Community must join forces to build teacher pipeline

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

— Margaret Mead

Renewed focus in recent weeks on the importance of preparing Nevada’s youth has been intense and well deserved. The release of the Quality Counts report in early February highlighted the breadth of this issue when it ranked Nevada last in preparing our children for future success. This report reinforced that the responsibility extends far beyond K-12 schools and classrooms. Committed, community-wide engagement is essential in helping to address these issues.

One of the most important factors is the capacity of our community to recruit, prepare, support and retain high-quality teachers. “Teacher pipeline” is often used to describe the necessary “flow” of licensed educators into and through their employment in schools.

The Clark County School District hired more than 2,200 new teachers this school year, and projections suggest the district will have 1,500 to 1,800 new openings over the next few years. These staggering numbers will be even higher if Las Vegas were to resume even a portion of its growth in the years preceding the Great Recession, and it would be even harder to fill our classrooms with talented and highly qualified teachers, especially in some of our community’s high-need schools and subject areas.

The good news: There are a wide range of agencies to help meet this demand. The school district itself actively recruits licensed educators from across the country to relocate to Las Vegas. Our institutions, the College of Education at UNLV and Teach for America, currently partner to prepare approximately 500 new educators each year, more than half of all new teachers prepared in Nevada. The University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada State College and a host of private institutions are also key contributors of educators, as are several universities in surrounding states. Alternative licensing programs, such as The New Teacher Project and the graduate licensure program at UNLV, are attempts to further increase the pipeline of qualified new teachers each year.

And yet, across all of these entities, fewer than 900 new teachers graduated from all sources in Nevada during the 2012-13 academic year, and the school district continues to struggle to recruit the number of new teachers needed.

As dean of the College of Education at UNLV and executive director of Teach for America-Las Vegas, we suggest that the “teacher pipeline” problem persists not because of a lack of commitment. Rather, we argue, a basic issue has been a lack of coordinated efforts across the multiple agencies involved.

As leaders in the effort to help provide an excellent education for all students, we commit to expand the number of high-quality educators we recruit, train and support each year. Teach for America currently prepares more than 125 new teachers each year and commits to increase this number to 175. The College of Education at UNLV has, in recent years, graduated roughly 300 teachers in our traditional undergraduate program and about 70 in our graduate licensure program. Through aggressive recruitment, increased capacity in each of these UNLV programs,and expansion of our alternative licensure programs, the College of Education commits to a goal of preparing 1,000 new educators each year. These 1,175 educators would meet nearly 70 percent of the Clark County School District’s estimated annual demand for new teachers. But this is only a first step.

With the generous assistance of Nevada Succeeds, we invite agencies that prepare teachers for valley schools to engage in an ongoing conversation about this issue. Our goal is a collaborative strategy for increasing both the number and quality of new teachers prepared by our institutions. A proactive, coordinated and data-driven approach will help us provide the school district with the highly effective workforce it requires.

This strategy will require investments that build each participating entity’s capacity to recruit, train and support greater numbers of qualified teacher candidates. Equally important will be the support of our respective constituencies, spanning the public, private and nonprofit domains.

There is no doubt about the imperative we face: We must do whatever is necessary to ensure that our schools have a well-prepared, sufficiently sized and effectively performing workforce. We hope that our efforts can contribute significantly to addressing this imperative and provide a strong foundation for future generations of educators in our city.

Kim K. Metcalf is a professor and dean of the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Victor W. Wakefield is executive director of Teach for America-Las Vegas.