1800s teacher plan no solution to shortage

1800s teacher plan

no solution to shortage

To the Editor,

The teacher shortage has brought out desperate plans for letting anyone with a heartbeat and a KBI clearance teach in Kansas classrooms. Several bills being debated in this Legislative session do just that.

Many Kansas rural schools are hard bit by the teacher shortage. The richer school districts in the big city suburbs and Johnson County region are hiring all of the new student teacher production. When rural school principals have a retire-off, there is simply no replacement teacher left to hire in the county, and not just in science and math and special education. Some Kansas rural schools are now sweating vacancies in English and social studies.

And aside from the Wichita, Topeka, and Kansas City industry centers, there is no pool of folks with a bachelor's degree ready to become alternative-route teachers. For this reason, some rural schools are pushing for "growing their own" teachers from local residents -- just begin teaching and other teachers will help you learn on the job. This is the master-apprentice model used by some labor trades and it is also how we trained doctors and nurses in the 1800s.

There are reasons we stopped apprenticing doctors and nurses: those fields are now far too complex. For a century, it has not been possible for a practicing doctor to teach all the knowledge and skills needed to be a modern doctor or nurse, from a local hospital. Modern medical training requires microbiology teachers and microbiology labs at medical schools, as well as biochemists, epidemiologists, medical law experts, anatomists, physiologists, pharmacologists, and all of their lab experiences.

The same holds true for training a biology teacher. A high school biology teacher does not have any more time or ability to train a rookie teacher than a modern physician has time or skill to train a new doctor from scratch. Veteran teachers do have an important role in verifying a student teacher's skills, just as medical supervisors have a role in supervising interns at a teaching hospital. But no advanced country would ever consider throwing out the whole modern medical curriculum. Any country that reverts to such shallow training of secondary teachers also turns back the clock in the education of their next generation.

Well-meaning proponents often point to non-teacher degree holders who would need to take another two or three years of methods courses under some methods-laden 5-year college programs. But the proposed grow-your-own "solution" not only dumps education coursework, but also the content preparation. Kansas cannot afford to place undertrained teachers in Kansas classrooms using an 1800s master-apprentice system.

John Richard Schrock

Emporia

Schrock trains teachers and lives in Emporia.