EDITORIAL: Bureaucracy, politics caused teacher shortage

The Clark County School District's shortage of teachers is a massive policy failure compounded by protectionism. By retaining bureaucratic barriers to the licensing of educators, the system is forced to fill hundreds of classrooms with the very people those barriers are designed to keep out of schools.

The school district began a new academic year Monday with almost 800 vacant teaching positions. As usual, those jobs were filled by substitute teachers, who lack the credentials and college coursework of licensed teachers but are deemed qualified to lead a classroom regardless, albeit at lower pay. What hypocrisy.

The state's education systems are run by people who went through the rigmarole of an education college, pedagogy training and other licensure hoops. A lot of them believe they'll devalue their career track if they support the idea that people from different professions can quickly become effective teachers through alternative training programs.

Nevada has made great recent progress in coming to terms with the need for alternative routes to teacher licensure. For example, teacher training programs such as Teach for America and Troops to Teachers are preparing hundreds of highly motivated people for work in the classroom. The Legislature this year approved millions of dollars in grant funding for such organizations, as well as scholarships to encourage young people to enter the teaching profession. Education Savings Accounts, charter school recruitment and other school choice initiatives will reduce the need for new government-employed teachers, too.

But more can be done. Seth Rau, policy director for education advocacy group Nevada Succeeds, said nationally renowned charter school operator BASIS won't come to Nevada because the state would take more than a year to approve its teacher certification program. That's nuts. Nevada is in no position to tell a highly rated school system how to best train its teachers.

This year, the Legislature gave charter schools with at least a three-star rating more flexibility in licensing their teachers (provided they have bachelor's degrees). Charter schools are public schools. Why not give every three-star school that power?

Of course, other factors are at play in driving Nevada's licensed teacher shortage. Once teachers are hired, good ones need to be retained. And that's exceptionally difficult when effective teachers are locked into a pay scale that values seniority over performance, and when educators are provided costly, lousy health insurance by their union, as they are in Clark County. Merit pay and better benefits would help.

This is a self-made crisis we can fix — if we have the will.