Thoughts on Public Education

Tonight we enjoyed a nice VoteShiozawa cottage meeting hosted by Gloria Johnson, in Cottonwood Heights.  We had an engaging discussion with many of her neighbors about a number of topics including last night's Presidential debate.  We also discussed public education and some current concerns. These include large classroom sizes and methods to remedy this.  One obvious solution is to hire more teachers.  However, the cost of implementing this fix would be up to tens of millions of dollars and could be cost prohibitive.  Another concept would be to use a "mid-level provider" much like we do in clinics and hospitals.  For example, many physician practices which are very crowded are using physician assistants (PAs) and Nurse practitioners to increase the number of providers and to increase the accessibility of the clinics to patients.  Patients under this plan have a much better chance of being seen on a timely, even same-day basis.  This has the other advantage of keeping many of them out of the very expensive ER setting.

So, consider doing a similar staffing model in the classroom using teachers aides.  Teachers aides could assist the classroom teacher, who could then both teach and supervise.  The individual students would get valuable and personal interaction, despite the large numbers in the classroom.  This concept would effectively reduce the classroom size and increase the face-to-face interaction with the teacher and the aides. Teachers aides would also be much less expensive to hire and could be specialized to teach important topics like reading, math, language, music and the arts, for example. 

We all recognize the importance of good, quality education. We also know that each year, the number of new students in Utah schools increases by 8,000-12,000.  This is both a blessing and a challenge. How can we handle the increase in students, maintain quality and achieve reasonable classroom size?  This concept of aides is one that we can and should pursue more.