science teacher

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.

Boldly going where no group has gone before - that is what ABCTE is all about. This month, we have set the unprecedented goal of recruiting 900 new teacher candidates into our program. To do this, we have discounted the program by $150 for January to give people the incentive to enroll.

Every one of our 34 employees are focused on making this goal a reality. We are going to be traveling across all our ABCTE states to talk to people who want to teach and get them focused on making their dream a reality.

I think a quick note is in order regarding the EdWeek Article on the Ingersoll and Perda research suggesting that we are producing plenty of math and science teachers and all we need to do is just retain them and we are set.

The facts are probably correct – though dated – that we produce 2X as many math and science teachers than retire. Thus, retention is the solution. Woohoo - problem solved.

It has to be about the students. When ABCTE was formed, it was because so many students were going without a great teacher because the certification rules were so complex that too many people were ignoring the teaching profession.

I was going to blog on TIMSS and talk about the mediocre performance of our schools in math and science and how we can never be competitive as a nation unless we lead in the area of technological expertise, but most other bloggers already have. So then I thought I could do a summary of what other bloggers said about the TIMSS results and provide that to our loyal readers, but then I found that Core Knowledge already did that as well.

I have been in 4 different states meeting with 4 different state education chiefs and all of them expressed the same concern - there is a serious lack of subject matter knowledge in their math teachers. Therefore, it was with great pleasure that I read the Title II draft and saw the emphasis on STEM professional development for teachers. It is with great sadness that I read that all the money had to go to institutions of higher ed (hopefully this will change).