Nursing Has Great Career Ladders — Why Doesn't Education?

I think the education profession should be set up a lot more like the nursing profession.

Here's what I mean.

Let's talk about career ladders in education.

And this is one especially for paras or for people who have been through a para to teacher program or a classified to certified program.

I think we need much more of this in our profession.

And as I said yesterday, I think paras really are the future of the education profession because we're not getting people to enter the profession in nearly sufficient numbers through the traditional route of college-based teacher certification programs, especially starting in undergrad.

Now, some people will still enter the profession through a master's program, but it's a big problem to the profession that these programs cost tens of thousands of dollars and often require you to take months away from paid work to do some sort of internship.

So it makes a ton more sense to me that we would try to reconfigure things to be a little bit more like the nursing profession.

I feel like the nursing profession has got this...

figured out much better than we do in education because in nursing, you can start as a CNA.

You can basically walk in off the street and get certain jobs with like almost no training, maybe a little bit of training.

And then you can work your way up all the way to being a DNP, a doctor of nurse practitioner, nurse practice.

We have friends who are that.

I don't know what it stands for, but you know, you can work your way all the way up and learn as you earn, right?

Make money as you go, stay employed as you advance your certifications.

And I especially think we need more intermediate steps.

It is not enough steps to say we have para, teacher, admin.

Not nearly enough steps.

We need to have many more steps.

Not all para jobs require the same level of skill.

It does not take the same level of skill to supervise on the playground, which you can train someone off the street to do pretty quickly.

as it does to be a highly trained para working with students with disabilities, you know, in a special education setting.

So I think we need job categories and kind of steps and grades within paras.

We need that within the teaching profession.

And I don't know, we kind of already have that in admin to some extent, at least.

when it comes to salaries.

But I think we just have to make it much easier to get into this profession if we want to have enough people coming into the profession.

Let me know what you think.

And I think money needs to go with that also.

Part of keeping people in the profession is giving them the opportunity to earn more money by increasing their training, by sticking around longer, by increasing their responsibility, having them move into more in-demand jobs.

And that's not to say we won't ever need, you know, the just kind of basic jobs where we just need an adult who can supervise kids or work with kids in a kind of basic way.

Like, those jobs are probably never going to pay great.

But if you've been doing this for 20 years, if you've been building your skills, if you've been getting really good at working with students, there should be opportunities for advancement in the sense of money as well as job category, right?

Like, if we want to pay people...

If we want to keep people, we have to be willing to pay them more over time as their skills increase.

So let me know what you think.