I've always been your ardent defender. I buy peanut butter buckeye candy for people out of state and I have a t-shirt with a red outline of you that says ?Midwest is Best.? And I really believe it.
I've lived in other states, and worked in far more thriving metropolises than what Ohio has to offer, but it always felt like testing out furniture in the IKEA showroom ? colorful, textured, wonderful ? but a little too much so. These places were my Karlstad sofa ? comfortable for a while ? but I ultimately couldn't settle in them.? They weren't home, good ol' heart-aching post-industrial-job-loss Ohio, in need of folks who believed in it.
And so I returned.
But here's my problem with you, Ohio. You don't make it easy. You're fighting a brain drain: young, bright people are fleeing the state en masse, and you're not drawing them back. We're a state full of soon-to-be runaways.
You've heard it before, but hear it again: you need to attract talent, and now. You need to be a magnet five times stronger than Indiana or Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or California, if you hope to reverse the insidious decline toward irrelevance. You are the mom-and-pop shop in the middle of a strip mall, about to go out of business. You need to get it together.
Luckily, someone in your shop had a brain-drain-fighting cape on when s/he wrote into your winning Race to the Top application that you will be seeking ?partnerships with alternative teacher programs like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project.? Alums of the programs rejoiced at that clause. I am writing to implore you to follow through with it.
Alternative teacher programs are not just about filling teacher shortages, but about creating climates ripe for reform, entrepreneurship, and Richard-Florida-like hubs of innovation. (By the way, you never fare well on his little scatter plots.) Alternative programs like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project not only place teachers into the schools that need them the most, but also create education leaders who form an attachment to place, who will not just buy a Midwest-themed t-shirt but may grow to love Cleveland or Columbus or Cincinnati or Dayton fondly enough to stay for the long haul. To be clear, this isn't a tradeoff ? attracting or retaining would-be educators via these non-traditional programs doesn't come at the expense of children's learning. These teacher training programs aren't less effective than the traditional ones, usually the opposite.
We need these programs not just to improve our urban schools, but to fight the brain drain that threatens to whittle us down even further.
I know you're not North Carolina or Louisiana or elsewhere, but multiple studies show the effectiveness of these alternative programs in places facing similar educational challenges (if not the extent of your brain drain problem). This recent study of TNTP (conducted by researchers at LSU) giving the program top ratings for preparing exceptionally effective teachers should reaffirm your promise to bring the program Ohio-side. You may argue that Louisiana is a more challenged place than Ohio, but try telling that to kids in some of our lowest performing cities.
The point is, we need these programs not just to improve our urban schools, but to fight the brain drain that threatens to whittle us down even further.
Last year, some 1,100 of Ohio's top graduates applied to Teach For America (I don't have the numbers for TNTP). Though not all got accepted, this flock of over one thousand of our best and brightest attempted ? or did?leave the state because such programs don't exist here.
At least not yet. But now you've made a promise ? a worthwhile one ? and I hope you keep it. I've met lots of alums of both of these programs, and education reformers and young professionals all over the place who'd consider a move to the heartland if an ed reform climate were thriving here. But let me tell you ? not all of them are as sentimental as I am. Do your part to win them over, Ohio.
- Jamie Davies O'Leary
