{Change the Equation} Now November Newsletter - In the News

Raytheon Company donates $2 million to expand the Museum of Science, Boston’s Engineering is Elementary® program and provide teacher training scholarships. Nearly 8 in 10 U.S. students have entrepreneurial aspirations, but inadequate education and work experience to realize their goals, according to a Gallup Student Poll. And new studies suggest that minority teachers make a bigger impact on students of color—but poor working conditions are driving these teachers out of the classroom.

CTEq member Raytheon is working to improve STEM education on both sides of the teaching and learning equation. The company donated $1 million to extend the national impact of the Museum of Science, Boston’s Engineering is Elementary^® (EiE) program and $1 million for teacher scholarships.

The EiE project fosters engineering and technological literacy through a research-based, standards-driven and classroom-tested curriculum. The project also helps elementary teachers, particularly those in urban, rural and disadvantaged areas understand engineering concepts and pedagogy through professional development workshops and resources. More than 2.5 million students and 27,000 teachers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia have used EiE resources.

The infusion of new funds will expand teacher training beyond Boston to new training hubs in Washington, DC, Phoenix, AZ, and Huntsville, AL. The scholarship program supports teachers’ access to training and materials.

Raytheon’s latest investment in STEM is part of the company’s MathMovesU^® program, which is committed to increasing middle and elementary students’ interest in math and science education by engaging them in hands-on, interactive activities.

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The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in American students—but their education and practical experiences are lacking. That’s the good news–bad news story from a Gallup Student Poll of students in grades 5 through 12. “Nearly 8 in 10 students (77%) in grades 5 through 12 say they want to be their own boss, 45% say they plan to start their own business, and 42% say they will invent something that changes the world.”

The majority of students (91%) also say they are not afraid to take risks even if they might fail, that their mind never stops (91%) and that they never give up (85%). 

Sounds like the nation’s future creativity and innovation engine is raring to go, right? Not necessarily. Many students are not getting the practical knowledge and work experience that are just as important as energy and ambition. Only about half of students say their school teaches them about money and banking or offers classes on how to run a business. Fewer than six in 10 students (58%) say they have a bank or credit union account with money in it. 

Meanwhile, only one in five students in grades 5 through 12 say they worked for an hour or more at a paying job in the last week. High school students were only slightly more likely to have worked at a paying job. And only 5 percent of students in grades 5 through 12 had picked up entrepreneurial skills by interning at a local business.

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Students of color might do better in school if they are taught by minority teachers, according to a new working paper by the  National Bureau of Economic Research, A Community College Instructor Like Me: Race and Ethnicity Interactions in the Classroom. The study, while large, is limited to a community college in California. 

Still, the study concludes: “We find that the performance gap in terms of class dropout and pass rates between white and minority students falls by roughly half when taught by a minority instructor. In models that allow for a full set of ethnic and racial interactions between students and instructors, we find African-American students perform particularly better when taught by African-American instructors”. The authors surmise that the same effect could apply in K–12 schools as well, because students of color see minority teachers as role models.

Unfortunately, a separate study, Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage, indicates that keeping minority teachers in K–12 classrooms is a challenge. Efforts to attract and place minority teachers in classrooms have been successful, but retaining them is another matter, according to researchers Richard Ingersoll and Henry May of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Minority teachers are more likely than white teachers to leave the profession, citing poor working conditions—namely, a lack of autonomy and influence in their work.