Insanity is not Innovation

I got a flurry of emails about President Obama’s Educate to Innovate program saying that ABCTE should be a big part of this. We should but the President has decided to pursue what Albert Einstein refers to as insanity – doing the same thing and hoping for a different result.

Public university presidents have committed to training 10,000 new math and science teachers annually by 2015 which is a whopping 2,500 over what they do now. Divide that by 75 universities and they have each committed to training an additional 33 teachers per year 5 years from now. They are going to push it to the max and each add 6 new math/science teachers per year.

Wow – breathtaking. They shall "endeavor to persevere" with that lofty goal.

Last year ABCTE certified 219 new math and science teachers and that was 75 over what we did the previous year and we are on track to certify well over 350 this year. And our program only costs each of our teachers $975 – about 5% of what it will cost the universities.

Saying you are going to do something and actually doing it year in and year out are two totally different things. It would be nice if the President looked for cost effective programs like ABCTE that actually make things happen.