As new classical schools sprout nationwide, fueling a revival of liberal arts and virtues-based education, there is no reliable pipeline of trained teachers from which to recruit.
Classical education demands an unusual synthesis: a teacher who is intellectually serious, well-versed in the great books, morally grounded, and pedagogically effective in techniques such as explicit instruction and Socratic seminars.
One increasingly common solution is recruiting “refugee teachers”―typically veterans of traditional public schools who have grown disillusioned with the K?12 system’s ideological trends and bureaucratic constraints.
To address the classical teacher pipeline challenge, policymakers should remove credentialing barriers, and schools should expand teacher fellowship programs, recruit from a wider range of colleges and universities, invest in HR infrastructure, take advantage of graduate programs that form teacher-leaders, and seek out refugee teachers and mid-career switchers.