The National Science Board has released a draft report for public comment titled “A National Action Plan for Addressing the Critical Needs of the U.S. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education System.” You can dowload the PDF of the report from that page, and email any comments to: NSB_STEMaction@nsf.gov.
I’ve only skimmed the report, so I won’t be sending comments in any time soon, but if I were to make a snap suggestion, it would be that they re-order their suggestions to reflect the usefulness of the recommendations.
They have a helpful one-sentence summary of their two “priority recommendations to the Nation” (apparently, they’re sometimes the German at the National Science Board):
First, ensure coherence in the nations STEM education system, and second, ensure that students are taught by well-qualified and highly effective teachers.
These seem to be backwards to me, at least priority-wise– I realize that they’re probably correctly ordered if the goal is to put them in order of likelihood. But really, I think that the teacher issue is the more important one, by far. If you make sure that students are being taught by teachers who are both “well-qualified” and “highly effective,” then the coherence issues will take care of themselves.
And yet, we get 11 pages of the report detailing new bureaucratic structures and initiative for “coordination” of science standards, compared to only 4 pages suggesting ideas to improve the quality of teachers. And really, the only suggestions that really matter are numbers 1) and 2) under section B.1 of the report, on page 19 in the Recommendations section:
1. Provide Resources to Increase STEM Teacher Compensation
2. Provide Resources for Future STEM Teacher Preparation
Of course, I suppose it doesn’t take a great deal of ink and paper to explain those– if you put more money into science teaching, you will get better science teachers. It’s as simple as that.
But doesn’t that deserve to be placed somewhere more prominent than page 19?