The “Blueprint” for the St. Louis Public Schools has the usual institutional worry about logistics of buildings closing and opening. It is not misguided but superficial. The quality of public education has always been about the quality of teachers, and it is a problem St. Louis shares with every urban school system in the United States. We are entering a crisis of lack of new, skilled and committed teachers in the profession.

In a recent study of interest and recruitment of good teachers, Matthew Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon reveal, through surveys and interviews, how students have indicated less interest in teaching in the last decade:

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshman has fallen 50% since the 1990s, and 38% since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years. The number of new entrants into the profession has fallen by roughly one third over the last decade, and the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50- year low. “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession,”

Teaching has recently suffered losses from its ranks during Covid, but the prestige of the profession has been declining for the past decade and longer. Some of the reasons identified by Kraft and Lyon are “education funding, teacher pay, outside opportunities, unionism, barriers to entry, working conditions, accountability, autonomy, and school shootings.”

The problem of loss of prestige most often cited by students is lack of pay. Missouri has addressed its low ranking for teachers’ salaries by minimum pay increases to $38,000 per year, but to no benefit for St.Louis teachers, whose average minimum is $44,000.  Urban schools require higher salaries to attract teachers to schools where conditions may be problematic.  So St. Louis teachers need more competitive minimum salaries.

Lacking that, there are ways to attract teachers to urban schools.

• A national movement called Grow Your Own (GYO)  attempts to “draw teacher candidates . . . from the local community. The hope is a community member will be more personally invested in the school system, and more likely to stick around. Drawing teachers from the community also makes it easier for students to see themselves and their life experiences reflected in their teachers.”  Incentives may include college scholarships, mentoring programs for teacher candidates, and job shadowing of good teachers.
• Schools in Jackson, Miss., have partnered with the Mississippi Department of Education to provide candidates with a no-cost master’s degree and dual certification in elementary and special education. In return, the new teachers promise to stay and teach in Jackson for three years. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1164800932/teacher-shortages-schools-explainer
• Professional Development Schools. This is an institution from the 1990’s that died for lack of funding. Classes in teaching were taught in fully-operating public schools where the gap between theory and practice was constantly challenged. Student teachers could come back to the methods classroom declaring, ” I tried this method and this is what happened.” Clinical professors would engage on the subject of what should happen vs. what works.  It would all occur within the same building, just a few doors away from the actual classroom with real students.  It was clinical education following the model of teaching hospitals. [https://online.suny.edu/epn/developing-a-professional-development-school-pds/].

The Professional Development School worked most effectively in small, under-enrolled schools, which makes St. Louis an ideal candidate.  Universities that prepare teachers must initiate the program by hiring or devoting faculty to clinical teaching in the schools. Teacher education professors would have to commit to a learning-by-doing methodology. In the public schools teachers would have to allow observers and conversations about how to improve teaching.

A significant by-product of Professional Development Schools is kids in schools get to see teachers in the making. They can see a community (university and K-12 teachers) devoted to excellence in teaching and see a bright career path.  The Professional Development School is challenging to set up, but the benefit is a cultural change in teacher preparation.

Improving public schools requires more than keeping the seats filled and the buildings maintained. It takes a village and generous funding to make a teacher, but good teachers are essential to school reform. When young people stop seeing the benefits of a career in teaching, there is serious disruption of the supply chain, to borrow a crude metaphor. It will take a community of teachers, teacher educators and determined public officials to make teaching an attractive career option for the next generation of teachers.

There’s no margin of error to plant seeds of disinformation and misinformation. There’s no margin of error to plant seeds of believing that in some shape, form or fashion, that one of the most horrific crimes known to mankind that was levied against people based on the color of their skin, brought some silver lining. [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/college-board-pushes-back-florida-work-group-member-likened-new-black-rcna97525]

The recent report of declining test scores among middle school students has alarmed parents and educators about the loss of in-class instructional time during the pandemic years. The details of that NAEP score decline are reported in the June 21 edition of the New York Times, among other media outlets.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/us/naep-test-results-education.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20230621&instance_id=0&nl=breakingnews&ref=cta&regi_id=58015410&segment_id=136280&user_id=c0905f751b354fe438caeb62c91726b3]

More concerning, the overall trend of testing by the National Assessment of Educational Progress over the years prior to the pandemic shows a regular decline, as noted in the Times article:

Performance has fallen significantly since the 2019-2020 school year, when the coronavirus pandemic wrought havoc on the nation’s education system. But the downward trends reported today began years before the health crisis, raising questions about a decade of disappointing results for American students.

The decline of Math and Verbal scores could be influenced by many factors. One cause echoes the seclusion of the corona-virus: chronic absenteeism, which also deprives students of the physical community and the facilities of the school. Chronic absence from the building where crucial learning takes place might be a reason for declining test scores both during the pandemic and before.  Without the peer and teacher reinforcement, the responsive approach to learning, the technology used to reinforce learning– all that is offered by attending school–students who are chronically absent miss the assets of in-person learning.

