Solving for X: Facing the critical shortage of math and science teachers
By:
Marsha Boutelle
In the 21st century and beyond, California, the nation—and the world—will be ever more dominated by technology in all its forms. From an individual using a cell phone or a computer to the scientific exploration of space, our lives are affected and driven by technical knowledge in ways no one dreamed possible even a hundred years ago. Our continued progress depends on the scientists, engineers and mathematicians who can push beyond existing boundaries and forge ahead with increasingly sophisticated products and services.
Hard facts
As of 2007, California had about 47,500 science and 22,500 math teachers. Not all of these teachers are considered qualified to teach, based on federal No Child Left Behind Act, California Department of Education or state Commission on Teacher Credentialing standards.
A few more hard facts:
- In middle schools, 10 percent of all science and math teachers are considered underprepared, meaning they are teaching without the proper credential, and nearly 30 percent of novice teachers—those in their first and second years—are underprepared. (In August, the CTC approved a new Foundational-Level General Science Credential that aims to ease the middle-school science teacher shortage by authorizing instruction in general, introductory and integrated science in grades K-8, thus freeing up holders of full science credentials to teach more advanced courses.)
- In high schools, 9 percent and 12 percent, respectively, of all science and math teachers and 35 percent and 40 percent of novice science and math teachers are underprepared.
- The percentage of underprepared science and math teachers is significantly higher in low-performing and high-minority schools.
Beyond the question of underprepared teachers is the loss of experienced or novice teachers to, respectively, retirement or more lucrative and perhaps less demanding professions. It’s a zero-sum game—the subtraction of those teachers adds to the problem of placing qualified teachers in math and science classrooms.
The result: In the next 10 years, more than 33,000 new science and math teachers the state will need.
Still more hard facts:
- Historically, a hodgepodge of teacher recruitment efforts has existed in the state; some were suspended before they could produce results. Current programs vary in size and funding, and little information is available about their efficacy.
- Teacher turnover is expensive—whether due to retirements or newer teachers abandoning the profession. This issue hampers school districts’ ability to maintain a qualified work force.
- Many districts’ professional development programs are designed primarily to help educators meet state requirements rather than to promote learning in their subject areas.
Show me the money
“The California public school system is heading toward a crisis in trying to recruit science and math teachers,” says CSBA Vice President Frank Pugh, an educator and longtime trustee of Santa Rosa City Schools.
“The [CSU and UC] teaching programs have not produced enough students interested in working in the K-12 schools. For logical reasons, a person who earns a degree in math, biology or chemistry, say, would have a better financial future working outside the public schools. So there isn’t really much monetary incentive that the present school system can offer these students,” Pugh says.
“That’s a tough nut to crack,” acknowledges Christine Bertrand, executive director of the California Science Teachers Association. “The problem is systemic with teaching in general, but in math and science, it’s [worse].
“We don’t have that many math and science graduates who go into teaching. The job offers they get [in the private sector] far exceed a teacher’s salary, plus there’s a year of extra schooling—without pay—they need to obtain a credential. So that costs them more money.”
“The lack of funding is a challenge,” says Margaret Gaston, president and executive director of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning in Santa Cruz. “We at CFTL think locally based incentives are really worth exploring. Signing bonuses and paid professional development help, in addition to what the state might do.
“But we have to be careful here,” Gaston cautions, “not to overregulate the incentives idea. Local control is very important and needs to be bargained locally. What the state can do is to provide incentives with grants or loans to teacher candidates to finish their credentials.”
This year’s state budget provided only minimum funding under Proposition 98’s education funding guarantee and doesn’t account for inflation. Yet the cost of teachers’ salaries, benefits, books and all the rest continues to rise.
“What we’re looking at here is an old habit from the policy community writ large—Legislature, state agencies, et cetera—to present initiatives absent a thorough examination of what it actually takes to implement those initiatives and implement them in a way where all students benefit,” Gaston says.
“Everything gets more complex with the budget crisis,” she adds, “with teachers retiring, with the added demand for math and science teachers, with the need for teachers with a better understanding of the subject matter they teach.
“What we have is a very big problem to solve now. We want to make sure that the children who bore the weight of past policy decisions—children of color, second-language learners—we have to make sure that we do right by these children this time. They can’t always be the default for absorbing the greatest load of responsibility for these decisions.”
“It’s hard to have an insufficient budget but high expectations,” Pugh agrees. “Folks cannot, in good conscience, demand the near impossible from students, teachers and parents without sufficient funding.”
Stan Hitomi, science and math coordinator for the San Ramon Valley Unified School District, understands the need for better compensation for teachers but points out that the profession also offers other rewards.
“Teaching has intrinsic value to it,” Hitomi says. “If prospective teachers see an environment that is collegial and supportive, that can make a difference. Both the University of Southern California and California State University [teaching] programs have made efforts to seek students out as early as incoming freshmen to steer them toward teaching careers. Students take seminar classes and spend some time in a K-12 classroom. Then they get more and more involved.
“Even at the high school level, our district has some programs where students can get some in-classroom [teaching] experience,” Hitomi explains. “There are more and more programs targeting younger and younger students.”
