Originally posted on Chalkbeat by Nic Garcia on August 23, 2017
Colorado education leaders are zeroing in on three broad ways to curb the state’s teacher shortage: increasing compensation, improving preparation and training, and “lifting the profession.”
While specific strategies are still being fleshed out, those three themes were highlighted Wednesday at a press conference held by Katy Anthes, the state’s education commissioner, and Kim Hunter Reed, the executive director of the department of higher education.
“We have a lot of work to do to talk about the profession that makes all other professions possible,” Hunter Reed said.
Anthes and Hunter Reed spoke to reporters as the two departments are wrapping up a series of forums across the state to gather input on how to best the shortage, which is especially pronounced in rural Colorado and in high school math and science classrooms.
The departments are tasked with creating a strategic plan to present to state lawmakers by December. The department heads said the plan will provide a mix of approaches that lawmakers, local school districts and communities can deploy based on individual needs.
One suggestion that has been a crowd favorite at the town halls is a statewide base salary for teachers, officials said.
However, neither Anthes nor Hunter Reed would commit to making such a recommendation to the legislature. Such a mandate would likely require an extensive influx of cash to schools, or at the least drastic cuts to other school-based programs at the local level. The latter scenario would infuriate superintendents in smaller school districts who are already feeling the squeeze to increase the required minimum wages for other workers.
“The answer doesn’t have to be to raise the entire school finance formula,” Anthes said, adding that changes to compensation could include loan forgiveness and block grants.
Both stressed that it would take more than new state laws to boost the number of new teachers and keep current teachers in the profession. That’s especially true, they said, when it comes to reframing the public conception of educators.
“You can’t legislate value and professionalism,” Hunter Reed said.
“We need to lift the profession of educators,” Anthes said. “I do think teaching is harder than rocket science.”
More specific ideas the departments are considering include developing new training at the college level, increasing awareness of alternative ways to become a teacher and providing educators better access to affordable housing.
“It’s a lot of little things that we hope add up,” Anthes said.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
