Radford University

When people try to claim that the teacher shortage we face is a retention problem, I laugh. Don’t get me wrong – I would love to see better working conditions and even higher salaries for teachers. But that will not come close to fixing the problem.

We no longer live in a society where someone works in one job, let alone one career, for life. Based on my daughter’s college friends, it is not going to get any better.

Two significant updates from the college world this week. I have a daughter at Radford University in Virginia and one who is a junior in high school.

We dropped our oldest daughter at Radford University for her first year and it really is quite impressive how things have changed. Part of this is due to the fact that someone at Radford mistakenly received training in customer service. Gone are the - "look left and look right because only one of you will be here". It has been replaced by bragging about freshman retention rates, graduate in four years rates and all the things other education pundits are pushing for in the US News rankings.