In the statistics provided below, chronic absence is defined as missing 10% of school days or more in a school year. Here are the most recent data for chronic absence:

Compiled by “Attendance Works,” an attendance-compiling study that highlights the effects of absenteeism on test results.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OEyUeswKs0lAMrWZaRbTX1rNEvWab-jI/edit#gid=1510369153

These figures indicate that as many as 8 million students (16.2%) have been chronically absent in an ordinary year, with 10 million chronically absent during the throes of the corona-virus. Those numbers of chronically absent students could easily drive down average test scores. The compiler of these statistics, “Attendance Works,” also highlights the public to research showing the academic impact of chronic absenteeism. (see https://awareness.attendanceworks.org/wp-content/uploads/Research2016.pdf).

Poor attendance is sometimes the elephant in the room when teachers and administrators discuss academic performance, because they assume that the responsibility for attendance is outside their control, more a function of family and student attitudes toward education. Sadly, some parents may send their children to school only to qualify for entitlement benefits,  which require a periodic “present” at school during the academic year. Such attendance has no benefit to education.

Schools are not helpless to improve attendance, even though students are motivated by their upbringing and home support to attend schools. “Attendance Works” identifies five strategies to address faltering school attendance, including “Programatic Responses” that the school can implement once the causes have been identified:

Identifying the barriers to attendance can indicate the appropriate solutions, whether that involves, for example, establishing uniform closets, improving access to health care, launching walking school buses, providing tutoring, offering mentoring, developing morning or after school care and other approaches. https://www.attendanceworks.org/chronic-absence/addressing-chronic-absence/strategies-for-school-sites/

Without getting into the weeds of school-specific solutions, the programs recommended by “Attendance Works” are practical to implement, if a school can devote or acquire resources to address the chronic absence problem, but it is a uniquely community-based problem.

Chronic absenteeism can be a consequence of poverty and broken families, along with the individual motivation of children to attend school. It is a community problem, best solved by the collaboration of social agencies within a community. Everything from transportation to public recognition can affect school attendance.

With the ability to offer virtual attendance, schools may have provided students and parents the motivation to miss in-person schooling to accommodate family needs, such as baby-sitting younger siblings, working full time to support family income, or avoiding problematic interactions at school.  Parents might consider virtual schooling a convenience that fits their life-style.

But the evidence of testing at the middle school level over the past decade confirms that learning outside of school is not a good option for adolescent students.  Motivation to learn is seldom enhanced outside of the school building, even if some students have been shown to thrive there. Participation in the school community increases motivation to learn and provides the individual reinforcement most students require in the middle years.

Virtual learning is mostly effective for students already motivated to learn. Consistent in-person attendance is the first step along the learning curve for most middle school students. School leaders and parents should resolve to keep students attending in person to preserve the valuable physical community of schools.

George Will continues his crusade against progressivism in academia in The Washington Post by pointing out how the college degree is worth less, because 38% of recent college graduates hold jobs that “do not require a college degree.” That statement does not reflect whether college graduates are preferred by employers or whether there are attributes of college graduates that make them more desirable as employees.

You have to acquire a college degree to teach in a public school, but you may not need one to work as an administrative assistant in a company with gross revenues of $1 million/ year.  However, businesses may prefer college graduates because of their communication skills, including the ability to understand a novel audience. College graduates understand the significance of their audience in ways that those who have only communicated with their family and friends may not.

Another skill that comes from a general college education is the detection and correction of bias or prejudice in written or spoken speech.  This is more than asserting “political correctness,” as right wing commentators call it, but understanding how language reveals an individual’s opinions of other races, religions, genders, or social classes.  Some people rightly take offense to being called “girl” or “boy,” because it shows disrespect. College graduates understand that language matters, and not only for the thin-skinned who take offense at everything.

Mr. Will objects to how history is taught in universities: “a prolonged indictment–ax-grinding about the past’s failure to be as progressive as today’s professors.”   This complaint suggests that our present condition is not influenced, for example, by the original slavery of, and economic prejudice toward, the Negro race.  Past indictments may illuminate present conditions. I’m sure Will would agree with the much quoted warning of Santayana, Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. Otherwise why do we study history at all?

Mr. Will objects to a study of literature “that is mostly about abstruse literary theories–‘deconstruction,’ etc.?”  Actually deconstructing language is a very modern skill necessary for studying social media. Deconstruction is a way of understanding how something was created, usually things like art, books, poems and other writing. Many readers of Facebook and Twitter posts take language at face value, and that is a problem, because they should understand how writers make use of words like “woke” or “globalism” or “diversity” rather than how the dictionary defines them.

Will’s problem is his higher education is private school-centered, where the most expensive, exclusive, politically-correct, and arcane literacy originates. In fact, students attending publicly-funded universities outnumber those attending privately funded universities 3 to 1. [https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment statistics#:~:text=73.0%25%20of%20college%20students%20at, graduate%20students%20attend%20public%20institutions]. Students at publicly-funded universities are more likely to get a workplace-oriented education, because employment is more often the goal rather than graduate school admission.  The academic setting imagined by Will is a private university where the majority of graduates go to graduate school. Yet private school enrollees represent only 25% of the university population.

