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

CARLENE ELLIS: Okay, well our team didn't have time to make t-shirts, but I'd like to introduce you to each member.

Nancy, from the proud State of Montana. Nancy Keenan, raise your hand for everybody. Kelly, Department of Labor, Carlene, our leader. Oh, pardon me. Transportation. They sound the same to me. Maria our leader, Maria Lopez-Freeman. Yeah. Dennis, Iris Metts. Iris, where did you go? Iris was invaluable for us, quite frankly. Barnett Berry, Richard Stoddard, and Judy Sunley, and our staff guy, we couldn't remember his name, where is he? Thank you. John Luczak was wonderful, too.

Okay.

We didn't do the format. I'm sure that surprises you. But what we did do -- but I'm sure we can fill it in for homework. What we did do as a brainstorming session and decided to use it was a supply side analysis. And what that means is we thought about every possibility of supply for the 2.5 million teachers we may or may not need, but assuming we need them. One of our most radical assumptions was maybe we don't need those teachers at all, and maybe we look at kind of technology as the teacher with a facilitator model that's not a teacher. And how we got there was if we truly can't find 2 1/2 million teachers, we'll probably go look for something else. So that was our most out there kind of deal.

[See Slide 1] Let me just go to 12:00 high on. Retirees. Retirees coming back into the system that have retired. Certified teachers who left teaching in their first three years, and something has happened and they want to come back to the new education. Existing teachers in other fields that aren't in math and science. Paraprofessionals from community colleges or other two-year institutions. We saw global sourcing, which Iris mentioned this morning, planet Earth recruiting is what we called it, as a supply side arrangement for those 2 1/2 million teachers.

We looked at a concept, not as far out as technology as the teacher, but master teaching concepts, with distance learning and classroom facilitation and aides. And then we looked at typical new college grads coming in, new teachers coming in from the colleges into the workforce, with a provocative "how" that we want to get back into the high schools and begin recruiting kids to be teachers at the high school level. Now, I don't know if that sounds funny to you or not, but I assure you the high tech companies are going to start recruiting kids in eighth grade soon, because as supply and demand gets more out of whack, we'll go all the way back into the high school system to sign up kids to work and go to school. So that was our supply side arrangement. Did we leave anything out? Where was that?

Oh, yeah. Business second-career people. There are many, many people in companies I know today that would love to figure out how to teach and go into teaching, many of them.

MEMBER: Did you get into?How about military retirees as second careers?

MS. ELLIS: Yeah, you're exactly right. No, we didn't get into that. Yeah. We didn't get that. Anything else we missed? Okay.

Okay, I'm going to skip this. I put it in the wrong order. Okay. [See Slide 2] "How." Those were the "whats," those were the "whats" of this supply side arrangement. So how would we go get these 2 1/2 million teachers, in a very tough environment, and get them to go do this for a career? Well, we'd probably recommend we do everything. We'd give them loans to go to school and then we'd forgive them. We'd give them scholarships, a little different. We can give them the loans outside of the college scholarship afterwards, or we can give them loans and scholarships, whatever. We would get into the two-year system and the high school system and start recruiting early. Somebody said in the room, they said you know, if business professionals would quit telling their kids -- I heard Secretary Riley say this once -- why are all these people running around telling their kids not to be a teacher? Well, there's some real truth to that. So if business professionals would quit telling their kids not to go into teaching, it would probably help, a little bit.

We think the salary structures, both at the state and district level, need to change. We think there could be a retirement incentive, where you retire from teaching -- companies do this -- you retire from what you're doing, you get full payout on that retirement, and then you come back in - IBM's done a lot of this -- come back in as a consultant. Well, this is the concept you'd retire from teaching, then come back into teaching, additional pay with no limits, a la the Social Security arrangement that's being proposed. That was a "how."

Housing assistance, which is being done in California, particularly in the Bay area today. Alternative pathways, the second career, fast tracking: you end your career, you get in a program to really become a teacher, and you get fast track into some teaching arrangement. Incentives. We listened to somebody this morning, 5K, 5K additional to go into a Title I school. We thought that sounded pretty interesting. Incentives for institutions to produce more math and science prepared teachers.

And by the way, our scope here is K through 12. We got all hung up on how we're going to have incentives for a kindergarten math teacher, kind of, but the fact of the matter is if we don't go all the way back we can't fix the systems. So we've got to get back into K through 6 and make some difference there. Lastly, a thought of maybe, maybe we need K through 8 math and science specialists in the short range, before we can produce all these people. So maybe a short- term solution is to get K through 8 math specialists.

