COME ON!!!

If you are not annoyed you are not paying attention. This should be the new bumper sticker of all in education – especially all of us who work in teaching.

A report by ETS that is just stunning to me - - the percentage of 8th grade math students on free and reduced lunch whose teachers left before the end of the school is year is 67%.

Breaking it down by race the percentage of white students whose 8th grade math teacher left before the end of the year is 28%. But for black students it is 52% and for Hispanic students it is 44%.

We are not going to affect the achievement gap if we can't get teachers to even finish out the year.

Now how in the world can you be college ready if two thirds of our students can’t even get an 8th grade math teacher to finish the school year. I know that some people have problems with ABCTE teachers who are alternatively certified but 85% of our teachers are still teaching AFTER THREE YEARS!!

Come on!! Get annoyed out there – this is ridiculous

The Retention Myth

I think a quick note is in order on the EdWeek Article on the Ingersoll and Perda research suggesting that we are producing plenty of math and science teachers and all we need to do is just retain them and we are set.

The facts are probably correct – though dated – that we produce 2X as many math and science teachers than retire. Thus, retention is the solution. Woohoo - problem solved.

But that ignores the societal reality that we are all job nomads now. We wander from career oasis to career oasis hoping for something better - never settling at one job for more than few years.

I regret to say that I don’t think that education will be the one career that is immune to this current reality. Labor statistics say that 18 to 40 year olds will have 11 job changes of which half will be total career changes.

Now we certainly can do more to retain better teachers through better working conditions, better professional development to help them deal with so many students on so many different levels and career ladders to increase job satisfaction.

But to make the naïve claim that the math and science teacher shortage will magically disappear if everyone sticks around to retirement is to ignore the current reality

In this economy, starting a business is better than teachintg

I received the comment below on an earlier blog about career changers. A lot of interesting points from this teacher.

1. He/she is leaving because of teachers/administration not because of the kids
2. He/she prefers to start a business in this economy over teaching
3. He/she believes that career changers can get into teaching and bring content to life
4. In their experience teaching is learned on the job

As we continue to look for ways to solve the teacher shortage, when you listen to the teachers leaving the profession and not the groups that supposedly represent all teachers, you get a very different story

“I'm a teacher who is planning a career change. The reason for this is partly that I don't get paid enough (I teach private school), but mainly because in teaching, you are not really rewarded for being talented or creative in the same way that you are in other professional endeavors. I'm planning on opening a small business, which unlike teaching, will grow and succeed in direct correlation with my own efforts and abilities. But here is a word of comfort. Good teaching doesn't rely on 30 years of experience. Some people can teach, and some people just can't. Experience does help, but a person can pretty much learn most of what they need to know in 3 or so years. Also, teachers who once worked in other professions frequently bring those experiences to the table, which only enriches their pedagogy. So the real issue isn't so much that teaching doesn't pay enough, it's more that talented people who want new challenges and opportunities to grow aren't given them. And in my case, it isn't the kids; they're great. It's colleagues and administration that frequently drive the brightest and best teachers into other professions. I don't know how to solve this problem, or else I wouldn't be planning my own career transition.”

Education budget cuts will get even worse

Just over a year ago, I predicted extreme belt-tightening ahead in state budgets. After looking at my retirement savings, I wish that I wasn’t so right. Now we read that 29 states face a total shortfall of $48 billion. And the states that were immune last year to the real estate crumble because they had oil and natural gas revenues are going to be hit hard with oil down under $80.

This is all very bad news for education spending. It will go down and it will go down hard.

At the Broad event, it was of deep concern to the superintendents on the panel. They felt it was going to hit their students and that they were going to have to make very difficult changes. They are going to have to get help from the community. What they were not doing is whining. They seemed to take it in stride and stayed focused on the kids.

States have got to find ways to cut that don’t adversely affect student learning. They need to find efficiencies in their systems that can fully leverage the smaller budgets they are going to find.

Programs like ABCTE that have been funded with federal dollars to reduce their recruitment cost is an excellent example. States and districts don’t pay a dime for our program yet they receive high quality teachers who stay in the classroom (85% retention after 4 years). Instead of providing a four year scholarship for a math teacher to Florida State, that money could be used to scholarship 100 math teachers through ABCTE. Instead of paying $5,000 - $7,000 per teacher for a recruitment program in the district, the district could work with ABCTE at $2,500 per teacher.

These are significant savings and could help save after school programs, reading programs that make our schools better.

If we can only get leaders to stop looking at the politics and look at the results – we can make this happen.

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!

Career switching will get worse

When people try to claim that the teacher shortage we face is a retention problem, I laugh. Don’t get me wrong – I would love to see better working conditions and even higher salaries for teachers. But that will not come close to fixing the problem.

We no longer live in a society where someone works in one job, let alone one career, for life. Based on my daughter’s college friends, it is not going to get any better.

We took some of her college friends to dinner a few weeks back and half were planning on transferring from Radford University to other schools. They talk about this as if it was as easy as upgrading to a new text messaging plan for their cell phones. Back in “the day”, the only people transferring to a different college were usually doing so for nefarious reasons.

My daughter has now been accepted to James Madison University and will transfer there next semester. All of her friends at the dinner who applied will also be transferring. If they switch colleges this easy, I can guarantee that attitude will carry over into jobs and careers. Thirty year teaching careers will be a thing of the past.