The continuous improvement of teacher quality, teacher retention and the recruitment of high-quality candidates to teaching are vital keys to reforming and improving public education in America. They are also critical to the profession and are at the core of the mission of National-Louis University.
Last month, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley joined us at NLU as we dedicated our new downtown campus and headquarters, located in the heart of Chicago’s South Loop Education Corridor. Secretary Riley lead a policy forum involving distinguished panelists from the education profession, teacher unions, business representatives and academia. Together we all learned some valuable things about ways to improve education and raise the quality of teaching in the U.S.
Approximately 2.5 million teachers, 42 percent of the nation’s total, are estimated to be retiring or leaving the teaching profession over the next decade. This is a dramatic fact that we in the educational community must face and prepare for. In past decades, teacher shortages have led to rushes to various forms of alternative certification and shortcuts in the continuing education of our teachers.
There are solutions to the problems we face in the education community. The answers are not easy; they require resolve and determination to improve teaching and learning skills for all our students. There is an urgent need to enhance teaching skills at all levels, not just the schools and the teachers who are performing the worst.
There will always be disparities in test scores and educational levels, but we should not and cannot stop improving upon the best. Too often we have become focused on the schools and teachers who are performing the worst and what can be done to improve them. We must ensure that this intense focus doesn’t come at the expense of our best and most committed teachers.
Our best teachers should also be given the opportunities for continuing education and improvement. We must focus on teacher quality and improvement on all levels. If we do not, we are sending a message throughout the educational community that a certain level of accomplishment is satisfactory. We must strive for improvement, and that goal needs to apply to all levels of performance in teaching and learning.
NLU grants more master’s degrees to practicing teachers than any other private college or university in the country. As a leader in continuing improvement for our nation’s educators, we, too, bear the responsibility of focusing on all our teachers. By doing so, we will be improving the entire profession.
At our policy forum, Secretary Riley identified “recruitment, retention and respect” as the “new three R’s” and issues that are key to teacher quality. Recruitment and retention are vital to the continuing success of education improvement in any school system, and they are challenges for educational systems and individual schools alike. Respect is a problem, however, that we as a society can and must address if we are to achieve success in retaining and recruiting the best quality candidates to teaching. We place an extraordinary responsibility with our teachers every day, and their skills and duties deserve our respect and admiration.
