Content area
Full Text
You can't throw a stone without hitting a STEM initiative these days, but most science, technology, engineering, and math initiatives overlook a fundamental problem. In general, the workforce pipeline of elementary school teachers fails to ensure that the teachers who inform children's early academic trajectories have the appropriate knowledge of and disposition toward math-intensive subjects and mathematics itself.
Prospective teachers can typically obtain a license to teach elementary school without taking a rigorous college-level STEM class such as calculus, statistics, or chemistry, and without demonstrating a solid grasp of mathematics knowledge, scientific knowledge, or the nature of scientific inquiry. This is not a recipe for ensuring students have successful early experiences with math and science, or for generating the curiosity and confidence in these topics that students need to pursue careers in STEM fields.
To improve STEM learning, we must strengthen the selection, preparation, and !icensure of elementary school teachers. We need higher standards for selection into teacher preparation programs that include demonstrated proficiency in math and science at a level far higher than current teacher candidates. Elementary grade teacher preparation programs must include more - and more rigorous - math and science courses in both content and pedagogy, and teacher candidates must perform in these courses at the high levels.
Furthermore, states must strengthen their !icensure requirements so that teachers cannot obtain a license without passing the math and science sections of the exams. Finally, alternative certification programs should continue to recruit candidates who were STEM majors in college or are STEM professionals, and their !icensure should be streamlined to get them into classrooms as soon as they are ready.
Action is needed now to improve our future global competitiveness, and strengthening our elementary school teachers in math and science is the first critical step in the right direction. To that end, we make five recommendations:
* Increase the selectivity of programs that prepare teachers for elementary grades.
* Implement teacher compensation policies, including performance-based pay, that make elementary teaching more attractive to college graduates and career changers with strong STEM backgrounds.
* Include more mathematics and science content and pedagogy in schools of education.
* Require candidates to pass mathematics and science subsections of !icensure exams.
* Explore innovative staffing models that extend...