Another itme from yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed that’s worth a mention is a report about a new call for improved science teacher in the public schools:
The report by the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) is distinguished from the many other recent reports on the subject, the forum’s leaders said, by the group’s emphasis as much on increasing the number of undergraduate majors in scientific fields as on getting more scientifically adept people into teacher preparation programs. One of its major initiatives is to double the number of college graduates earning degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by 2015.
The report, “An American Imperative: Transforming the Recruitment, Retention and Renewal of Our Nation’s Mathematics and Science Workforce,” proposes an emphasis on recruitment, retention and teacher preparation to improve math and science education and research.
What’s sort of amusing (in a black humor kind of way) is the way the story and the web page promoting the report dance around the real issue here, which is money. There’s lots of talk about new initiatives, but very little mention of the thing that would make the most difference: Money. They’re great on the nature of the problem with science education:
American students today have limited interest in studying mathematics and science, and academic achievement in these two foundational disciplines is demonstrably low. This bleak reality poses an acute challenge to our ability to keep American society intellectually vibrant, to have enough employees for highly-skilled positions, and ultimately to ensure that our economy is globally competitive.
The root of these issues stems from fundamental problems in teacher quality and quantity. Research shows that the quality of P-12 mathematics and science teaching is the single most important factor in improving student mathematics and science achievement. Nationally, however, there are simply not enough highly skilled mathematics and science teachers entering the profession or committing to long-term careers. The United States will need more than 280,000 new mathematics and science teachers by 2015.
But their publicity material goes a little wobbly on the solution:
BHEF calls for the creation of a national consortium among stakeholders from business, higher education, and P-12 to improve teacher recruitment, retention, and renewal and elevate the status of the teaching profession. The consortium would launch a national public awareness campaign to promote the teaching profession, share information and coordinate resources, and encourage business and philanthropic support for the most promising programs and strategies.
The winning strategy to improve teacher recruitment and retetion is really simple: pay them more, and provide better working conditions. If you want people with science degrees to go into teaching, you need to compete with their other job options, most of which offer a good deal more money than teaching.
They do their best to make it sound like somehow, just getting business and education leaders to talk to one another, and to science majors, will magically make everything better, but that’s not going to work. Improving the state of science teaching will require improving the lot of science teachers, and somebody’s going to have to pony up some cash for that to happen.