Iwas flooded with e-mails after my Aug. 24 column on high school teacher Jonathan Keiler. Prince George’s County officials said he was going to lose his certification because he had not taken enough education school courses, even though he had a law degree and was the only person at his school with the highly regarded National Board Certification. Shortly after I told county and state officials that I was going to write about Keiler’s situation, he was told that he had enough courses after all.
That change of tune was maddening to the teachers who wrote me. So were what they considered the uselessness of many education courses they were required to take and the faulty information they often received about the advanced training they did or didn’t need. I learned much from them. Here is a sampling:
“I’m a 17-year science teacher in Montgomery County. I was actually fired two years ago for not having the ‘right’ Advanced Professional Certificate (APC) credits. The online credits I was told would be accepted were denied. I later managed to complete the required credits online from the University of Phoenix — which was extremely lame but easy to do and is recognized by Montgomery County — in less than three weeks. By then the deadline had run out and I was fired from my job but rehired as a long-term substitute. Demoralizing to say the least. Financially I took a very big hit.”
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From Aviation Week interview of Norm Augustine, who Matthews mentioned as being told he was unqualified to teach 8th grade math but was hired as faculty at Princeton University. http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/aw051109p2.xml.
You chaired the national Academies “Gathering Storm” report on U.S. competitiveness that called for attracting more students to science and engineering. Have things changed since the committee wrapped up its work three and a half years ago?
I think they’ve changed – they’ve deteriorated in that area. I would submit that the science community in this country would barely function without foreign-born members. If you take engineers with Ph.D.s in the U.S. workforce under the age of 45 – those are the people who are doing the most aggressive research – 52% are foreign born. The lack of interest among native-born U.S. citizens in science and engineering is particularly tough on the defense industry because most of those jobs require security clearances and cannot be filled by non-citizens. If you’re Intel or HP you can put your plant overseas. The aerospace industry doesn’t have that option. A second factor is that when I was studying, if you wanted to work on the leading edge of any technology you went into defense. Today there are many competitors to that – energy, information systems and so on. It’s a real challenge for the defense industry to try and attract talent that used to walk in the door. The only good news I have is that the stimulus package [passed by Congress in February] has money to invest in some of the things the “Gathering Storm” recommended. But these are long-term issues. You could double investment in basic research, or increase it by a factor of 10, and you wouldn’t know the effect for 10-15 years.
Why is engineering so unpopular in U.S. society?
Engineering is hard. And the image of engineers needs to change. If you look at television, engineers are either geeks or mad scientists. That’s not true in most of the rest of the world, where engineers are revered.
What can be done to attract young people back to studying engineering?
The K-12 education in this country on average can best be described as ‘abysmal.’ Most of the teachers to whom students are exposed in science and math don’t have a degree or a certificate in science or math. So right off the bat, kids tend to be uninterested. We can start by getting teachers in the K-12 grades that have primary degrees in the fields they teach. Second, we can change the image of this profession. If you list the top problems that America has to deal with – the environment, energy, national security, homeland security, the economy, water supplies and to some degree health care – the answers are going to come from engineers, not lawyers, bankers or accountants. The Washington Post recently had an article on how to succeed in college, and number two on the list was ‘Don’t study engineering.’ That’s not helpful.
There’s a great program called Project Lead The Way which provides nationally standardized Engineering education to middle and high schoolers. They have it at East High, not sure about the other 4 high schools in Madison. Students who earn at least an 85 on a standardized test can receive college credit for their high school engineering courses. There are about 35 universities with engineering programs involved in PLTW now, and they add a few every year. Our oldest, who wants to go to engineering school, has gotten some college credits out of this program, as well as an early exposure to the profession. You’re right Larry, there’s nothing sexy about engineering in our society, but everyone complains when engineers don’t “get it right”!
Thanks for addressing and publicizing this issue. I began a Masters in Education and was so disappointed by the curricula and the professors that I switched to a Masters in Liberal studies which has proven to be much more challenging and useful to my field as an English teacher. In one of my Education classes the professor told us on the first day that we would all get A’s. Each class was a repeat of the same disjointed lecture of the class before. In another class, the professor brought in arm loads of books and had us pass them around. That was her idea of class.
Teachers deserve better, and so do their students. At elite private schools, teachers need not go through certification hoops. Why is that? They know what many of us teachers know: that it is a waste of their teachers’ talents and money. Instead, many private school teachers have advanced degrees in their fields. They write, research and publish just as their college teaching peers do.
As mentioned in others previous posts, I think a worthwhile goal would be to eliminate university majors (even minors) in education.
All college graduates must major and minor in substantive subjects, and none dumbed down for students who eventually want to teach in public or private schools.
What about graduate studies in education? I would probably want that eliminated also. Real research areas in education, like psychometrics, educational leadership, should be subsumed in others substantive areas such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, statistics, medical areas, psychiatry, law, business.
I don’t believe any progress can be made in public schools until then. I find little worthwhile in the educational arguments to date — only mostly unjustified opinions.