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.
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I will have to whole heartedly disagree with you on this one. Having first hand experience in both the US and the UK I would like to emphasize that it has NOTHING to do with money. We already spend a totally excessive amount of money on education and are doing nothing to improve the situation. In the UK,80-90% students leave at the age of 16 (when and where I was there, which admittedly was a FEW years ago). I am saddened to say that a majority had a better education than our 18 year olds. further to this was seen when I applied to my current academic residence- I was astounded to find that all my A-Levels (post 16 education) ALL converted to college level classes. Mot to mention in my graduate studies, I haven't even touched the first year math syllabus I started in Glasgow Uni'.
Its all about philosophy, and we are a little misguided here, at least in the institutions I have had contact with. This link is a little dated, but makes the point :
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-education-comparison_…
There is already a huge disparity between how much money we are putting into education and what we are getting out of it. Which suggests to me we are either doing it all (well most any way) wrong, or we are really intelligently challenged. Since I don't believe the latter....
Not too far off the point- did you know in Massachusetts a head football coach earns twice what a professor of medicine gets. Would someone please explain how an employee that contributes NOTHING to the academics of a student uses twice the financial resources an actual teacher in what some call a noble profession? Maybe we are intellectually challenged....
Thanks for your thoughts, and letting me vent mine :)
They are dancing around the subject of money because they know (or should know) that the teacher unions will not accept higher pay for science teachers. This was discussed on Slashdot several months ago when teacher unions gutted a state proposal http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/08/1922214&from=rss
Of course most of this assumes the problem is at the high school level. While that is certainly at least partially true, most kids have turned off of math (and hence science) before they reach high school in a large part because at the primary level it is one teacher for all subjects, and those teachers themselves often hate/don't understand math. You need to fix the early years, so that the kids get interested in math in the first place, before you can worry about the later years.
Yes yes. Blame teachers. Or taxpayers. Or whatever. 30 years ago we were churning out scientists like cheeseburgers at McDonalds. Really I think it's a cultural thing. Science and math just aren't really valued in our culture except among us nerds.
The dumbing down of physics in the UK ?
http://www.wellingtongrey.net/articles/
We already spend a totally excessive amount of money on education and are doing nothing to improve the situation.
All money is not created equal.
The fact that lots of money has been spent stupidly in the past, and produced no results does not mean that money spent more intelligently would not produce better results in the future.
Yes, large sums of money have been spent on education, but in my opinion, and the opinion of many others, they haven't been directed at the right place to improve science education. If you want to improve science education, you need to get better science teachers, and right now, the people who have the skills and background needed to be effective science teachers have more attractive options available to them. Getting those people to consider teaching as a career will cost money-- not just in salary increases for science teachers, but also in improved working conditions.
I understand what you are saying, I just have a hard time reconciling the fact that many other European countries do a grand job of educating their youth (on average), on far less money. Why do you think that is ??
The OECD report includes through college and includes private sources (2004 summary, pp 4-5). I don't have the full report nor do I have time to look through it if I did but questions of what is included in that average has to be looked at as well. Do salaries for athletic coaches count? School lunches? etc?
I just finished teaching a year of high school science and I have to agree with Chad. There is no way I will continue to keep teaching because the working conditions and pay are dreadful. Not only do my friends made way more money, but they were also a lot happier with their jobs. In contrast, I felt abused and disregarded at mine. The entire profession is warped-- the longer you teach, the more regarded and the more rewarded you are. The pay structure is not based on performance. I was constantly dismissed by my superiors because I was a new teacher, despite the fact that I had the best technical science background in the department. I found several errors in the textbook and in the material that the other teachers taught in their classes. Education needs a major makeover. It is a profession dominated by incompetency.
Damn skippy.
I just finished a year here in Manhattan where we:
1) didn't have enough books. As in, not all students received personal textbooks.
2) didn't have enough support equipment. I get $250 per year in discretionary class supply spending. I spent it on my students - and I didn't get any supplies from my department.
We also decommed a fully running DNA lab and a school zoo because the faculty who maintained them left due to the awful working conditions.
Money is not being spent correctly.
The Science education at Stuyvesant High School, and presumably also at Brooklyn Tech and the Bronx High School of Science, was superb in the mid-to-late 1960s. My graduating year, 1968, there were 3 of us from Stuyvesant that were accepted to hypercompetitive Caltech. But the schools that I cited, in New York City, were what are called today "magnet schools." Public, but merit-based exam-filtered entrance. I do not know what Science teaching was like at average New York high schools. And my data point is 39 years old.
My wife has taught Science in 4 countries. That it is done well in Great Britain does not surprise me. That it is done better than the USA, on average, in Australia, gives me concern. And that it is done better in Nassau, the Bahamas, than the USA, on average, shows how deep the crisis is.
There are more high schools in the USA than there are high school Physics teachers.
Starting 27 June 2007, I am teaching Math (Algebra, Geometry) at a poor high school in Pasadena, California. Most of my students will be Hispanic or African American. Roughly 20% have not yet passed the California High School Exit Exam without which, one doesn't graduate. In the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD), which was considered very good in the 1960s, some 30% of high schoolers drop out for pregnancy, drugs, crime, whatever.
The administration was (per newspaper articles and lawsuits) amazingly corrupt and inefficient. It took over 10 months for my job application to be processed. They would not look at my CV or letters of recommendation (from the Executive Officer of Math at Caltech, and others). "We have a paperless office."
Everything had to be scanned and attached as image files to the automatic output of a user-unfriendly system that they outsourced to a company. There were 2 to 3 spelling, grammatical, and typographical errors on some lines of text on the job application website. The school system only looked at applications one day per month. The school Board member who expedited things for me said that HR and IT were the two most dysfunctional subsystems of a dysfunctional school system. The day of my 2nd round interview at the specific high school, the PUSD system had crashed again. The high school was backing up their admissions database from a previous version, cutting and pasting from a copy locally archived.
I am being evaluated to teach Math and other subjects full-time in the Fall. They say they need help with Science, and with Chemistry. So, I'll have more data by mid-August, and much more by September.
The pay? $133/day for the summer school, where I am technically a Substitute. That's under $17/hour, assuming an 8 hour day, which is not valid -- there is homework to grade, and so forth.
Needless to say, this is less than I earned as an adjunct professor of Astronomy at one college, or as an adjunct professor of Math at a university. And WAY less than I earned as a software engineer in the corporate and government worlds.
But this is where the need is acute. I thought it wrong to keep bashing the public school system of the USA, in such startling decline for so long. I thought it time to roll up my sleeves and pitch in to help.