the economic opportunty

When unemployment rises, education organizations do well. When the economy is good, people coast and soak up the rewards. When the economy tanks, people want to make themselves more valuable to their current organization or seek training to move into a more new career after losing their jobs. At Kaplan we could count on many more LSAT, GRE and GMAT test takers during a crunch.

We are seeing this firsthand at ABCTE right now. We are having the largest enrollment month of our short history. Part of this is due to the tremendous response from Missourians but it is also coming from people who have lost their jobs in real estate, financials and technical fields. They now want to move into teaching.

I have heard the past criticism that these people will move back into the private sector once the economy recovers. But there is no actual data to support this AND the economy is a long way from recovering. Plus ABCTE has an 85% retention rate – so as long as the program is rigorous, there is no concern.

This is a unique opportunity for states and even for the Congress. We can put technical workers back to work and solve our math/science teaching shortage. We are seeing great people come into our program (over 110 have enrolled in January so far and many more are expected). We have even discounted our program by $100 to make sure we do our part to help. We cannot let this opportunity pass us by.

One program and we can solve two problems - - let’s work together to make this happen.

NOTE: we need some school districts in Tennessee to work with us to apply for an alternative teacher certification program under their new regulations. If you know an education leader there, please connect us!

Go St. Louis!!

Great article today covering our start in Missouri. It has been such an amazing response from some amazing people. Our first certified teacher completed last week - - an electrical engineer who has been teaching in a private school for three years.

My favorite part of the article is where the cite the recent Mathematica study showing 85% of our new teachers are still in the classroom - an amazingly high number - and in the next paragraph the NEA rep says he doesn't think our teachers will stay in the classroom. Never let facts get in the way of your talking points.

Our new teacher discussion forums have launched giving our candidates an online community to work with and our next prepare to teach workshop will go up next week.

In the world of education reform - progress like this always feels good!

Education Moving Forward

Today I had the pleasure of attending the US DOE working group on school leadership looking to exchange ideas on teacher recruitment, retention and leadership in general. A number of points from this outstanding discussion:

1. Our teachers of the year are pretty amazing – Nebraska, Connecticut and Arkansas had outstanding ideas and thoughts
2. Teachers think differently than teacher unions – no shocker here but union policy input tends to meet their goal of better pay and conditions for members while teacher policy input really looks at what is best for the students
3. Customization – there is no “one size fits all” for teachers – whether it is training, certification, performance pay, mentoring – stop trying to find one solution for all 3.2 million teachers, it will not work
4. Any time you start to pick at the edges of education it starts to snowball into all the things that need to happen to fix the thing you were picking at – the only real conclusion is that the current education system cannot work in the current reality of 2008 and we need total educational system redesign to fix any part of the broken system
5. If people don’t stay in jobs for more than 5 years, why would teaching be different – find ways to work within the reality of the social environment and stop trying to hold on to preparation systems that don’t work in the current reality
6. Education Schools need help – they can no longer be ignored by universities and need a serious upgrade in what works
7. Value add is solidly in the vocabulary of teachers – say what you want about NCLB but I have heard more teachers talk about gains then ever before
8. The “teaching to the test” mantra is still a crutch as is talking about the mythical loss of music, social studies etc. NCLB didn’t make this happen. Your student test is supposed to be aligned to student learning standards which are supposed to be aligned to what students need to know. If teachers teach to the standards, by default they are teaching to the test which is teaching to what students need to know to succeed.
   

Sadly – the administration is rapidly approaching lame duck status and like all the millions of panel discussions in DC, this great exchange will be cataloged and placed on a shelf without real action.