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College of Education Dean Authors Article Concerning Education Policy in Rural Areas
By Katlyn McGraw (March 2007)
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – College of Education Dean David Monk has authored “Recruiting and Retaining High Quality Teachers in Rural Areas” which appears in the March 2007 volume of The Future of Children: Excellence in the Classroom, published by The Brookings Institution and Princeton University as part of their series The Future of Children.
Dean David Monk |
The editors of the volume approached Monk, he believes, because of his knowledge and previous research regarding rural education and rural education policy making.
“The Future of Children series addresses important policy issues and each volume is focused on a particular theme,” said Monk. “The series is quite visible within policy making circles and strives to provide research-based evidence that will be helpful to those who are involved in policy making.”
In his article, Monk addresses the profile of many rural schools: high teacher turnover, difficulty hiring qualified teachers, low compensation, transient populations, and populations of students with special needs.
Monk focuses attention on the challenges involved in recruiting and retaining qualified educators in rural schools. He also emphasizes the need to create policies specifically for “hard-to-staff rural schools” rather than a general policy for all rural schools.
Additionally, Monk addresses
the creation of a national database to track
students' academic progress. This database would be especially useful
in
monitoring students whose parents are migrant farm workers and need to
travel frequently. Editors of the volume encourage authors to focus on
the
use of evidence to inform policy and convened an author conference held
at
Princeton University in spring 2006 where detailed feedback was provided.
“The experience was intellectually stimulating and involved quite an impressive group of authors from many different perspectives.”
The Future of Children: Excellence in the Classroom is expected to be made available to the public free of charge at the end of March at www.futureofchildren.org.
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The Penn State College of Education serves approximately 2,800 undergraduate and 1,200 graduate students each year. The College prepares administrators, counselors, psychologists and researchers, as well as K-12 teachers in 21 different specialty areas. All of the College of Education graduate programs, that are ranked by the U.S. News & World Report, appear at least in the top 15, with six programs in the top ten.The College's Higher Education Administration program is ranked 1st and the Workforce Education and Development program is ranked 2nd. The College is known nationally for its education research and outreach, housing such centers as the Center for the Study of Higher Education, the Center for Science and the Schools, the Mid-Atlantic Center for Mathematics Teaching and Learning, and the Regional Education Laboratory--Mid-Atlantic.
For more information on Penn State’s College of Education, contact EdRelations@psu.edu, call 814-863-1192, or visit www.ed.psu.edu.