Abstract

In recent years, the "street teachers" issue has caused social concern in Taiwan. This study estimates the retirement of and needs for newly hired and public primary school teachers in 2010 using an algebraic model from the paper by Husssar (1999).This recursive methodology predicts the number of newly hired public primary school teachers due to teachers leaving the work force, and due to the predicted enrollment with age-specific continuation rates of teachers. The age-specific continuation rates were calculated from the Yearbook of Teacher Education Statistics, Ministry of Education to predict how many teachers will continue teaching from one year to the next. We assumed the age distribution of new teachers would be the same as the 2009 distribution. Depending on the assumptions, we estimate there will be 41 to 1491 newly hired public primary school teachers by 2010 and about 1662 teachers will retire.

Key words: Primary school teachers, newly hired teachers, retirement teachers, algebraic model, age-specific continuation rate.