William Marvel: Apophenia

Is the glass half-full, or half-empty? An optimist will always call it half-full, and the pessimist will inevitably deem it half-empty. Since the question eternally involves the same amount of water, an engineer would readily tell you that the glass is simply too large for the amount of water available. A similar dialectical distraction may foster belief in a national shortage of teachers, which our superintendent has been alluding to lately, as he tries to fill all the faculty positions the Conway School District has advertised.

Teachers unions have been pointing into the clouds to show us the mirage of a teacher shortage for a while, with the customary aim of encouraging ever-higher pay. The Economic Policy Institute, a heavily union-funded “think tank,” claimed in 2019 that “the teacher shortage is real, . . . and worse than we thought”— reflexively identifying higher pay as the foremost solution to the alleged crisis without offering convincing evidence or analyzing potential causes.