July 24 News Round Up & LW&R

Segment spotlights a couple of  news articles on teacher recruitment and retention. The episode also looks at some geeky and fun channels from the satellite radio universe.

Transcript

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Welcome back to education matters New York, I am your host, Wayne Ackles. And this week will be a news roundup and listen, watch and read week as well. And so thank you for joining the program. And let's get right started with the news roundup piece of it. In the June 29, edition of Education Week, they had a couple of articles related to teacher retention and teacher recruitment. And I wanted to highlight them because this continues to be an ongoing problem. I remember this was an issue, even long before the pandemic, in fact, early in my administrative career, there were certain fields, math, science and technology, especially, that have always been tricky in terms of recruiting and retaining teachers, frankly, because if you have a related science degree or a math degree, many times that will take you in places that will, you know, have a much higher starting salary, different work life balance, etc. The same with many of the tech degrees that are tech skills that people may have, where they may find that they can make a much more lucrative life in those other regions. But what's happening now is that there is clearly a shortage of teachers for a variety of reasons, the pandemic has caused many folks to exit early. Also, we have those folks that are not going in, because they are seeing, you know, the demands and and the payroll restrictions. And not that the pay is terrible. It's just you can potentially make more in another field. So I wanted to talk briefly about these two articles. One was written by Mark Lieberman, and it was it's titled One district's unusual recruitment tool. It focused on a number of districts but it caught my attention because it focused on the Scolari Central School District, which is, if you're familiar with the Thruway at all, you will see the scary exit as you're heading east toward Albany, or I guess West, but it's probably a little bit between Utica and Albany is where sqare is at. And it's lovely part of the state. But it's very rural. And they go into that into in the article. And they talk about that many of their teachers commute upwards of 40 minutes a day. And the recruitment tool that they talk about in this article is the use of electric car charging stations, with their for their employees that that's a perk. And what they did was they created these charging stations, and they're open to the public. Throughout the week, the teaching staff gets first dibs at them at a reduced price. What I'm guessing is there's probably some kind of identification number or key card or something that you have to punch into them. And if you're a member of the Ohio Republic, you can use them and get one of those cards. For one price. If you're a teacher, you you know as part of your employment, you get a different price for that. And so that was to me an interesting way of really looking at two problems. One is the issues that come with high gas prices and climate and all of those other issues. And also a becomes a recruiting tool. When you say look, if you join us, we have a charging station right here on site where you can recharge your car at a reduced price and save you the hassle of trying to figure out how you're going to charge that. The other article that was also in the June 29 edition was written by Elizabeth heubeck. Her article is about the four day work week. And that's the latest. It's called the latest PARCC four day work week. This one was interesting in that it talked about how throughout the nation is as recently as 2018 560 districts across the United States. 25 states in total, had four day work weeks. And this really It must be a challenging situation where a district has to decide that they can no longer go five days a week and they must go for. One of the things that she also states in the article is that in February of 2020 to that half of the teaching population was thinking of retiring, which was a pretty hefty stat. If you can imagine Now, she cites another study in there as well, where they looked at just general employee satisfaction. And she said that most people, one of the things that would make them consider or likely day in a position, and this wasn't just teachers, this was across the board in a position was the possibility of a four day work week. Now this one, as a perk, I think, I've always thought that, especially at the upper grade levels, especially, you know, your junior level, your senior level courses, I think we try to hang on to students at school, sometimes a little bit too tightly. And I think we need to open up those opportunities, whether they have internships, or work experiences or things like that. But I wonder, really how feasible it is, especially at the elementary level, to offer a five day work week. I know as a parent, one of the things that I was waiting for, was the day that I didn't have to worry about paying for daycare anymore. And that's not to say that our public schools are daycares. That's not what I'm saying. Because we did pay a reduced daycare rate after school and we paid for daycare when they were not in school. But it was a significant savings, there is something to be said that parents count on and need the support of their local school, in order to have, especially for the younger children, a place to go for those six hours a day, it makes a significant difference in a number of places around the country. And I would say probably most places is is working parents can attest to. So this will be you know, it's an interesting idea how widespread it can become, you know, that's something that we'll have to wait and see on. So I also said that today would be a listen, watch and read segment. And it's another listen segment today. The last segment I spoke a great deal about really, it was a public radio heavy assortment of things to listen to. And I'm going to balance that off a little bit with some offerings. I know I have friends and other folks and I include myself in this group that have satellite radio subscriptions. And there is a really, there's a tremendous continuum of programming. It's not all just music, for those of you that are kind of talk radio geeks, like myself, there is everything from sports, to comedy, to music, commentary, to politics, all