States have recently focused their efforts to reduce the nation’s teacher shortage by promoting strategies that “remove or relax barriers to entry” to quickly bring new people into the teaching profession.

California, for example, allows teacher candidates to skip basic skills and subject matter tests if they have taken approved college courses. New Mexico is replacing subject skills tests with a portfolio to demonstrate teaching competency.

Similarly, Oklahoma eliminated the Oklahoma General Education Test as a certification requirement. Missouri no longer looks at a prospective teacher’s overall grades – just the ones earned in select courses required to become a teacher. Alabama has moved to allow some who score below the cutoff scores on teacher certification exams to still get a teacher’s license, and Arizona’s education requirements for teachers now allow people without a college degree to begin teaching – so long as they are currently enrolled in college.

All of these efforts focus on recruiting new teachers, mostly by lowering requirements to make it easier for people to become certified to teach in public schools.

But these approaches do not address the actual causes of the nationwide teacher shortage. As we found doing research for our book “How Did We Get Here?: The Decay of the Teaching Profession,” college students who are interested in becoming teachers and current teachers agree: The root cause of the problem is a longstanding overall lack of respect for teachers and their craft, which is reflected by decades of low pay, hyperscrutiny and poor working conditions.

Disrespect to the profession is driving teachers away

Even before COVID-19 hit, teachers were leaving the profession at an increasing rate. In the late 1980s, annual teacher turnover was 5.6%, but it has grown to around 8% over the past decade.

The stress of teaching through a pandemic has been speculated to drive away even more teachers. About 1 in 6 teachers expressed that they would likely leave their job pre-pandemic, but this increased to 1 in 4 by the 2020-21 school year. While teachers continue to leave classrooms, fewer people are signing up to replace them.

In fact, the number of incoming teachers declined from 275,000 in 2010 to under 200,000 in 2020 and is projected to be under 120,000 by 2025. And even those staying on the job are so unhappy, many have been striking.

We found that the reasons teachers are leaving primarily revolve around the disrespect they and the profession consistently face. For example, teachers earn about 20% less than similarly educated professionals.

They also faced an escalating workload, even before the pandemic placed additional demands on their time, energy and mental health.

In addition, teachers have been experiencing diminishing control over what and how they teach. They are also regularly exposed to a continued tide of disrespectful student behavior and parental hostility, as highlighted by a survey of 15,000 educators that revealed a growing trend of students verbally and physically harassing teachers, as well as parents engaging in online harassment and retaliatory behaviors for teachers simply doing their jobs.

This overall lack of respect drives turnover from existing teachers and discourages potential teachers from considering the profession.

One college student told us, “I looked into teaching as a career pretty strongly … and every person I talked to, be it a grade school teacher or college professor, told me the same thing – that it was a lot of work, it was an unstable work environment, and the pay was very poor for the amount of work that you put in.” Unsurprisingly, she chose another career path.

The wrong solutions for the problem

A growing number of states have eliminated or have proposed to remove basic skills and subject matter exam requirements for teacher certification. Those prerequisites have long served as quality control checks for prospective teachers. While they do not guarantee effective teaching, they do serve as a minimum qualification threshold.

We believe efforts to loosen requirements for new teachers will bring more disrespect to the profession. History also suggests that they will make it so that schools that serve mostly students of color will have even fewer certified and experienced teachers than they already do.

But more directly, these efforts to boost teacher recruitment don’t address the reasons teachers are leaving the profession in the first place, which drive 90% of the demand for new teachers.

Lowering the standards to allow more people to enter the teaching profession may, for a short period, boost the number of people available to stand in front of classrooms. But that approach does not make teaching an attractive profession to consider, nor worthwhile for someone to stay and thrive in. Solving the teacher shortage problem requires solutions that reduce the numbers of teachers leaving the field and specifically address the lack of respect, low pay, hyperscrutiny and poor working conditions that they regularly endure.

Henry Tran, Associate Professor of Education Leadership, University of South Carolina and Douglas A. Smith, Associate Professor of Education, Iowa State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

After news broke that the U.S. declared monkeypox to be a public health emergency, friends and family started asking me, an infectious disease epidemiologist, if monkeypox is about to begin causing widespread death and chaos. I assured them that the Aug. 4, 2022, public health emergency declaration is about government resource allocation. Similar to the World Health Organization’s declaration of monkeypox as a public health emergency of international concern, the U.S. declaration isn’t calling for individuals who are not in a high-risk group to change anything about their lives.

There have not yet been any monkeypox deaths in the U.S., but more than 7,000 cases have been diagnosed thus far, and the spread of the virus to nearly every state is concerning. While most cases are still occurring among men who have sex with men, the virus is also transmitted through nonsexual skin-to-skin contact, so there is a risk of people in other population groups contracting the infection. The federal declaration is intended to help slow the spread of the virus among men who have sex with men and stop it from spreading to new communities.

What is a public health emergency?

Presidents and state governors have the authority to declare states of emergency when there is a potentially life-threatening situation and the resources routinely allocated to the responding agencies are insufficient for dealing with the situation.

In late July, 2022, for example, the governor of Kentucky declared a state of emergency following devastating flooding in the eastern part of the state. The governor requested and received federal assistance to help respond to the floods. The declaration didn’t mean that more flooding was expected. It just made extra resources available for rescuing stranded individuals and providing essential services, like shelter and drinking water, to displaced people.