But whether you go to graduate school or right into the workforce, as a c0llege graduate you have received training in that elusive notion “critical literacy.” College educators characterize it in various ways, but here is one:

When students examine the writer’s message for bias, they are practicing critical literacy.^[3] This skill of actively engaging with the text can be used to help students become more perceptive and socially aware people who do not receive the messages around them from media, books, and images without first taking apart the text and relating its messages back to their own personal life experiences.^[2][3]

It is not a course in literacy, but an attitude toward literacy that is lacking in many of those who missed college. It is both a skeptical and constructive stance toward reading and viewing that makes college graduates less subject to indoctrination.  Although critical literacy is taught in secondary school, not everyone gets it, because students are often co-dependent on their teachers.  Independent thinking is not always advocated in high school and even when it is, students are too grade-driven to take the risk of disagreeing with the teacher. That sophistication often develops in college, and critical literacy is the best reason for going to college, as a culmination of education.

George Will’s concept of a college education is too much driven by economic goals and political correctness. He needs to get out more and meet some graduates of our public post-secondary institutions, instead of following the headlines.  The reputable state universities (and some private colleges) are focused on the thinking that matters in the workplace, in the community, and on social media. The rest of the academic uproar over political correctness is only a distraction for the 75% who attend public universities.

The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. (Luke :2)

When Jesus uttered these oft-quoted words, he was in the midst of sending out seventy disciples to “every town and place where he himself intended to go.” In other words, these were “front men,” people hired to attract the crowds to the public teaching of Jesus.  I think of these people today as those called to service careers, where their primary mission is to touch those who have primary needs of safety, education and health.

In  education the enrollments in teacher preparation programs across the nation are 33% down. This suggests an impending shortage greater than the current one in which

the researchers estimate that there are more than 36,500 teacher vacancies in the nation. They also estimate that there are more than 163,500 positions filled by teachers who aren’t fully certified or are not certified in the subject area they’re teaching.  https://www.edweek.org/leadership/how-bad-is-the-teacher-shortage-what-two-new-studies-say/2022/09

The pandemic has been blamed for a teaching exodus, but the truth is that teaching just doesn’t attract young people as it once did, due to lack of adequate salary and benefits, as well as public attacks on local schools.  I could see this decline even in 2017, when I retired from teacher education.  The kind of teaching skills required today include technology for Zoom interactions, special education for students entering the mainstream, and cross-curriculum familiarity to integrate the humanities, a sophistication that a primitive teacher preparation program, such as “Teach for America,” cannot provide, and entry-level salaries cannot fairly compensate.   Teachers cannot afford to take the necessary 160+ additional credit hours needed for such preparation, for which the national average entry level salary is around $40,000/ year.

Healthcare has also faced a major exodus at a time when the demand for healthcare workers is skyrocketing. The healthcare sector faces a labor shortage, with most workers being overworked due to the pandemic. The Department of Commerce projects a severe lack of physicians, nurses, and health workers.  The stress of the pandemic has driven hospital workers out of the profession, but the demand for these professions continues to be exacerbated by a rising aging population in the United States, initiated by the Baby-boomers, but perpetuated by the increasing lifespan of Americans.

Public safety does not appear among the lists of job shortages, but it is worth noting that the St. Louis police force is down 250  officers at a time when increased lack of presence of patrol-men/ -women on the street is considered a public danger. The entry-level pay for the St. Louis police force is $50,615.

Most urban police forces lack adequate staffing of professionally trained officers.  The mere presence of patrol-people on the street is considered a crime deterrent in a time where urban crime is a major election issue.  So the need is critical and the supply is diminished. Teaching, healing and public safety are the work of laborers of the harvest, in  Jesus’ terms. You cannot work in these professions without a sense of calling, because the salaries cannot compensate for the daily challenges you face. You discover the soft underbelly of human suffering and the hard edges of addiction which demand discipline, patience and kindness, traits that sometimes come from training, but more often come from dealing with the hostility and the suffering that you “can’t pay me enough to do.”

Since these professions are always underpaid, the workers need to be called and committed to a life of service. You can argue that all professions require “service” of some kind, but not all professions are so underpaid for such extended hours and stress. Possibly the leisure and hospitality professions also provide a woefully underpaid service, and they also are losing employment at two times the national average.

What all these understaffed professions require is the call to be “laborers in the harvest.”  The labor is underpaid and the workers under-appreciated. Check any day’s headlines and see if one of these professions is not under attack, because those who expect to be served are not feeling adequately served. So there are weak incentives to enter the work unless as a “higher calling.”

I pray that the Lord of the Harvest will send these laborers. Unless the next generation of qualified workers hears the calling, we are facing a painful decline in our care industries and a coarsening of our lives. These jobs are not for the faint of heart or the materialistic . They are for those who still believe you can be called to a career and who are ready to accept they can’t be financially rewarded enough for their life’s work.