all on that continuum. So if you do have a Sirius XM, subscription, I did want to share with you some of the things from the universe of of that world that I find that I listen to on a regular basis, for a number of reasons, both in terms of, you know, my inner geek, and also for entertainment beyond, again, the huge platform that it is for music, the one channel that I probably serve the most and come back to and often come back to online with some of the segments that are there. And speaking of online, there are a number of options that in terms of podcasts, or old episodes, just a number of extras that you can get as a serious subscriber, that if you can't catch a show, you can follow up. And I often, you know, I support my local NPR station out here WX exci, in Rochester, I've supported them for years now. And I continue to support them. I often listen to a lot of NPR offerings through Sirius XM, just because, you know, wherever I am, I kind of know the schedule. And I know that I don't have to worry about okay, trying to find that station to find that particular program. So, but here are some of the the things that that I have a tendency to listen to, and the one that really probably is probably one of the main reasons that I hang on to my subscription beyond the music. And there are other things that there are other ways, including Amazon, that I could probably get to music just as easily and frankly, more cheaply. But the talk radio side of things that I am drawn to is there's a channel on, it's around, I believe it's 121 or no I'm sorry, 124 it's called poor Lourdes, P O T US politics of the United States. And there are a number of shows on there that I either try to catch live or I often catch them and replay through the the web service. And one of them is Julie Mason mornings. She used to do a show called the press pool in the afternoon. That's where I first started to listen to her. And that was incredibly enjoyable. It was a great way to spend the day. Julie Mason's wasting mornings are a good way to start today. She has tremendous access largely to other reporters that cover the political beats, not just in Washington, but around the nation. It really gives some insight that some different perspectives also. She has a perspective on just how media covers politics. Kind of a look behind the curtain. And it really and she's entertaining. She's just a neat human being. And I would really recommend her show on on POTUS. Also Smerconish, Michael Smerconish, and he has a CNN show, but he has his own radio show on right after Julie Mason mornings that runs from about noon to arxys me nine to noon, Julie Mason show runs from 6am to nine. Again, what what's neat about him is that Smerconish really tries to stay in the middle and show a number of perspectives. He has a website that coincides with his show in terms of resources and articles, and he references them throughout his show. And it's neat to be able to go back and read those articles, to get a little bit more depth and understanding on a topic and very thoughtful, and some neat stuff there. And the last show from POTUS that I'll mention here, and this is a show that plays on Saturdays. And this is for the incredibly geeky, especially political, but just in general kind of human nature, public policy, geeky kind of stuff is a show called trendline. And basically what this show does, and I think it's on at like 10am. On Saturday mornings, I might have the time just a little bit off, but I'm pretty sure it's right around 10am. And what they focus on is the different surveys and other metrics that can be measured on people's, you know, whether it's political support, or their takes on things that are happening in the world right now or their take on, you name it. And it's very fascinating, not only to listen to them talk about what is happening, the data that supports that in terms of some of the surveys, but also the work that goes into creating the survey work, and how they collect the data and why some polls are better than others and other things like that. And that's, to me, that's fascinating to understand, you know, what's behind the curtain and understanding that data a little bit better. So I would recommend POTUS a great deal. The other stations that I would recommend, and I'll just this one is a kind of a broad variety. There's a number of comedy stations on Sirius XM platform, I think they start around 99. And they there's probably three or four stations within quick succession of each other and they run run the gamut of different political or excuse me, different styles of humor and sources, whether it's from Comedy Central or Netflix. But it's a nice change of pace. Sometimes, you've listened to as much music as you can, or in my case, you've listened to as much talk radio as you can. And it's nice to switch it up and listen to just straight comedy. And having someone that has delivered a monologue that hits hits every no and makes you laugh and you know people look at you strange as you're at a stop stoplight laughing hysterically at that stoplight. So I would really recommend those channels as well. And the last one and this is also a good culture, kind of gauge and it's just it's it's really interesting to follow, especially if you feel like as a teacher, you've kind of lost up with where you're at versus where the kids are at. This is a station called VA volume. And volume is a station that focuses solely on music. They talk. They have a number of shows that talk about the state of music. What is trending right now? What artists are touring, and just in general kind of world where the world of music is out. And I find that I listened to it a lot in terms of just understanding not only current music, and what some of those trends are, but also there's a number of shows on there that are highlighting what previous acts are up to, and interviews with some of those heroes from for me, it's the hair metal folks that I find myself gravitating toward just hearing what those folks are up to and hearing some of the interviews with them is pretty interesting as well. So that's our episode for this week. I really hope you have enjoyed it again with the news roundup and the listen watch and read. We will have a guest coming on later in the week as we really start getting the show back into high gear. This has been education matters New York. I'm your host Wayne Ackles. And this is a fat Wolverine. Take care and have a great rest of the week.