Similarly, the monkeypox emergency declaration doesn’t mean that the government expects millions more cases in the next month. It is about helping health agencies get the vaccines and other tools they need to slow the spread of the virus.

Does the public health emergency call for public action?

No. The main thing the emergency declaration does is enable the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to get more of the funding and other resources that it needs to protect the public from a more widespread monkeypox outbreak. At this point, monkeypox is an emergency for the U.S. government’s public health agencies to deal with. It is not an emergency for the public right now. The goal of the emergency declaration is to prevent monkeypox from becoming a more widespread threat to public health.

First, the government will intensify its efforts to protect at-risk communities by trying to get new vaccine doses faster and increasing access to testing and treatment. Officials are also working with LGBTQI+ communities to educate men who have sex with men about reducing their risk of contracting the monkeypox virus.

Second, the emergency declaration calls for all states and other jurisdictions to share data with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It also authorizes the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to collect data about monkeypox testing and hospitalizations. These actions will give the Department of Health and Human Services better data about where monkeypox is occurring so the agency can distribute vaccines and the antiviral medication tecovirimat (Tpoxx) to the states and cities that have the greatest need for them.

Will the declaration boost the supply of vaccines?

The Jynneos vaccine is the only monkeypox-specific vaccine currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Increased demand for monkeypox vaccines has used up most of the world’s existing supply of Jynneos. It will take several months for additional doses to be manufactured. These new doses are expected to be delivered between the end of 2022 and the middle of 2023.

However, the emergency declaration explains that the government may use a “new dose-sparing approach that could increase the number of doses available, up to five-fold” – an approach called fractional dosing – to make the vaccine available to more people.

The package insert for the Jynneos vaccine specifies that it should be given in two 0.5-milliliter doses four weeks apart. The emergency declaration outlines a strategy in which people are instead given two 0.1-milliliter doses. If the lower dose is as effective as the full dose, up to five times more people could be vaccinated with the same amount of vaccine.

Fractional dosing is not a new strategy. During a 2016 yellow fever epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, clinical trials showed that a small portion of the approved vaccine dose was just as effective as a full dose at conferring immunity.

For the current monkeypox outbreak in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health will evaluate whether a smaller dose of monkeypox vaccine might be effective, as well as whether one shot provides about as much protection as two doses.

The emergency declaration does not call for schools, businesses, nursing homes or individuals to change their behaviors in any way or to prepare for any sorts of future restrictions. Declaring monkeypox a public health emergency just makes more resources available to help the government protect the public from this infectious disease.

Kathryn H. Jacobsen, William E. Cooper Distinguished University Chair, Professor of Health Studies, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As a former school principal and district superintendent, I’ve witnessed firsthand how some students struggle to settle into routines when a new school year begins.

Some students would show up late, if they came at all. Some told their parents they were sick and wanted to stay home.

A lot of this was due to the anxiety over going to a new school or having to adapt to new friends, new teachers and a new schedule. But sometimes it was the simple result of kids having gotten used to staying up late and sleeping in over the summer. The sudden change of having to wake up early to go to school can make kids very cranky.

Even though it can be challenging for some kids to start a new school year, there are a few simple steps that parents can take to make the process easier and less stressful. Here are four of my top recommendations:

1. Reestablish a bedtime

Don’t wait until the night before the first day of school to bring back bedtime. Do it a week or two before school starts. Then, stick to the schedule throughout the school year.

Sleep deprivation is one of the biggest detriments to students of any age doing well in school. Children of all ages need adequate sleep to improve their mood and their behavior.

Proper amounts of sleep range from nine to 12 hours for elementary and middle schoolers and from eight to 10 hours for high schoolers.

And, to ensure your child’s sleep is uninterrupted, keep technological devices out of the bedroom.

2. Practice the morning routine

A week before school begins, start practicing the morning routine. Are clothes and shoes chosen and ready to go? Are lunches and snacks packed? Are backpacks packed and easy to find?

Part of healthy child development is giving children a sense of control. To further this goal, let children pick out and lay out their clothes for the next day. Provide some basic guidance on what’s appropriate to wear to school. Allow children to pack the lunch or snack, again providing guidelines of what’s appropriate and what’s not.

3. Visit the school ahead of time

If possible, especially for children going to a new school, visit the school and practice walking to their classrooms.

Many schools offer orientations for students and their caretakers.

If there is no orientation, call the school and ask when it might be possible to come to walk around with your children to help familiarize them with their new classrooms. This will provide a level of comfort to your child on the first day of school.

4. Sign up for after-school activities

Encourage your child to participate in one or two after-school activities, whether school- or community-based. If the after-school activities are off-site from the school, ask school employees or after-school program providers about transportation.

Participation in extracurricular activities that interest your child can increase their motivation and ability to pay attention, both in the activity as well as school in general. However, be careful not to overschedule your child. The benefits of extracurricular activities – which include a stronger sense of belonging to the school community, higher grades and improved academic engagement – are maximized when after-school activities are limited to two.

Following these tips will hopefully help families make sure the school year gets off to a good start.

Suzanne McLeod, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.