![]() Next year, though, they'll have a brand new building. This first year, they've done most of their learning in portable classrooms. The pitch worked: 85 rising ninth-graders signed up. "We started asking students, 'What are you passionate about?' " If you love writing, or playing basketball, or video game design, she told them, those are all skills that someone is lucky enough to teach. So, Olivarez says, she changed her approach. " 'Come and explore this possible field.' And middle school kids were kinda like, 'Meh, school.' " " 'Come and enjoy a career in education!' " she remembers telling anyone who would listen. Last year, she traveled the district's middle schools, trying to recruit her very first freshman class. Olivarez is the school's founding principal and the new program's emotional engine. Kaylee Greenlee Beal for NPR CAST Teach student Christopher Olivarez surprised his mother, Ericka Olivarez, when he enrolled in the teaching high school she helped create. ![]() The purpose was to raise the profile of teaching and to eventually help staff Northside schools with Northside graduates. Northside Superintendent Brian Woods says, when the idea of creating a high school for aspiring teachers first came up, there was no teacher shortage. The idea of a teacher training program for high-schoolers like Christopher Olivarez isn't unique to Northside, but because of its implicit longview - it'll be at least another seven years before the current ninth-graders become full-fledged teachers, assuming they stick with the profession - it's less common and, in the short-term, less helpful to districts with immediate staffing gaps. In San Antonio, and in Bravo's classroom, the plan at work is less conventional. In Mississippi, a so-called Grow Your Own Program has helped Jackson schools provide no-cost master's degrees to aspiring, local teachers, and is now playing a critical role in tending hard-to-staff classrooms across the district. Many districts are now racing to bolster the traditional, college-level teacher-training pipeline that has, over the past decade, failed to produce enough educators to meet schools' increasing demands. Researchers and educators also point to a cultural undertow pulling at the profession: a long decline in Americans' esteem for teaching. Kaylee Greenlee Beal for NPR CAST Teach student Heather Faulkner, 14, helps a class during lunch at Forester Elementary.įor nearly a decade, fewer people have been going to school to become teachers pay remains low in many places and, with unemployment also low, some could-be teachers have chosen more lucrative work elsewhere. Interviews with more than 70 experts and educators across the country, including teachers both aspiring and retiring, offer several explanations. For several months, NPR has been exploring the forces at work behind these local teacher shortages. Society has taken teachers for granted, and 'now that is falling apart'Īccording to limited federal data, as of October, 45% of public schools in the U.S. are struggling with teacher shortages, including Bravo's own Northside Independent School District in and around San Antonio, Christopher represents many things in addition to the wind: a bold experiment, an expensive risk, a glimmer of hope. Because he's actually a ninth-grader - part of a brand new high school, just a couple miles away, for teens who are interested in becoming teachers.Īt a time when school districts across the U.S. While Christopher is a student, he is taller than the other second-graders, his voice deeper. The second-graders giggle and chirp their predictions.īravo asks student Christopher Olivarez to help by being the wind, and together they perform a playful duet between wind and wing, student and teacher. "But! If your hand is like this," she asks, pointing it into the wind, "like an airplane wing?" ![]() "The wind is strong! It makes your hand go 'Whoa!,' like this." Her hand quivers like a sail. "If the wind is going against your hand, what's your hand going to do?" Bravo asks, blowing dramatically against her open, upright hand. Something remarkable is happening at Nora Forester Elementary School in San Antonio, Texas, in teacher Patrice Bravo's STEM lab - a wonderland of technicolor gears, tools and laboratory doo-dads, all overseen by STEM's playful patron saint: Albert Einstein, poking out his tongue from a poster on the back wall.
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