Change the Equation Blog

This morning, The Washington Post published a moving portrait of space pioneer and Change the Equation Board member Sally Ride. The piece portrays her as a brilliant, courageous, generous and highly principled woman with a passion for inspiring young people, especially girls, about science.

That is exactly how we knew her. Her limitless energy, tireless dedication and keen insight have been critical to shaping CTEq’s work in our first two years. Her memory will impel us forward for many more. We will sorely miss her.

Today President Barack Obama announced the immediate creation of new national corps of leading math and science educators to improve education in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The STEM Master Teacher Corps initiative aims to help schools and districts do what they haven’t traditionally done very well: broaden the reach of our best teachers. The program has some hurdles to clear, but it could have a real impact if it succeeds in creating a culture of professional learning in schools.

Master teachers will model lessons, lead professional development, help with school turnaround efforts and mentoring younger teachers, according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan. In exchange for their services, the teachers will receive up to $20,000 more in salary each year. The stakes for this effort are high. It is well known that U.S. students lag far behind their peers in top performing nations, and companies are having trouble filling STEM jobs, even during the downturn. As STEM jobs continue to grow, shortages will only become more acute, and the U.S. risks losing its innovative edge, Teachers can have an enormous impact on student performance, yet all too many teachers of math and science lack degrees in the fields they teach. As rigorous new common standards in math and science come down the pike, teachers will need all the mentoring they can get to come up to speed.

The STEM Master Teacher initiative is ambitious. It aims to include10,000 teachers over the next four years. (Compare that to Teach for America, which just reached the 10,000 milestone this past fall, more than 20 years after its founding.) Given that there are almost 100,000 schools in the country, we’ll need every one of those Master Teachers.

Even when it reaches full force, the program will have to address multiple challenges. Among them:

• Create strong professional learning cultures that help Master Teachers share their gifts and expertise. This is harder than it seems. Master teachers can be very effective, but only if their schools and districts have structures in place to promote true collaboration among teachers and other staff. Schools, may, for example, have to reconceive their schedules to give teachers time for common planning.
• Ensure that the Master Teachers go—and stay—where they’re needed most. Nowhere are strong professional learning cultures more important than in struggling low-income schools. All too often, our most accomplished teachers move from such schools to more stable high-income schools after they have a few years under their belts.  Turnover at struggling schools is notoriously high and disruptive. Master Teachers will need strong incentives to stay at schools that serve our most vulnerable children.

There is, of course, one more immediate hurdle the STEM Master Teacher initiative faces. It depends on the success of the president’s budget request, which includes $1 billion for the program. In these lean times, that money is hardly a foregone conclusion. The President is getting the ball rolling with an initial investment of $100 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF),which will support the program at 50 sites across the nation. According to Secretary Duncan, more than 30 school districts have already signaled interest in the new TIF grants. (Proposals are due on July 27). This early investment may give the Education Department, districts and schools time to work through some of the biggest challenges before the program goes to scale.

The good news is that the STEM Master Teacher initiative comes amidst a broad national focus on boosting the quality of STEM teaching. Last year, for example, the President announced the 100Kin10 initiative, which rallied more than 100 organizations (including Change the Equation) around the goal of bringing 100,000 excellent new STEM teachers into classrooms.

None of these initiatives is easy, but we can’t face our biggest national challenges by making do with small-bore solutions.

Late last week, Change the Equation released 'Lost Opportunity,' the third brief in our Vital Signs series, focusing on out-of-school STEM opportunities for students in America. Through surveys conducted by Nielsen, an information and measurement firm, we ascertained that only 19 percent of households report that their children participate in out-of-school STEM programming. This new insight provided the foundation for a conversation on how to improve the quality and accessibility of STEM after school programming during our latest STEM Salon, held July 12, 2012.

After an overview of the findings by CTEq Director of Research Claus von Zastrow and reflection and analysis from Jen Rinehart of the Afterschool Alliance and Martin Storksdieck of the National Research Council, conversation quickly pivoted to what businesses, organizations, and individuals can do moving forward.

While the statistics are sobering,many agreed that they provided just the first glance of how we engage children and youth in STEM outside of school hours. The panel fielded questions on how to evaluate programs; increase access, particularly in rural areas; how to use out-of-school time to compliment in-school learning, given that many students have limited in-school exposure; and how to use out-of-school programs to strengthen engagement and interest in STEM subjects.

Watch the video to learn the answers!

It’s not your grandfather’s economy anymore.                                 

In today’s job market, few opportunities are exempt from needing STEM skills. But, as NPR details, some industries that are slowly gaining workers, like the manufacturing industry, are finding that prospective employees  often lack the basic math skills they need as the nature of the industry shifts. Workers need to know how to work with decimals, fractions, and compute basic trig to operate technically precise machinery. So despite high unemployment, companies are saying they don’t have enough skilled workers.  And as we showed, this is not an isolated phenomenon.

To fill this need, several community colleges and nonprofits, especially in the Midwest –whose manufacturing base was hit hard by the recession – are stepping up by teaching workers these skills, giving them a better chance of landing that job. Either through bridge instruction offered by nonprofits, or pre-major coursework at community colleges, students are gaining the strong math and science foundation that they need in order to be successful.

While remediation and community support isn't new, communities are increasingly responding to today's challenges by creating programs that focus on STEM skills. These programs can help patch up the STEM pipeline, increasing the flow of workers into the workforce. Investing in these skills will hopefully help us build the workforce we need for the economy we want.