A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

DR. BARNETT BERRY: Thank you very much, Senator Glenn. It's an honor to be here today. I'm going to ask our AV people to flip the overhead on for us here. [See Slide 1]

I can't agree with you more that it's time for us to do something really big. And, as you said yesterday, Senator, to stir some souls. So, I'm going to be your tour guide for how we might stir some teacher recruitment souls in the next 14 minutes. How's that?

Let me first say that we can, indeed, find a way to spend Craig Barrett's half million dollars in a very powerful way. But if we do so in the very near term, let me first suggest that what we ought to do is actually follow exactly what we plan to do, track the initiatives that we do fund and, indeed, learn from the lessons from the past, because I'm sorry to say that most of the teacher recruitment lessons that we have learned or should have learned in many years, in many decades past, have not served us very well in the near-term.

Let me quickly say that as we move toward solving these teacher shortage problems in this country that we cannot pay attention to recruitment without paying strict attention to preparation, induction and retention. And with issues of retention, as you know, dig deeply into conditions of work for prospective and future and current teachers. And I would say that with some perhaps humble thoughts here, that Governor Hunt's commission, National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, which I've been a part of, has designed a blueprint for how to put the pieces of that puzzle together, and I would encourage this commission to think deeply about that blueprint as you move your work forward.

[See Slide 2] I will quickly point to this overhead up here real quickly that's in front of you, and speak clearly the fact that there are some issues that we must address simultaneously in terms of teacher recruitment for math and science teachers. First of all, as you all know, there are imbalances across states and fields. The teacher shortage that we have in this country is not uniform. At the same time, from state to state there are a myriad of different requirements that make it very difficult, and I know Terry Dozier knows this quite well, make it very difficult to move our math and science teachers that we do have to where we need them to be. We also have, at the local level, some very cumbersome hiring and selection practices, and some of these problems are embedded in the funding systems and how teachers get -- and their positions get slotted in those local districts that prevent very efficient hiring. We lose very good candidates that way.

We know about unequal funding, and noncompetitive salaries. We know also of the lack of data that we have, and the lack of data that we do not use, the data that we do not use. We actually mismanage the distribution with respect to teachers in this country. We do not know who is producing whom, and where they actually go. And we can do a better job of that.

And, finally, we know more about -- and we're talking a great deal about the working conditions of teachers and the dysfunction of school organizations that prevent teachers from learning from each other. A hallmark for quality induction and professional development that we need to have for our math and science and all teachers.

And finally, as you all know, probably the most preponderant reason why we have shortages in this country is the high turnover for beginning teachers. We lose up to 30 percent of new teachers within the first three years of teaching and, of course, as you know, it's much worse for math and science.

Quickly, we need to offer a couple of important facts here. One, we have disbanded very potentially powerful programs in the '50s, '60s, and the '70s that I would like for us to go back to. In the 1950s, we had the National Defense Education Act, which gave us a lot of wherewithal, if you will, in terms of recruiting math and science teachers. In the '60s, we had the Education and Professional Development Act. And in the '70s, we had the Career Opportunity Program, a program I think has a lot of merit today. That program, particularly in the '70s, moved teacher aides into full teaching positions with $130 million infusion from the federal government, and I think there's a strong lesson for us to learn there.

Finally, let me just say quickly that we all know that students of poverty and color are more likely to be taught by unqualified math and science teachers. And, again, I will say, once again, that new math teachers, new science teachers are much more likely to leave for all the reasons that you already know.

[See Slide 3] It's worth noting that the states, and this kind of harkens back to Governor Hunt's National Commission on Teaching and America's Future agenda, the states that lack teachers, systemic teacher recruitment and retention policies are the states that have the most under-qualified and under-prepared math and science teachers. Connecticut, which has the most robust set of coherent strategies for raising and enforcing teaching standards and paying teachers well has virtually no under-qualified math and science teachers.

And, again, I will tell you there's a program in Governor Hunt's State of North Carolina, the Teaching Fellows Program, that if you actually pay attention to the kinds of folks that you do more, provide some robust incentives, that is the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program, which is a model that I think we ought to consider, that you actually can recruit and attract and keep good high quality math and science teachers. The teaching fellows program in North Carolina actually credentials 30 percent of its teachers as math and science teachers. They product 1,600 teachers, and 30 percent of them are math and science.

However, let me tell you, and I know both Dennis Bartel's and Bill Firestone and many others that will follow me, if you do not have the right kind of supports for them once you get them into those positions, they will leave. And that is, indeed, the most prominent reason why these highly qualified, very smart, high SAT scoring, high GPA scoring teaching fellows do not stay in the classroom in North Carolina.

To keep to my 15 or 14 minutes or less here, I'm going to move quickly, with a few more points, and then get into some recommendations that I would like you to consider here. [See Slide 10] First of all, this is kind of striking, I don't know if this data point had come before you yet in your deliberations, only 50 percent of our new teacher ed graduates actually enter teaching. There is no actual mechanism for us tracking where they go as I suggested earlier in my remarks, and there's no way for us to figure out which fields they actually will end up teaching in. Many of our potential teachers in one field end up teaching in many others, as you know. We need to do a much better job of that.

