Teach For America-Colorado Executive Director Damion LeeNatali is leading an effort to inspire and train new teachers with diverse backgrounds.
As a high school English teacher, I was continuously amazed at the foresight of my students. I still remember the day that Jorge came to me with an idea of easily moldable Lego blocks.
"Using square blocks doesn't always make sense," he said. "How can you build tomorrow with only square blocks?"
I think back to Jorge when I look at our education landscape, because our system is poised for change of massive proportions. Of the 57,000 teachers in Colorado, up to a third are projected to retire in the next five years.
Nationally, the prospects are even worse: Of the 3.5 million teachers across the country, up to 1.7 million will be retiring by 2020. At the same time, interest in the teaching profession is at an all-time low.
Teach For America is a national nonprofit that recruits, develops, and mobilizes nearly 5,000 high-caliber leaders every year to join the education profession. Our belief is that transformational change requires leadership at every level. So, in the first two years of TFA, our leaders teach in a classroom setting. After their two-year initial commitment, our leaders go on to become master teachers, school leaders, policymakers and social entrepreneurs.
I was hired as the executive director of TFA-Colorado to continue to build out a pipeline of highly-talented leaders in the education profession. What I have quickly realized is that we actually need to reengineer the entire profession if we are to be equal to the challenge of solving our teacher shortage crisis.
In my first four months on the job, our team has engaged nearly 500 students, families and education and policy leaders to craft a statewide solution. During that time, three themes have emerged:
We need to dramatically diversify the composition of our corps by doubling down on our existing recruitment of homegrown talent.
We need to reimagine our program to better suit the needs of students and schools while making it more attractive and sustainable for our teachers.
We need to research and develop the re-engineering of the teaching profession. Given the teacher shortage, this moment represents a crucial opportunity to begin to rethink the barriers to enter the profession -- and the incentives to exit.
So what can be done? Our state has incredible people with incredible expertise, but there's no simple way to connect those who could use training (like our teachers and school leaders) with those who have the expertise (imagine the power of a private-sector financial analyst helping a principal build his budget).
All of these things will take significant time and investment from everyone is our community, and TFA is developing an easy-to-use platform for business leaders, community members, and others to volunteer their time and talent to build the capacity of our teachers and schools.
The challenges confronting education have never been more daunting, but I've never been more optimistic that Colorado is equal to the task. Together we can build the leaders who will build tomorrow.
Teach for America's mission is "to enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation's most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence." To learn more please visit www.teachforamerica.org or email Damion here.
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