Dallas ? As a marketer for Nortel Networks, Kashif Akhtar used to fret about Ethernet access, router outsourcing and resilient packet ring technology. This fall, he graduates to logarithms, quadratic equations and vertical asymptotes.

Akhtar, 32, will teach calculus at a south Dallas high school. Around the country, thousands are turning to teaching after their high-tech jobs dried up.

Kashif Akhtar poses in his new classroom at Roosevelt High School in Dallas. Akhtar, who lost his high-tech job, has moved into a teaching career and will be schooling students in calculus this fall.

The sour economy and business scandals may be bad for Wall Street and individual investors, but they are good for public education. With high-tech and telecom companies cutting back, more college graduates are going to teach.

Corporate turmoil also is bringing unprecedented numbers of mid-career professionals into the public schools.

While many are not exactly beaming at the prospect of a salary starting in the mid- to high-$30,000s often less than half of their previous pay they like the fringe benefits: home before 5 p.m. most days, two weeks off at Christmas and one at spring break, plus more than two months of summer vacation.

“How many places can you go and work 187 days a year and no travel?” said Akhtar, who comes to the job with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s in business administration.

Need is strong

Education Department statistics suggest that in the next decade, schools will need nearly 3 million new teachers, especially in hard-to-fill jobs in cities and rural areas, and in subjects such as advanced math and science.

School districts are hoping to catch some of the newly jobless, expanding programs for alternative certification so teachers with degrees in unrelated fields can quickly get their credentials during their first year of teaching.

Rick Berry, superintendent of the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Houston, said such programs are training more second-career teachers than ever including former employees of Houston-based Enron Corp. and Dynegy Inc.

“In some cases, it is people who have lost their jobs, or it is people who have decided that they’re not liking what they do and they want to teach,” he said.

Applications for teaching jobs are up in many cities Dallas got 2,800 applications for 460 slots in the alternative program, a 68 percent increase from 2001.

Rethinking careers

Mildred Hudson, chief executive officer of Recruiting New Teachers Inc., a Belmont, Mass., nonprofit group that advocates for better teacher recruitment and retention, hesitates to pin it all on the sluggish economy. She says that after Sept. 11, more professionals decided to change careers.

“Many, many people were reporting back that, after Sept. 11, they wanted to give something back,” she said.

During an alternative certification program in Dallas this summer, Akhtar’s classmates included laid-off software engineers, salesmen and troubleshooters, as well as lawyers, construction managers and massage therapists. Of the 23 teacher candidates in Akhtar’s group, most had lost their jobs in the tech industry.

One classmate, Muhammad Islam, 50, lost his computer technical service job in August 2000. This fall, he will teach high school algebra and calculus.

“I want a secure job, and it seems like this is the one,” he said.

Kenneth Simone, 58, a manufacturing engineer at Tyco, lost his job at its Mesquite, Tex., facility in December, when the company moved thousands of jobs to Mexico. He had worked there since 1978, when it was owned by Lucent Technologies.

This fall, he will teach eighth-grade math. Simone does not plan to return to manufacturing and its uncertain job prospects.

“I plan this to be my second career,” he said.

Sticking around?

Observers worry that the new high-tech teachers are just biding their time, laying low while the economy improves.

“I’m just not sure if, out of their desperation, they’re thinking, ‘$37,000 a year, that doesn’t sound too bad, it’s better than nothing I can do that until I find something else,”‘ said Judith Gonzales Kell, executive director of the Bay Area Teachers Center, which trains new teachers in San Francisco and Oakland. “I’m hoping we can give them the support they need to stick around.”

Akhtar said he is excited about motivating his students. “Even to make one of them go to the college level and think big, I’ll consider my job successful,” he said.

While he is not ruling out a return to industry when the economy improves, he hopes to teach for a while.

“Industry was always cutthroat,” he said. “People were changing jobs. Here the signs seem right.”