Suggestions for Future Study
A report from the Southern Regional Education Board, September 1998
Further studies of supply and demand for the State of Oklahoma would be enhanced by addressing the following issues.
Categorizing Positions
Stakeholders need to agree on the groupings used to create the primary positions. Ideally, a coding scheme for classes could be developed to allow for numerous types of groupings. This would allow the analysis to extend past the 26 categories designed for this study.
Aggregating Majors
Similarly, the grouping of academic majors should be reviewed for their usefulness. Again a coding scheme to allow for different levels of aggregation would allow greater flexibility in using the data for analysis.
Aggregating Certification
Categories Similarly, the grouping of certification categories should be reviewed for their usefulness. Again a coding scheme to allow for different levels of aggregation would allow greater flexibility in using the data for analysis.
Crosswalks and Accountability
The link between majors, certifications, and classes taught should be created with a coding system that allows for easy joining by code, among numerous databases. This would allow for the flow among graduates, certificate recipients, and teaching assignments to be logically linked. In this way training, credentialing, and assignments could be monitored. Currently, this process is opaque and sketchy at best.
Link Between Quality and Supply
There is currently no measure of quality in this study. Linking the testing data, GPA, SAT, or some other measure to a teacher can begin an analysis of where higher or lower quality educators obtain employment.
Filtering the Reserve Pool
There needs to be agreement on how to cull the certification file for those individuals who are, and are not still candidates for teaching. In this study, the culling was done by year of expiration, year of certification, and whether attrition past 20 years experience could be tied to a certificate recipient. Knowing the size of this pool is a very important measure of the state of supply.
The Missing Link: The Number Trained, The Number Who Become Certified, The Number Who Enter
It is important to better understand why so many students train for teaching, and why do more than half of the students not enter teaching in Oklahoma? Are such yields like other professions? Does the training obtained to become a teacher easily translate to other professions? Is the large number trained due to lack of teaching jobs, or simply poor information about the market?
Develop Indicators to Create an Executive Information System
A set of indicators among all of the statistics provided herein needs to be developed as steady monitors of the system. They need to be identified, and the frequency with which they should be observed established. It would then be useful to know what policies influence such indicators of supply and demand. These indicators would provide the feedback needed to monitor the strategic aims of your organization with regard to supply and demand. The indicators will form the basis of your executive information system.
Develop a Data Warehouse to Create a Decision Support System
You need to have your historical data organized in such a fashion that it is easily retrievable. That is the idea behind a data warehouse. The organization of the data is based on your workflow. That is: how do you use the data? When do you need it? In what form do you need it? If the data are in a well-designed data warehouse, then it will facilitate a decision support system. A decision support system provides an interface to allow easy access and querying of the data, and efficient and effective methods for report writing. Through using the decision support system, useful indicators can be found that can be migrated to the executive information system. In this way, the creation of information can dynamic and adaptive - while moving to stabilize the flow of information that truly helps manage the system.
