Teachers of Tomorrow is out with a new infographic on the teacher shortage crisis and the states and content areas that are hardest hit.
To shed some light on how we can solve this problem, the organization asked 15 experts passionate about education the following question:
What is the single most important thing America can do to fix the teacher shortage?
Selected responses appear below:
Matthew Lynch:
The single most important thing that we can do to end the teacher shortage in America is reaffirm teaching as “a noble profession.” When I was growing up in the 80’s and even 90’s being a teacher was a respectable position.
Now, the general public has reduced teaching to a second-hand profession, causing many of our best and brightest to find a more worthy venue for their intellectual talents.
Dr. Lynch is the editor of The Edvocate and The Tech Edvocate.
Jaime Casap:
The best thing we can do for teachers (besides paying them more) is to give them some room to iterate and experiment. There isn’t an industry where the workforce is more passionate than teachers.
They care about their kids. They want the best for them. They show up on the weekends to learn how to be better teachers. They spend their own money to benefit their students. They deserve our respect. They are also the experts when it comes to education and we should give them the opportunity to utilize that expertise.
Their hands are usually tied and we need to untie them! We need to give teachers the autonomy they need to bring education to the next level! We need to give them the opportunity to learn – to build the knowledge, skills, and abilities to help our kids thrive!
Jamie Casap is the Chief Education Evangelist at Google.
Chad Aldeman:
To address teacher shortages, we need policies that are specific to particular shortage areas. General, across-the-board solutions only make sense in a world where we are suffering from a generic teacher shortage. We aren’t.
Long-term solutions to the problem of staffing hard-to-staff schools and subjects requires policy solutions like hiring or retention bonuses or other staffing models that make those difficult jobs more attractive to current and future teachers.
Chad is the Principal at Bellwether Education.
James M. Lang:
Although not all of our social problems can be solved with money, this one can. We will attract more candidates to the teaching profession when we pay them salaries that commensurate with the value of the incredibly important work they are doing.
Unless you teach or live with a teacher, it’s difficult to understand the intense intellectual and emotional work that goes into teaching, and that is not well-reflected in their current levels of compensation. If we want more teachers, we need to make teaching a well-paid and highly respected position in our society.
James is the author of Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning.
Adam Kirk Edgerton:
The research tells us that working conditions, including a reasonable workload and a good principal, are more important than merit pay and some other incentives that have been tried. Pay helps to a point, but working for long hours without any collaboration or assistance is the unfortunate norm for many American teachers.
Adam is a contributor to Huffington Post and a Ph.D. student in Education Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
For more, see https://www.teachersoftomorrow.org/blog/insights/teacher-shortage
