428: Our teacher shortage needs more than a band-aid fix

"This is not going to solve the problem," Rebecca Pitkin, the executive director of North Dakota's Education Standards and Practices Board, said on this episode of Plain Talk.

She was talking about her board's recent request of Gov. Doug Burgum to issue an emergency order setting aside some teacher licensing requirements so that student teachers can run classrooms without supervision.

"This is a band-aid," she told me and my co-host Chad Oban (full disclosure, his day job is at North Dakota United, the state teacher and public worker union).

Pitkin answered questions about how student teachers might react to being asked to run classrooms without oversight, and why more hasn't been done prior to this immediate crisis to address what is a long-standing problem in our state.

I also asked Pitkin about this tweet from Rep. Zac Ista, a Democrat from Grand Forks, who complained in a post on X that the ESPB board opposed his proposal to remove relicensing requirements from long-term teachers.

Also on this episode, we discussed the latest from Burgum's presidential campaign, including the mystery donor to a Burgum-aligned super PAC, and some fake news from Fargo television station Valley News Live about a Trump attack on Burgum that never actually happened.

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