As new Board of Ed can­di­date Shaver pre­pares to take office, she is lay­ing out a pret­ty sound agenda:

Shaver said pri­or­i­ty num­ber one would be to hire a new com­mis­sion­er of edu­ca­tion after for­mer com­mis­sion­er Bob Corkins resigned recent­ly. Shaver said she thought the new com­mis­sion­er would need expe­ri­ence in edu­ca­tion and man­ag­ing large groups of peo­ple, along with com­mu­ni­ca­tion and finan­cial skills.

After that, Shaver said there are sev­er­al key issues to work on.

“When I was out cam­paign­ing and talk­ing to folks, par­ents, teach­ers, every­body is con­cerned about No Child Left Behind and the reg­u­la­tions for that, the test­ing involved,” Shaver said. “I believe there has to be some atten­tion giv­en to review­ing that. That’s at the top of a lot of folks’ agenda.”

Shaver said anoth­er issue includ­ed the teacher shortage.

“We talk a lot about teacher short­age,” Shaver said. “It does­n’t seem to be as crit­i­cal in this area, but it will be. So I think the state board needs to look at how to solve some of those issues.”

One issue I’d love to see the Board tack­le would be ways to bet­ter inte­grate tech­nol­o­gy into teach­ing. That’s a sub­ject that a lot of the can­di­dates for Com­mis­sion­er of Edu­ca­tion had focused on last time around, and I expect that the best can­di­dates this time will have a sim­i­lar emphasis.

Tech­nol­o­gy can help address short­ages of expert teach­ers in some rur­al areas by pro­vid­ing long-dis­tance teach­ing or oth­er assis­tance from expert teach­ers in fields that over-stretched school dis­tricts some­times have trou­ble hiring.

And in tack­ling teacher short­ages, I’d empha­size the impor­tance of teacher reten­tion as much as teacher recruit­ment. Peo­ple may sign up to teach with the best of inten­tions, but any teacher you talk to has hor­ror sto­ries galore, and very lit­tle in the way of offi­cial perks to bal­ance those out. No sur­prise then that teacher reten­tion rates nation­wide are quite low, and that pro­grams like Teach for Amer­i­ca have had to re-orga­nize them­selves in order to keep their trainees work­ing in schools that bad­ly need bright, enthu­si­as­tic teachers.

Bring­ing in a Com­mis­sion­er of Edu­ca­tion who cares about pub­lic schools and rescind­ing stan­dards that put teach­ers in awk­ward binds between the truth and Board required mate­r­i­al will obvi­ous­ly help, but undo­ing the bad deci­sions won’t be enough to stem the flow of teach­ers out of the state or the profession.