Lately, we are hearing a lot of chatter about making changes to our public schools. Creating charter schools and changing the way we hire teachers seem to dominate the news, and they are effectively blinding us from our more pressing problems.
Taking a second look at these issues can be good, but change merely for the sake of change is rarely constructive. And in this case, it is a distraction.
Focus should be on the one issue no one seems to want to discuss - the shortage of certified teachers and qualified school service personnel.
Research tells us that the most important factor in a child's education is the presence of a highly qualified and certified teacher. Unfortunately, odds are pretty good that a student who took chemistry, math, foreign language or even language arts in a West Virginia public high school last year did not have a teacher who was specifically trained to teach the class.
In other words, the teacher was not certified to teach the subject matter.
In fact, according to a recent report, 56 percent of chemistry positions in our schools went unfilled just two years ago, meaning teachers with at best some science background filled in.
Over the last two school years, 10 percent of all classroom positions posted were not filled by educators certified in the specific area. That's up from 7 percent three years ago, and the problem is only getting worse.
Equally sobering is that the shortages are not restricted to one area of the state.
Contrary to the conclusions reached by members of the Governor's Twenty-First Century Job Cabinet (many of whom have not been in a classroom since high school), it is not the way we hire teachers or the absence of charter schools that place us at a disadvantage in recruiting certified teachers.
Rather, it is our low salaries.
But now we are about to add a new wrinkle. While West Virginia and many states freeze teacher salaries, we are sailing against the wind with our plan to eliminate retiree health insurance for future education personnel.
I have yet to hear a coherent explanation how this help in our recruitment efforts and stem the migration of our student and veteran (and certified) teachers to school systems in Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Moreover, we delude ourselves if we think that tinkering with the way we hire teachers or creating charter schools will be our "silver bullet."
As I have said before, AFT-WV is not blindly against charter schools (with certain caveats). In fact, years before the charter school movement was co-opted by right wing ideologues, AFT President Al Shanker envisioned charter schools as centers of innovation for academic excellence.
They were always intended to be incubators - small pilot schools where new ideas could be tested. If successful, the point was to bring those innovations into the larger public school system so all students could benefit.
This is exactly the type of reform envisioned by AFT-WV when we helped to pass the 2009 Innovation Zones Act of 2009.
It is our hope that the Innovation Zones Act will foster teacher-led laboratories of reform that will experiment with new instructional practices. These practices would then be subjected to rigorous evaluation and, if successful, serve as models for other schools.
So let's be patient while state Department of Education awards the first round of the Innovation grants before we pass judgment on whether this constitutes real reform.
Let's use the next 60 days to find creative solutions to address the real problem facing public education - the lack of certified teachers and qualified school service personnel.
The silly season is over. It is time to get to work and make a better future for our children.