Posts
Teacher Retention/Highly Qualified
Cowboy had requested information on teacher retention in another thread. Here's the answers I received from Human Resources.
We hired about 350 teachers in the last year.
We had the following number of teachers leave:
Step 1= 53
Step 2= 73
Step 3= 36
Step 4= 13
Step 5= 6
You can see that the number tends to decrease after the first two years. There is always movement in these two years.
Maryland Dept of Education reports the following statistics in regard to the percent of classes being taught by Highly Qualified teachers. This means that the teacher is deemed Highly Qualified by state standards and is teaching that particular class.
2,445 classes reported
447 classes not taught by HQ teacher
82% taught by HQ teachers
However, the total number of HQ teachers employed by Charles County Public Schools is closer to 92%. This means that 92% of our teachers are certificated/highly qualified in a grade(s) or subject area. The difference of the 10% happens when a teacher is assigned to teach a class out of their area of HQ status. Ex:- HQ Physics teacher teaching a general science class.
5 comments:
After looking at the "rubric" and the classes required to be "highly qualified", I was a little perplexed.
These classes are freshman and sophomore level classes in college.
This frightens me. How can these teachers be considered highly qualified with these type of classes.
I simply (and many others) can't consider a teacher to be highly qualified if they don't have at least a 4 year major in the subject that they are teaching.
Do I need to list the required classes at University of Maryland?
Or, any other decent school?
Look at the biographies of the mathematics teachers that teach at Dematha HS:
http://www.dematha.org/index.php?cms=54
Now tell me that we have highly qualifed teachers.
It's an embarrassment.
There's an easy solution to your problem. Send your kids to DeMatha.
Why should we have to?
Why can't we dredge up the academic levels in the county schools?
Let's hire these type of teachers that teach at DeMatha that have degrees in physics and mathematics, to teach in our schools?
The heck with all the BS classes required to get some dimwitted certification.
We need people that have the lights on upstairs to get a pure degree in mathematics, chemistry, physics, computer science, etc...to teach our scientific classes.
Who knows, we may actually start seeing some results instead of declining SAT scores and bottom of the barrel AP scores.
We have some very talented teachers in this county. We also have too many that really have no clue what lies ahead of a student's academic career, some only being steps ahead of the levels at which they teach.
Unfortunately, we are having too many experienced teachers either retiring or leaving the profession.
Well said by a University of Maryland Professor:
http://www.math.umd.edu/~jnd/subhome/BD_Oct%202003.htm
Although this contains some dated information, it is still sadly right on the money.
As a lack of mastery of a student's skills in many subject areas, this is propogated until higher level HS teachers ask "you should have learned this years ago". Well, why doesn't someone have the balls to change a broken system?
You shouldn't have to send your kids to DeMatha, I agree. My original response was a reaction to the first post which seemed to imply that there are no capable and qualified teachers in Charles County.
Oh my, no. That's not what I meant.
There are too many that don't know what they are doing, from elementary on up. We've lost way too many veteran teachers. Too many "fed up" with the system.
And we are allowing way too many to get into "non-classroom, full time teaching jobs". These jobs should be reserved for veteran teachers, not newbies that don't like to teach children.
We lack veteran teachers as there is. Let's reward successful, veteran teachers with jobs which will give them a much needed break of the day to day doldrums as well as sharing their expertise and experience with newer teachers.
Post a Comment