we have to accelerate the process,” Gavin Payne, the state chief deputy superintendent, told the commission.
Payne said the Department of Education has limited ability to require districts to equally distribute experienced teachers.
And the “elephant in the room,” Payne suggested, is the need for 100,000 new teachers in coming years as the student population grows and veteran teachers retire. Successful recruitment initiatives, such as the governor’s teaching fellowships, have been gutted or eliminated due to budget cuts, said Payne, adding that the federal government must increase funding to help the state develop more teachers.” (more…)
Speaking of elephants…
(CBS) LOS ANGELES “A 3.7-acre, $39 million elephant exhibit is one step closer to being built at the Greater Los Angeles Zoo, under a plan approved Monday by two City Council committees.” (more…)
Yeah, whatever!
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