Wisconsin has a Retention Problem. Personal Finance Literacy Is Part of the Fix. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction just released its 2024 Educator Preparation Program and Workforce Analysis Report , and I think anyone who cares about teacher education should sit with the data. Source: Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, dpi.wi.gov/education-workforce For example, out of 5,256 educator preparation program completers in 2023-24, only 3,568 stayed in the state as employed teachers, meaning roughly 30 percent left teaching in Wisconsin public schools. For those folks who do start a career in teaching in Wisconsin, the eight-year retention rate was only 52.6% for all teachers (for special education teachers, that number drops to 43.2 percent). The report is blunt about the cause of the continued teacher shortage: "The lack of retention of early-career teachers is a significant factor contributing to Wisconsin's shortage of educators."  So, this isn'...

AI will change how we teach, but it won't change why we're needed. 1961 airborne television broadcast (Rockefeller Archive Center) Everyone has an opinion about teaching because everyone has been a student. Ask any teacher and they'll tell you: what people think teachers do and what teachers actually do are very different things. The current discourse around AI tends to flatten professions into a single question—can a machine do this job? For teaching, I think that's the wrong question. A better one is: what opportunities does AI create to improve teaching?  This post is a collection of my current thinking on why the replacement framing gets teaching wrong, what it misses about the fundamental nature of the profession, and why I think new teachers should have confidence that there will be plenty of work in their future. I’m not a tech futurist, but I am a mathematics educator with focus on the integration of technology. I'm also a person who has spent my career in a...