Happy Teacher Appreciation Day

We all have them -- those special teachers from school that we'll always remember. It might be the teacher that taught you how to read, or the one that mentored you in choosing which college to attend. Whoever it may be -– teachers affect the lives of our students everyday. We know, and research even shows, that teachers have the biggest impact on student learning.

Over the next eight years, the United States will need to recruit nearly 3 million new teachers due to teacher turnover, retirement and increased student enrollment. However, this task will be nearly impossible if we don't start to treat teachers like the professionals they are. As we celebrate National Teacher Appreciation day today, there are three major approaches we need to take to successfully recruit and retain our teachers:

• We need to give teachers the same opportunities for advancement and better pay that other professionals enjoy.
• We need to offer higher salaries to compete with other professions for adults who have strong math and science backgrounds.
• We need to pay teachers more when we ask them to take on harder jobs.

It's imperative that we have an effective teacher in every classroom and to do this we need to start appreciating our teachers more than one day a year. Take some time today to use the comments section of the blog to tell me about your favorite teacher.

Comments

[Scott Gibson]

Mr. Romer,

I've recently gotten very involved in my elementary school district's Parent Teacher Association. We have some amazingly good teachers in our district. My own children have been very fortunate to have been taught my some of the best.

Since my PTA involvement, I've started to research and chart some education statistics (http://www.supportingevidence.com/Education/Education_landing.html) and was shocked to learn the broad range of investment (spending) per student across the United States as well as the range of test score results.

Are our educational institutions learning from each other how some schools can spend so little per student and still get outstanding test scores?

Scott Gibson
www.supportingevidence.com
'worth a thousand words'