This op-ed was first published in the Chronicle of Higher Education
When I entered elementary school in the mid-1950s, the nation was responding to Sputnik, and our shortcomings in teaching math and science to schoolchildren were of grave concern. Aggressive federal recruitment and training programs for teachers during the 1970s created a brief respite, but those programs ended in the early 1980s. Severe shortages of math and science teachers were rampant again by the 1990s and continue today. As Yogi Berra put it, we are seeing "déjà vu all over again."
Especially in predominantly minority schools, many math and science courses are now taught by teachers who were trained in other fields, by emergency hires, or by teachers with background in the content but inadequate teaching skills. For many new instructors, the lack of training in content and pedagogy contribute to both high attrition rates and lower effectiveness.
Research shows that teachers who are not fully prepared are twice as likely to leave teaching in the early years, creating huge attrition costs for districts. Also teachers who are fully certified in the subject that they teach are much more successful than those who hold only a content degree or are certified in other fields. In addition, a study of student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress found higher achievement in math and science among students whose teachers had specific training to use hands-on teaching methods, who taught higher-order thinking, and who could teach diverse learners — including those with special-education needs or who were just learning English.
The shortage of well-trained, career-committed math and science teachers has created a vicious cycle for our nation: Because those subjects have frequently not been well taught, we have a nation of math-phobic citizens, few of whom are prepared to pursue higher-level math and science in college, which in turn makes it harder to produce enough graduates who can effectively teach those subjects. As a result, our nation ranked 21st out of 30 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in scientific literacy on a study recently released by the Programme for International Student Assessment (just above the Slovak Republic) and 25th in math literacy (between Spain and Portugal).
To break the cycle, we must develop a national policy that will:
Raise the quality of teacher preparation in math and science. The National Science Teachers Association recommends that elementary and middle-school teachers be prepared to teach a balance of course work in life, earth and space, physical, and environmental sciences. In addition, they should have pedagogical knowledge about how to teach science effectively. But according to a national survey of teachers of science, only about half of first-grade through fourth-grade teachers and two-thirds of fifth-grade to eighth-grade teachers meet those recommendations.
There are similar issues concerning math instruction. In her 1999 book, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), Liping Ma, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, described how elementary teachers in China learn to teach the subject: by revisiting the foundations of arithmetic, engaging in deep study of number concepts, and playing out concrete applications in the classroom. That poses an alternative to the common approach in the United States whereby students take college-level math courses that bear little relationship to what they will eventually teach. Multiple courses in ways to teach content have been shown to increase teacher effectiveness in math, but few programs in this country provide such extensive training.
Federal grants to colleges of teacher education should support training models that place prospective teachers in extended student-teaching opportunities or internships with expert teachers, where they can see effective teaching firsthand and practice what they are simultaneously learning in their courses. Course work should interweave theory with practical tools, including curriculum planning and content-specific teaching strategies. Professional development should involve teachers in curriculum and assessment planning with their colleagues, provide learning opportunities linked to the teaching of specific content and the needs of students, and give follow-up coaching in classrooms. In return for grants supporting such initiatives, colleges should be required to show evidence of teacher learning and what kinds of training have worked most effectively, so that a knowledge base can be built about how to support teachers in acquiring more sophisticated skills.
Enhance the supply of well-qualified science and math teachers. The federal government should also support, as it does in medicine, a sustained program of service scholarships that cover the costs of training students who will teach for at least four years in math and science fields or high-need locations, as defined nationally and by individual states. (After three years, candidates are much more likely to remain in the profession and to make a difference for student achievement.) While some federal grants are available, there are too few of them, and they are too small to attract enough new teachers who will make a long-term commitment.
Nearly all of the vacancies filled with emergency teachers could be filled with talented, well-prepared teachers if 40,000 service scholarships of up to $25,000 each were offered annually. The scholarships, as opposed to post hoc forgivable loans, should be allocated to students who will have strong content preparation and strong preparation for teaching, and should be based on academic merit and indicators of potential success in teaching — such as perseverance, capacity, and commitment. In addition, teachers who will diversify the teaching force and bring language skills that support immigrant students should be a recruitment target.
Such a program could build on successful models like the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program. Supported by the state legislature since 1986, it provides $26,000 in scholarships to each of 500 high-ability high-school seniors who enroll in intensive four-year teacher-education programs and teach for at least four years in North Carolina schools. The program has supplied over 8,000 teachers for the state's schools, a disproportionate share of whom are men, members of underrepresented minority groups, and in high-need fields like math and science. An evaluation that followed fellows over seven years found that 75 percent were still teaching in the public schools in the state, and many of the others had advanced to educational-leadership positions in schools or districts. School principals have also reported that the fellows' first-year classroom performance far exceeds that of other new teachers in every area assessed.
Improve the retention of qualified teachers through effective mentor programs. Many teacher candidates choose to teach where they grew up or went to college. Thus, too often, student teaching does not take place in schools that serve low-income students well, but rather in more-affluent schools or in high-need schools that do not illustrate good practice. What prospective teachers learn does not give them the tools they need to succeed in such settings, and if they take jobs in high-need schools, they often end up leaving.
Because teachers need to be involved in practice to learn effectively, the government should increase its support of programs of teacher preparation in "professional-development schools," like those that have developed in Cincinnati, New York, San Antonio, and many other cities. Similar to teaching hospitals in medicine, such schools are partnerships between colleges and public schools that exhibit state-of-the-art practice and train novices in the classrooms of expert teachers while they complete course work that helps them teach diverse learners well. A broader national effort, as outlined in the Teaching Residencies program proposed by Sen. Barack Obama, should be developed along the same lines to create a pipeline of committed teachers who are well prepared and willing to teach math and science in high-need schools — and to help establish demonstration sites that serve as models for urban teaching and teacher education.
If such investments are to reap benefits, however, colleges must continue the reforms many began in the mid-1980s to create stronger programs. Longstanding critiques of teacher education have focused on inadequate content preparation, weak and fragmented education courses, theory disconnected from practice, and uneven student-teaching placements.
Reforms at many institutions have begun to change this state of affairs by creating more intellectually rigorous programs of teacher education that provide intensive clinical preparation, tightly interwoven with more coherent and relevant course work and conducted in collaboration with local reform-minded schools. Over the last decade, more than 1,000 professional-development schools have been established, the best of which have demonstrated improvements in teachers' practice and in student achievement. A growing number of colleges are also developing centers of pedagogy for enhancing the quality of instruction across their own departments, creating an engine for developing more-powerful teaching that will influence the success of all their students.
Federal support to engaged colleges could go a long way toward encouraging such reforms and creating a high-quality teaching force in math and science fields. The evidence strongly points to the central role that effective teachers play in educational improvement — a role that leads to student success and employability, and contributes to our nation's competitiveness. The investment would be repaid many times over.
