We know that American high-tech companies often look abroad for workers who are cheaper. But the situation gets much more dire if they say they need to go overseas just to find employees who are skilled in math and science. The scope of this problem is made clear in an alarming report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” from the National Academies, the country’s leading advisory group on science and technology. It decries the dismal state of math and science education and calls for an ambitious national program that would retrain the current teacher core, while attracting 10,000 new math and science teachers into the profession every year for the foreseeable future.
Congress is considering proposals that would offer substantial scholarships to math and science majors who enter teaching, [US gov't is recognizing a problem and making room in the budget to address it, a commendable effort] as well as to low-income college freshmen from high schools that offer appropriately rigorous curriculums. Although it’s far from clear how the program would work, it might be a good way to pressure the states that have thus far ignored education reform for the upper grades.
But, commendable as this impulse is, it hardly addresses the central problem of teacher preparation. Many education colleges have become diploma mills where the curriculum has little or nothing to do with the employment needs of the public schools in the state [this is the core problem in education. How do we best prepare teachers to prepare students for employment in the real world?]. Thanks to poor planning – or no planning – they place no particular emphasis on training teachers who actually major in subject areas like math and science. The data suggests that more than 60 percent of the public school students in some areas of math and science learn from teachers who have not majored in the subject taught or have no certification in it [the media here is making the assumption that a college student who has majored in a subject is actually qualified to teach that subject. Seems like an obvious assumption, but one that becomes questionable upon examination].
The No Child Left Behind Act, which was passed four years ago, was supposed to take care of this problem by requiring the states to improve teachers’ training and to make sure that all teachers were “highly qualified” by the end of this school year. Instead, the federal government has allowed the states to simply define the problem away – by relabeling the same old teaching force as “highly qualified.” States aren’t even required to report on how many teachers have actually majored in the subjects they teach [again, the idea of majoring in a subject is being used as the leading characteristic of being a "highly qualified" teacher].
It will be impossible to improve math and science education until we assess teachers’ preparedness based on the same high standards in all parts of the country [this isn't necessarily the case. What do we mean by "math & science education." That issue is never even touched in this article, and the question that must be asked before we go holding teacher accountable]. Teachers must gradually be held accountable for majoring in the areas they teach, especially when the areas are math and science, and for demonstrating that they have mastered those subjects by passing rigorous tests [This is the key area where the media and politicians aren't addressing education as they should be. As testing currently stands, a teacher can pass a rigorous test and have little mastery over the math & science that students need to know for real world jobs. All this is just assuring that teachers are qualified to teach to tests by demonstrating they can pass tests, none of which address the real issue of preparing young people with the math & science skills necessary for 21st century jobs].. Even Bush administration insiders realize that Washington has dropped the ball on this issue. While the latest round of proposed reforms is welcome, it will have little effect without skilled, well-educated teachers. [While this latest article is welcome, it will have little effect without skilled, well-educated teachers who are not limited to preparing students for the old tasks of simply passing math & science. What we need is real world teaching and learning, for real world situations].
