Discrepancy in Teacher Employment: The Problem of Out of Field Teacher Employment.
Enacting changes without considering essential educational components such as number of teachers, non teaching staff, and classes can lead to problems in education systems. One common problem is an inadequate number of teachers. In response to this, policy makers often create out of field teacher employment to meet the teacher shortages. While this practice meets the teacher shortages quantitatively, it decreases the quality of education. The purpose of this study is to identify the problems associated with out of field teachers and to make recommendations for overcoming these problems. In this study, a qualitative research method and phenomenological research design were used. The study group consisted of 20 participants (8 principals and 12 teachers) from public schools in Ankara. The data were collected with interviews and analyzed using content analysis technique. According to our research findings, participants do not approve out of field teacher employment. The reasons for their disapproval vary and have been grouped into themes such as "Lack of subject knowledge, teaching experience and professional specialization." The findings also show that out of field teachers have troubles with issues such as commitment, job satisfaction and motivation, subject knowledge in teaching, and adaptation to the job. On the other hand, out of field teacher employment provides advantages such as meeting the teacher shortages, decreasing unemployment and providing different perspectives on teaching. Despite these advantages, out of field teacher employment as a means of meeting the teacher shortages must be put to an end. Participants generally think that this practice can be prevented by means of collaboration between Ministry of National Education [MEB] and Council of Higher Education [YOK] The findings of this study could contribute to discussions about out of field teaching and help educational stakeholders to increase their awareness about out of field teaching by giving real life examples. Permanent employment policies must be created in order to provide better and more consistent system of education in which each teacher is employed in his or her own field of study. INTRODUCTION Human capital is an important resource for countries as well as for organizations. In order to use human resources efficiently, human resource planning is necessary. Human resource planning means projecting the number and quality of needed employee shortages in each department of the organization, determining available categories of human resources, revealing the differences between human resource shortages and available human resources, and deciding on how and where to seek for the required human resources. In this process, with the help of action plans, human resource planning aims at developing human resources by increasing their effectiveness, meeting the organization's human resource shortages, and determining the recruitment of permanent staffing (Karakutuk, 2012) However, human resource planning is a difficult process because it depends on many ambiguous and changeable structures of the unforeseen future (Basaran, 1985)