2021 A Year of Disruptions
2021 was a year of disruptions. The virus disrupted world economies, businesses, the lives of parents, children, and education.
In this blog, I would like to concentrate on the disruption of educators. Like many of you reading this, I receive magazines, newspapers, and blogs about the educational disruption. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I live there has been a dramatic increase in the number of educational retirements. In the school year 2020-2021, there has been a 40% increase from the previous year.(ABQ Journal September 21, 2021). Not only have classroom teachers left but so have custodians, principals, superintendents, support staff, bus drivers and dietitians. There are many reasons are given to explain the increase. Is it the virus, the age of the workers, low salaries, the lack of respect, or overburdened teachers or simple exhaustion? There has been little research to determine the primary reasons.
2022 will be a year of rebuilding our economy and our educational system. In 2019, I wrote and published, Who Will Teach The Children? Recruiting, Retaining & Refreshing Highly Effective Educators is available on Amazon. The book has received eleven 5-star reviews. In the book I pointed out that “Teacher and school administrators are leaving the field of education almost as quickly as Colleges of Education are preparing them.” By 2021 the situation has grown much worse.
The book answers the questions:
- What are educators leaving?
- What, if anything, can be done to retain them?
- How do we refresh the teachers who are already in classrooms?
The book proposes that school systems:
- Actively RECRUIT highly qualified and highly effective educators
- Work to RETAIN those people in existing positions
- REFRESH the skills of those people currently occupying classrooms and front offices.
Schools cannot produce high performing school graduates unless they have high performing teachers in classrooms, school administrators in front offices, superintendents developing, designing, and deploying their visions, and high performing systems.