Guest commentary: How to avert the coming teacher shortage in our state
There are no comments for this page [ Add Comment ]Thursday, April 26, 2007
By Lynn Stoddard
Guest commentary
A special task force on teacher shortages in Utah recently issued a five-point recommendation for solving the looming teacher shortage. Unfortunately, it missed the main reason why one-third of our teachers leave before serving three years, why many more stay less than five years, and why, since the arrival of the No Child Left Behind law, many of our best teachers have retired early or left for other work.
The reason? Not salary, class size, nor length of school year. There is a teacher shortage because public school teaching is not regarded as a profession. Teachers are not allowed to practice as professionals who take the interests and needs of individual students into account. Instead, they are treated as assembly-line workers who are required to deliver a standardized core curriculum on a designated schedule to all students without regard for individual needs.
The ultimate insult is the growing number of teachers who are being asked to follow a script in delivering the sanctioned curriculum. The result is widespread alienation -- teachers feel diminished, parents become sideline spectators, many students don't like school and huge sums are spent on state testing to enforce standardization.
What needs to be done? The renaissance will occur when we stop holding teachers accountable for doing an impossible thing -- standardizing students -- and start holding them responsible for doing the opposite: nurturing individuality.
If we want to attract and hold good teachers, we must trust them to decide, with parents and students, what content and experiences are best to help students develop their unique talents and become eager learners.
Our public education system is deteriorating because the public falsely believes that the main goal of education is student achievement in a test-driven curriculum.
How profoundly better our schools would be if that goal were: Develop great human beings to be valuable contributors -- not burdens -- to society!
If we want to realize this more enlightened goal, we will have to change what we measure as success and what we hold teachers accountable for.
If we want schools where students are eager to learn, where they can achieve more and where parents are meaningfully involved, we can start by holding teachers and parents jointly responsible for the following goals:
Inquiry: Nurture students' natural curiosity and help them find great questions to pursue.
Identity: Help students discover who they are and develop their unique talents and gifts.
Interaction: Help students learn how to communicate clearly and cooperate effectively with one another.
Imagination: Encourage students to creatively express themselves in all disciplines of learning, including the arts.
Integrity: Encourage students to use free will and be genuinely responsible for their own learning and behavior.
If we pursue these five priorities, we can restore teaching as a profession.
This will attract and hold bright people. A critical teacher shortage can be avoided if we let teachers use their knowledge, talents and creativity to meet the needs of a great variety of students.
Stoddard, a Farmington resident, is a retired educator who writes about the need to modernize education. He can be e-mailed at lstrd@yahoo.com.
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