Importantly, [See Slide 9] and this sometimes makes my friends in higher education not my friends anymore. Right now, the higher ed funding formulas in our country at the public universities actually promote us recruiting and educating any old teacher we want, and I don't mean "old" in the pejorative sense here, but any old teacher that we want irrespective of our needs. Universities and colleges across this country have, unfortunately, just have all the incentives to actually produce as many teachers as possible irrespective of the quality, and irrespective of the demands that are before us. And so, I think there are some things I'm going to talk about in just a minute that actually can push us in a much better direction, and in a much more powerful direction in this regard.

So, let's jump to recommendations real quickly. [See Slide 12] As you all know, there are huge numbers of out-of-field teachers of math and science across this country, and we know they are primarily in high poverty schools, and schools that serve primarily minority children. It's not uncommon for the really excellent PE teacher to be teaching three classes of PE and two classes of physics. Well, here is a recommendation I would like you to consider, and this is a short-term recommendation. I think you can make a big hit on this right away, and I would argue that this may be the way to learn some lessons from that career opportunities program. Those PE teachers who are teaching physics, those people are good people. They are in those schools, they're teaching those rural communities and those urban communities right now. Use some of those monies and actually, with some incentive-laden sort of opportunities for them, give them the kind of professional development and turn them into the math and science teachers that you need them to be. They're already teaching math and science, they're already in those communities, they know the children, they know the families, do something to help them turn them into the teachers that they must be.

[See Slide 15] At the same time, in those schools, you're probably never going to get all the math and science teachers that you want right away. So let's be much more thoughtful here, much more thoughtful, in establishing a really highly interesting differentiated staffing of math and science teachers, a cadre of expert teachers at the top level. You could consider using our National Board Certified Teachers who have a knowledge of subject matter, a knowledge of children, knowledge of families, how to work with them, putting them in new roles to actually support as mentors for, not just novice teachers who need all kinds of support that our next presenters will speak to, but also developing those out-of-field teachers who need more content knowledge as well as some content knowledge experts that we bring in who if we need more pedagogical training.

So, think about a really interesting stratified approach of using the resources that we do have to help recruit and retain really and prepare highly qualified teachers.

[See Slide 14] Anne Jolly's State of Alabama has got an interesting policy on the books right now, that is if you are a nationally board certified teacher, you are eligible for a $5,000 pay raise, not a bad chunk of an increase for teachers in Alabama. Right, Anne? Okay.

You also get an additional $5,000 if you agree to teach in these low-performing, hard to staff schools, and I think we ought to get very thoughtful, especially in terms of math and science in providing those types of incentives to get those teachers there, but do remember that the reason those schools are hard to staff is because they're challenging work environments. And we've got to keep our focus on those work environments and make sure if we do get these kinds of teachers that we want in these schools that we keep them there.

[See Slide 8] I mentioned very briefly just a few minutes ago, and I wish I had more time to go into detail about North Carolina's teaching development program. It really is a terrific program that does, indeed, attract high quality high school students into the teaching profession. I mentioned their SAT scores, which are close to the average, about 1200, very high, especially in the South, and, as well, an average GPA of 3.66.

The college selected program, only one in five applicants are actually selected for these $25,000 scholarships that these new teachers, or prospective teachers will earn, if indeed they go through the program and actually teach for four years in North Carolina. It's really a powerful intervention. There's another program in South Carolina bordering right below the state of North Carolina, called the teacher-cadet program, a very -- again, a very powerful pre-collegiate teacher recruitment program that, again, takes or tracks or recruits high ability, interesting kids in their junior year in high school and puts them into a college bearing credit course in their senior year where they learn about the teaching profession, learn about teaching and learning, and actually do tutoring. Now, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually take those two recruitment policies and combine them. Well, indeed, guess what's happening, and thank goodness, in South Carolina and in North Carolina, there are people now talking about combining those two approaches. And if you target math and science folks, through those approaches, I think we'll get somewhere.

It reminds me of Kevin Costner in "The Field of Dreams." If we build it, there is a good chance they will come. And I would encourage us to follow these developments here and think about this.

At the same time, it's more than just incentives for those kids, if you will, to go into teaching. We've got to do some new incentives, as I suggested before, to put some heat and some supports into higher education to actually go out and support these folks and make sure they get into the right programs.

[See Slide 13] And that's really this next recommendation is that I want to see some very good funding formulas in higher education. If an institution of higher ed gets a dollar for very teacher ed student they bring in to prepare them, why don't we give them a dollar and a half to prepare math and science and special ed teachers, and the like. We've got to get outside the box here and do something aggressive here, and I think that would make a very, very big difference.

[See Slide 17] And then finally, to keep to your time limits Senator Glenn, and this actually provides somewhat of a segue to our next presenters, as well. We've got to do something about providing some very thoughtful incentives for redesigning schools that support teaching and learning, as well as -- and this is extraordinarily important -- redesign the schools in a way that actually teachers, who have a whole lot of math and science knowledge, can actually use that knowledge in the best interest of student learning. And they cannot do that if our math and science teachers are teaching 150, 170 kids a day, which is not uncommon in any of our high schools across this country.

Believe it or not, I think I kept to my 14 minutes. And for those who know me, you know you're very, very surprised.

[END OF PRESENTATION.]

This page last modified April 26, 2000 (sab)