This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Utah can't seem to keep its teachers teaching, so instead we're finding other people to do it?

The Utah State Board of Education last month changed teacher licensing standards so that non-teachers could begin teaching in public schools if they had bachelor's degrees and demonstrated subject mastery. This has brought blowback from teachers who point out that mastery of a subject says nothing about how well someone can teach. To the vast majority of teachers who went to college to learn how to teach, it shows disrespect to both the teachers and the students who must learn from less trained teachers.

The board says it acted out of a very real concern that school districts can't find enough qualified teachers to meet the needs of the youngest state in the nation.

But this isn't a teacher shortage. It's a teacher leakage. We already have enough college-educated people specifically trained to be teachers coming out of our universities. They have all the skills that both the Board of Education and the teachers believe are needed at entry into the profession.

But then we chase them away. The state's own data released earlier this year show that nearly half of Utah teachers give up within the first five years. Thousands simply burn out on Utah's low school funding and large classes, and many of those, particularly those with some "STEM" skills, are finding their way to jobs in Utah's growing tech sector.

This is a downward spiral. Those technology companies — already forced to go out of state to fill software engineering positions because Utah can't produce enough college-educated engineers — are enticing teachers to fill some positions. It's easy to see where that is headed. If we can't keep enough good math teachers in K-12, it reduces the number of engineers we will produce in colleges, thereby keeping the pressure on the tech sector to hire away our teachers.

So paying market wages for teachers is a big part of this, and, frankly, that is true even if we let other college-educated people teach.

But so is putting more merit into the system. If teachers want the respect they deserve, they, and particularly their union, need to be more willing to base compensation on success, not just years of experience. We will always argue over the criteria for assessing teacher success (student test scores producing the most arguments), but as long as years served is the main determinant, we'll see many of the best and brightest young teachers leave for employers who will reward their talents years earlier.

Don't lower the standards to let untrained teachers in. Raise the rewards to keep the good ones from leaving.