Saturday, April 18, 1998 | 10:04 a.m.
BILL HANLON is a school district administrator and a member of the State Board of Education. He can be reached on the Internet at bhanlon@ accessnv.com.
The number of students graduating from UNLV's College of Education is about 400. The Clark County School District hired about 1,700 new teachers last year and will probably hire about that many next year.
Doing a little math, it's easy to see that Clark County relies heavily on out-of-state recruitment of teachers.
That is about to get pretty rough. With California's class-size reduction program, it is hiring many of its home-grown teachers that we were able to recruit.
Texas also was fertile ground for Nevada. With the Houston school district in need of more than 1,000 teachers this year, things will get tougher for Clark County recruitment efforts in the Lone Star state.
Some Southern states now have policies to keep predator districts -- such as Clark County -- from stealing from their new-teacher pool. The Northeast has been cutting the number of students in its teacher education programs because of declines in K-12 enrollment. Those factors can affect the quality of education in Las Vegas.
If you read news articles in education from other states, you might think you are reading about Nevada. That's just how similar education problems are from state to state.
In North Carolina and Massachusetts, teachers were complaining about having to take tests to demonstrate competence. An editorial in the Boston Globe addressed teacher-preparation issues that recruitment woes will exacerbate in Clark County. It states: "The analysis of 10th-grade test results in Boston conducted by Bain & Co. indicates that a substantial minority of teachers in district high schools -- as many as one-third -- are ineffective. No level of high-school restructuring or creation of new academic pathways for students will compensate for teacher inadequacy."
The editorial concluded: "There is no single factor having a greater impact on student learning than the quality of teaching."
The teacher-competency issue should have been addressed two legislative sessions ago in Nevada. The State Board of Education urged the Professional Standards Commission in Education, appointed by the governor, to adopt regulations that would increase teacher-licensure standards, introduce reciprocity of licensure, require teachers to be current and competent in their fields and have an alternative route to teacher licensure.
Although the governor failed to address these issues and the bills failed on a partisan vote, the good news is the commission passed a reciprocity regulation. It increased math-licensure standards and passed a weak alternative-licensure regulation.
The bad news: The state's universities don't readily allow students access to class work to receive alternative licensure. While math standards have increased, there is work that needs to be done in other critical areas such as science. The commission, Legislature and governor refuse to require that secondary-classroom teachers be current in their fields. That attitude flies in the face of research and common sense.
It's time the governor realizes the importance of the classroom teacher and demands the commission require teachers take classes in their fields for relicensure. School administrators should also require teachers with subject-matter deficiencies to take classes.
No one doubts that the Clark County School District needs to hire more than 1,000 teachers a year. What's bewildering is, although UNLV's College of Education would like to help produce those teachers, the method of allocating money by the university administration is getting in the way.
Funding provided by the Nevada Legislature is disbursed by the university's administration. Rather than having that money shared proportionately according to the student populations, another reward system is in place.
The College of Education is not receiving the funding proportionate to its enrollment or to meet the community's teacher needs.
That's got to change! Hiring 60 percent to 70 percent of our teachers from out of state is not acceptable.
Hiring teachers who live in Southern Nevada develops a sense of pride and ownership within the district. Those new teachers know they belong and will probably stay.
To that end, we must ensure UNLV's administration provides adequate funding to the College of Education to meet the community's needs for new teachers; we need to guarantee our students have teachers who are competent in their fields; we need to stop putting artificial roadblocks for people who would like to enter teaching through an alternative route; and we should have teachers hang their degrees on the classroom walls in the same way doctors do so students and parents can see they are qualified.
However, teacher licensure just doesn't guarantee teacher competence. We understand that no level of restructuring, testing or creating new academic standards will compensate for teacher inadequacy.
archive