Factoring in regulatory impacts
The dedicated science, technology, engineering and math instructors—the STEM teachers who enter and stay in the profession—face seemingly ever-increasing state and federal mandates they must follow to keep their jobs and to teach their students.
“NCLB has had a serious dampening effect on STEM teachers,” says Kerry Clegg, a past president of CSBA and now a member of the National School Boards Association’s Board of Directors. “Many science teachers in small, rural schools may need to teach more than one science class, such as chemistry and biology, or chemistry and physics. Too-rigorous credentialing or competency requirements in both fields make it difficult for teachers to meet this [obligation], and small school districts may not have enough classes to warrant a credentialed teacher in both sciences and multiple math areas.”
In fact, California is preparing only about 70 percent of the STEM teachers the state will need in the long term, according to “Critical Path Analysis of California’s Science and Mathematics Teacher Preparation System,” a report co-authored by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning and the California Council on Science and Technology in 2007.
NCLB requirements have impacted course availability and offerings, especially in rural school districts, and have narrowed the curriculum, points out Priscilla Cox, Region 6 CSBA director and a member of the Elk Grove Unified School District board.
“This is particularly evidenced in our middle schools that have reduced electives to double up on math or language arts and reduced career technical opportunities or arts and science [classes],” Cox says.
She also believes the Commission on Teacher Credentialing needs to make its process “more reasonable.”
“Teacher candidates with math or science backgrounds should be paid interns, if possible,” Cox says. “Our district’s Teacher Education Institute tries to provide this option in hard-to-fill content areas, but it definitely is hard to convince those making good salaries [outside of teaching] to switch careers if it means a year without income.”
The CTC is trying to encourage more professionals to come into the classroom with waivers and alternative credentialing pathways, Clegg says.
Even though California does manage to recruit some teachers from other states and other countries, and welcomes military veterans in federally sponsored programs such as Troops to Teachers into university teaching programs, the numbers of these candidates constitute “a drop in the bucket,” according to CFTL’s Gaston.
Gaston is currently a member of the CTC, the 19-member state board that sets standards for teacher preparation. She has come to realize, she says, that “state licensure systems are really balancing acts.”
“We are the standard-bearers of public trust on the one hand and provide the education system [with teachers] on the other. Credential requirements must be high enough to ensure that teachers are at least minimally qualified.”
Caleb Cheung, science program manager for the Oakland Unified School District and vice chair of the CTC, agrees.
“There needs to be a balance between how to get teachers into the classroom as soon as possible with making sure they are well qualified,” Cheung says. “I don’t think anybody would agree that we want just anybody off the street to become a teacher just because they want to. The question we always ask each other as commission members is, ‘Is this good enough for your child? What standards would you want for your child?’”
Final thoughts
We need to make the teaching profession generally more appealing to job seekers,” Gaston says. “The economy is a ‘good news-bad news’ scenario. When it booms, we see people come into teaching. When the economy is at risk, we see them going toward business and industry.
“Other things that matter a lot in keeping teachers include offering attractive wage and benefit packages and prospective candidates hearing that schools have effective leaders,” she continues. “Over 40 percent of teachers who leave the profession say it’s because of the school’s principal. They don’t feel supported. Over 50 percent of leavers cite poor administrative support from the district for leaving. Leadership is incredibly important.
“Regarding teacher turnover, California is just putting into place teacher data systems that would track the work force,” Gaston says. “It’s really shocking that with a work force of over 300,000 people, we can’t answer a simple question like, ‘Well, where did they go?’ The new CALTIDES [California Longitudinal Teacher Integrated Data Education system] law will provide a unique anonymous identifier for every credential holder in California. If they leave one district and go to another, or leave teaching, we’ll know. Right now, we don’t know who is coming and going.
“We hear anecdotally that teachers move out of low-wealth communities to higher-wealth communities, but we don’t have any information to back that up,” Gaston continues. “So, stay tuned! But now CALTIDES will not come online until 2010—instead of 2009—because of budget problems.”
Elk Grove USD’s Cox offers some suggestions for addressing staffing challenges:
- Distance learning and advances in technology should be promoted and funded—particularly for rural areas that have an even harder time recruiting high-quality math and science teachers.
- More effort needs to be made through research to explore alternative methods of differentiating learning styles, interests and abilities of teacher candidates. The CTC could develop methods to identify and motivate college undergraduates and high school students who might not be considering teaching. It could also offer incentives in the form of signing bonuses and professional development opportunities to those already involved in math and science careers.
The process of recruiting the math and science teachers needed to maintain the nation’s current but eroding technological edge will be filled with challenges. Many—although not all—of them stem from the chronic underfunding of education. Other difficulties include unwieldy bureaucratic issues that arise from a variety of governmental mandates and a culture that largely undervalues teaching as a profession and rewards it—both financially and sociologically—correspondingly. Nothing less than a comprehensive, well-structured and thoughtful reinvention of the process is likely to produce significant change.
“If we really think education has a huge problem with teacher shortages, and we believe we are falling behind the rest of the world in math and science, then we need to make this issue a national priority,” says CSTA’s Bertrand.
“But so far, I haven’t seen that kind of push to raise awareness.”
Marsha Boutelle (mboutelle@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.
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