Drawn by mission, kept by coaching
Part of an ongoing Badger Institute series about teacher loss in Wisconsin schools and what policy makers and administrators can do about it.
Facing an increasingly difficult market for hiring teaching talent, leaders of Wisconsin independent schools are developing useful strategies even as they look to the state for some fundamental policy and financial reforms.
“I think a teacher’s job is to be a lifelong learner themselves,” said one of those leaders, Kimberly Desotell, president of the GRACE Catholic schools system in Green Bay. “You can’t do the same thing you did today in teaching tomorrow. … We always have to be improving.”
One key response: Retain the talent a school has through deliberate and sustained coaching to help educators grow better at the work they chose. Others: changes in the timing of student teaching, alteration of certification requirements, and closing the funding gap with traditional public schools.