Blog Juice for Educational Technology

The Raleigh News & Observer, my state’s capital paper, reports today (N.C. Teachers Given Raises) that…

Every teacher in North Carolina’s public schools will get an extra $75 each month beginning in November and a promise from state political leaders of more to come.

Under a plan Gov. Mike Easley announced Tuesday, the average pay for teachers in the state will be raised by the 2008-09 school year to the national average, projected to be $52,206 by then. To get there, Easley and legislative leaders have committed to average increases of 5 percent in each of the next three years, amounting to about $150 million a year. ¹

If our governor and legislature believe that getting North Carolina’s teacher pay on par with the nation will solve our education problems, then they know much less about our classrooms than they claim.

Our problem is that we do not have enough teachers. An August 2004 press release from The Teaching Commission, refers to a report from the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research, which…

…details teacher turnover rates for each of the state’s 117 city and county school systems and concludes that “a 20 percent or more annual teacher turnover rate in some school districts will take the teacher shortage to crisis proportions if the state does not act quickly to get more teachers in the pipeline now.â€?

The press release continues…

…while North Carolina must hire about 10,000 teachers per year to staff existing classrooms, the state’s public and private universities produce a combined total of just over 3,000 teachers per year—just 2,200 of whom end up teaching in North Carolina. With enrollments growing, that problem will only grow more dire, unless bold new strategies are put on the table without delay.

Again, if our government believes that mere salary hikes will solve the problem, then we have a bigger problem. Our teacher shortage is not happening because they do not make enough money, though they certainly deserve more, and most of us acknowledge this. Teachers are leaving the classroom because they can not succeed. Our students are performing better on standardized tests. But intelligent, dynamic, talented communicators do not enter the teaching profession to boost test scores. They become teachers because they want to help children to grow into productive, insightful, adaptive, and self-fulfilled citizens. Good teachers know what success in the classroom looks like. We need to return the confidence that we once had for our teachers, and we need to establish an education system that provides for success, not simply punishes for lower than expected test scores.

We need to ask good teachers what they need to succeed. Their answers will include relevant and dynamic curriculum, freedom to explore innovative and inventive teaching strategies, technologies appropriate for 21st century learning, ongoing professional development, and above all, significantly more professional time to plan new lessons that address the needs of a rapidly changing world.

If we set up our classrooms for success, then we may find that there is only a very thin line between a mediocre teacher and a good teacher and we may even get more talented young people entering the teaching profession.

2¢ worth