So those were some of our recommendations, specifically, on "hows."

We had some overarching needs that we were worried about. So we put them on a new page and wrote them in red. [See Slide 3] The first one is a real belief there're some missing systems. We don't exactly know how many teachers we need, exactly where and exactly when. That's a system. That's called demand. We don't know exactly how many we've got, where and when, and what they look like. That's the supply. So in our business this would be called a supply and demand system. So you can produce product and ship it.

We see a system need here, math and science for K through 12, with a database and indicators. Secondly, we kind of talked about -- I don't know much about this -- but a K through 8 math and science licensing process that, you know, got more math and science pumped into that K through 8 curriculum and, therefore, teacher. So that was both a licensing and a long -- it's a long-term solution, and the short term solution was to put specialists in K through 8 that probably came down from high school. Okay?

Third, we need a distinct linkage process for this report thing we're going to do between recruitment, induction, professional development, and the teacher prep cycle itself. There's going to be standard horizontal themes running through here. We've got to make sure we're linked. Kind of like linked teams.

[See Slide 4] We saw recommendations coming in at least three levels, federal, state and local. The federal level, we named it NDEA 2000. We thought of a John Glenn Memorial thing here, but we didn't think you'd like that.

SENATOR GLENN: You were correct.

MS. ELLIS: So we came up with the NDEA 2000. At the state level, national reciprocity for math and science K through 12 teachers, the ability to source teachers from anywhere for anywhere. If we couldn't do that in business we'd be dead. So the concept of hiring from anywhere for anywhere with licensing and credentials and everything working themselves out. We think we needed to state salaries distinctly. We had avoided it till the end, and we decided that we could go and do everything we've written up here. If we don't address the salary issue, we're not going to address it. So we wrote it up boldly.

And then at the district level, to bring in business leaders, get 'em in the high schools to turn kids on to teachers. You know, technology has a National Engineers' Week. And there's probably 20,000 out of 80,000 INTEL employees that volunteer around the world. They walk right in the school and tell the kids how great it is to be an engineer and get stock options. Well, that has a profound impact on that kid, I'll assure you.

MEMBER: Has a profound affect on a lot of teachers.

MS. ELLIS: Probably. So we need to declare the crisis we talked about, and then get business out into the schools, and with our own kids, encouraging them to be teachers. And then we've got to address salaries at the local level. Our thought was -- well, I guess our thought was that the state level was where most of the salary "umph" came from, but we felt like it needed to be done at both.

That's all folks. That's it. Questions?

MEMBER: Weren't there any consideration, in terms of, like, public announcements on TV, in terms of recruiting ?

MS. ELLIS: That's a good idea.

MEMBER: If you would indulge just one minute, Linda. From the Time magazine, very short article. U.S. to help boost enlistment, Defense Secretary Bill Cohen is asking some -- asking celebrities to do military recruiting ads. The Navy is airing a Spike Lee directed commercial. James Brolin is narrating a video for the Marine Reserves. You know, I wonder if that's a model to think about in terms of doing the same for math and science teachers.

Thank you.

MS. ELLIS: Okay, got it. What I heard you say was sales and marketing for recruiting, whether it's ads, radio, TV, whatever.

MEMBER: This is just about your salaries. Were you thinking differentiated salaries for math and science teachers, or kind of across-the-board? Or could you elaborate on that a little bit and any particular strategies?

MS. ELLIS: Yeah. We talked about paying math and science teachers more, and then we thought about the unintended consequences of doing that. You know, you please the 20%, and tick off the 80% in one fell swoop, or whatever the numbers are. So we clearly thought about it from a permanent differentiation, and then the rest of team should speak. I think we kind of didn't go there. Is that, right? Maria?

MEMBER: Yes. I think the question became "Who would get that differentiated salary?" We kind of assumed that it would actually go to the calculus and the physics teacher. And we were really talking about the K-6 teacher, also. So we took a different take on that.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Any other questions or clarifications?

MEMBER'S DESIGNEE: Could I have a clarification on the following?

Did you talk about the possibility of working with the local industry, government labs, to fill in the summer salary, I mean to make use of the talents of these science and math, but they're working for the extra money. Was that discussed?

MS. ELLIS: I don't remember it being discussed in this meeting, per se. But it could -- but it could have been.

Probably was incorporated in alternative pathways. It was a pretty raucous session. Probably could imply a lot of things.

MEMBER: Yes, it's not easy. But then, none of this is.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Anything else? For recruitment? Well, let's move to induction.

This page last modified April 24, 2000 (pss)