Editorial: Finding quality teachers difficult

Friday, Sept. 4, 1998 | 11:31 a.m.

LOCAL education leaders are grappling with the difficult issue of how the state can produce more home-grown teachers for the Clark County School District, one of the fastest growing in the nation.

In this new school year, the school district had to hire more than 1,600 teachers, and of this total just 300-400 new teachers came from UNLV. This shortage of locally educated teachers has required the school district to look for teachers across the nation to fill the gap.

The Board of Regents of the University and Community College System of Nevada created a task force to develop a plan to address the lack of teachers. The task force, which held its first meeting this week, will report its findings to the board in November.

Some critics believe that teacher licensing itself should be scrapped, allowing the school district to select from a wider group of applicants. According to this line of thinking, school districts should be able to lure some of the best and brightest from the private sector, even if they do not have the required teacher licensing.

The problem with this thinking is that it is, at best, simplistic. Junking licensing standards ignores that bright people sometimes make poor instructors. Teaching isn't just lecturing students on a subject in which the teacher is an expert. Teaching also is fostering in students a thirst for knowledge, something that doesn't come from a dry recitation of facts or figures.

This isn't to say that the current licensing requirements to teach in Nevada shouldn't be re-examined or even changed if it's found they are keeping quality people from becoming teachers. But licensing requirements are just one piece of solving the education puzzle. Getting more top-notch teachers from Nevada will require innovative thinking, not reactionary ideas.