IBM Training Employees To Leave IBM?

lucabrasi999 writes "IBM just launched a new program that will encourage some employees to earn teaching certificates and degrees. IBM will help defray the costs of these new degrees. With those newly earned degrees, the IBM employee would then become a 'former' IBM employee who moves onto a career as a public school math or science teacher. While it seems odd that IBM would encourage employees to switch careers, the point is that IBM is trying to help offset an expected shortage in the number of math and science teachers in the United States." From the article: "While many companies encourage their employees to tutor schoolchildren or do other things to get involved in education, IBM believes it is the first to guide workers toward switching into a teaching career. The company expects older workers nearing retirement to be the most likely candidates, partly because they would have more financial wherewithal to take the pay cut that becoming a teacher likely would entail."

Comments

Random thought...

[Gothic_Walrus]

Lately, it seems more and more to me that IBM is taking Google's place as the "Don't be evil" company.

With moves like this and their support of the open source scene, you'd think that they'd be Slashdot's new baby by now. :)

Pay is the issue.

[bcrowell]

The battlefield is littered with proposals to improve the dismal state of K-12 math and science education in America. I don't see how this proposal would work any better than the others.

The biggest issue is pay. K-12 teaching is a low-paid, low-status job, and in high school, it involves dealing with a lot of hassles from the 50% of the students who don't want to be there, and are just being warehoused by the government until they turn 18. Often the people who go into K-12 teaching are liberal arts majors who were mediocre students in college, and decided relatively late in the game to become teachers, because they weren't really qualified to do much else. For those people, the pay and job conditions might be OK, but people who are actually qualified to teach math or science have better options.

The effective government monopoly on education is preventing math and science teachers from being paid anything more in line with what they could get in a free market, and it also turns schools into assembly lines that produce students who pretend to have learned math and science, but actually couldn't calculate their way out of a paper sack. Part of the psychology of a government monopoly is to drag everybody down to the level of the lowest common denominator. Here, that means the lowest common denominator for both students and teachers.

Sounds like the company is trying to...

[GecKo213]

...give itself a haircut. All the old grey hairs are getting the axe. They don't want to have to deal with their shit anymore so they give them an "alternative" to being let go for being old and slow.