Two parts to a recipe...the ingredients and directions. Adjust either one of the two parts and you may have a delightfully wonderful new creation or an epic inedible fail.
Consider the current ingredients of education right now:
Rapidly increasing teacher shortages and teachers leaving the profession--more and more of them exiting mid year.
Declining rates of students in teacher preparation programs--whether traditional or alternative pathways.
Rising mental health concerns for students which have attributed to increased student behavior problems, decreased student engagement, and increased absenteeism.
Political and parental influences in education ranging from what books can be in a library, what curriculum can be taught, how to handle discipline matters, to teacher salaries and how school buildings should or should not be used along with school vouchers and ESAs.
It is the proverbial recipe for disaster.
Within the next five years, if not sooner, our schools will be full of classrooms of students and no adult to teach them. It is already starting to evidence itself in many of our schools and unfortunately those schools typically serve the most at-risk students, underrepresented students, and/or our rural communities. Students sit in a room and "watch" their lessons from a virtual instructor from another state/school/country. In some schools, a paraprofessional is standing in for the teacher and simply doing the best they can.
Why is this a disaster? Because it only exacerbates the learning loss from the pandemic which only compounded the achievement gaps and performance of our students present before the pandemic. It has been three years since our schools and children were thrust into a virtual learning environment ill-prepared and ill-equipped. We have not recovered. Indeed, the smoke alarm has sounded because we cannot keep this mix of ingredients baking any longer. We need to either change the ingredients or change the directions. Ideally, we would do both.
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