Zimpher, Elia support teachers during stop at UB

New York State’s two top educators brought their statewide “listening tour” to UB yesterday, focusing attention on the upcoming teacher shortage while continuing their campaign to support the teaching profession.

SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher and state education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia met with local educators and doctoral students from UB’s Graduate School of Education in the newly renovated Hayes Hall. It was the fourth stop on a tour throughout New York State to show how SUNY and the state education department are working together to support the teaching profession and encourage good students to become teachers.

“This is the picture,” Zimpher told more than 100 local educators and doctoral students attending the daylong conference. “Higher education and K-12 coming together at a policy level to lift up teaching.”

“Higher education and K-12 have figured out we have to be on the same page,” Elia said.

The statewide campaign to promote teaching — called TeachNY — has special relevance for UB. The Graduate School of Education has launched its own program to recruit top students to enter the profession as many baby boomer teachers leave their jobs. GSE administrators say it now could be the best time in decades to become a teacher, pointing to state Department of Labor statistics predicting teacher shortages by 2022.

The coming demand for teachers presents an opportunity for accomplished students looking to find a profession with good career prospects that also elevates the people they serve and their community.

“Teachers and teacher education impact student lives and our communities in an integral way,” said GSE Dean Jaekyung Lee. “A great teacher can change a student’s life, and those students go on to positively impact society. As some of the most influential role models, teachers are responsible for more than just academic enrichment.

“Great teachers are made, not born.”

Throughout the day, the state’s two top educators expressed their joint commitment to removing the obstacles facing teachers, as well as restoring confidence and support to those in the classroom.

“We have to stop denigrating this great profession,” Elia said.

The conference included meetings with UB doctoral students, during which Zimpher and Elia asked them why became interested in teaching in the first place. Monica Ridgeway, equity and inclusion coordinator for the Education Collaborative of Western New York, told Zimpher and Elia how she went from a high school dropout to a student finishing her doctoral dissertation at UB because of the encouragement and example set by several minority educators along the way.

Ridgeway named Monica Washington, assistant to the chair and graduate student coordinator in UB’s Department of Learning and Instruction, as one of the people who had a “very influential” impact on her path to earning a doctorate. Washington listened to Ridgeway’s questions during a phone call and told her she needed to think about a doctoral program, something Ridgeway had never considered.

“Key women of color have basically encouraged and shown people that not only are these things possible, but they are much needed,” Ridgeway said. “That’s so important. Students of color — but also their white counterparts — need to see this as well. We do have things we can contribute.”

Zimpher and Elia, who continue their listening tour today with a visit to SUNY Geneseo, told their UB audience that cooperation and coordination among higher education institutions and schools in need of their graduates are extremely important.

“We just left a group of doctoral students who said one of the key things that has to happen in education is we have to have community partnerships, school partnerships with the university,” Elia said. “I couldn’t underscore that enough. It is extremely important we all understand we are together in this, and an educational institution of a university or college has to be connected to our K-12 system.”

“That’s what we heard,” Zimpher added. “Teachers want to be respected. They want people to understand the work that they do. And most of all, at the heart of it, these are dedicated people who chose teaching because they want to help young people learn. They want to be recognized for their own professionalism.”