Rural teachers invited to take survey; education group hopes responses will help rural districts lure more teachers - Entrepreneur Generations

It's getting harder and harder to recruit and keep teachers in rural schools. So a group of education organizations is conducting a nationwide survey to find out what rural teachers and administrators love and hate about their jobs, in hopes of making rural teaching jobs more attractive, Liz Carey reports for The Daily Yonder. The Survey of Rural Schools and Communities is a partnership of the National Rural Education Association, the Rural Schools Collaborative, and The New Teacher Project.

The problem has been getting worse over the past 30 to 40 years, according to Gary Funk, director of the Rural Schools Collaborative. "As more teachers reach retirement age in those school districts, there isn’t any policy to attract new teachers to those positions," Funk told Carey. "This is a tsunami that has been building up for some time." It's especially hard to find teachers at the secondary level, and in math, science, technical education, and special education, he said.

Though negative aspects of rural teaching are well known, like the frequent lack of broadband access, there are positives too, like smaller class size, Carey reports. The collaborative hopes rural school districts will use negative survey responses to address those concerns and positive survey responses as talking points to lure new teachers. To further facilitate new hires, the survey website will eventually host a rural teacher job listing board.

The collaborative will collect responses to the survey through the end of April, and expects to release the results this summer, Carey reports. Click here to take the survey.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2GPE5ts Rural teachers invited to take survey; education group hopes responses will help rural districts lure more teachers - Entrepreneur Generations

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