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

SECRETARY GARY HART: My perspective on these issues comes out of 20 years serving in the California State legislature, 12 as the chair of the Senate Education Committee, and for the past year I served as Governor Davis' Secretary for Education. So I have both a lengthy legislative perspective, and a much more limited but very intensive executive branch perspective. So I'm going to talk some about policy and about politics at the state level. And what I'd like to do is to, again, just sort of work through each of these issues quickly.

Someone asked the question, which are the highest priorities, and I want to try and focus on some of the things that I've heard. I think there's been some wonderful ideas and some rich recommendations here, but I want to share with you some of the ones that I think are most intriguing for your consideration.

A couple of preliminary comments. One, I think issues of equity are extremely important. It's our poorer kids, our minority kids that suffer the most from under-prepared teachers, and I hope that this report will focus on this issue. I think that's the role for the national government, and I think it's a role for national commissions. I'm also unclear from what I've heard today in terms of some of the recommendations as to whether or not they're meant to be limited to math and science teachers, or whether they're meant to be across the board. And this gets into the politics. If any time we start making certain kinds of awards or distinctions for certain kinds of teachers, we always run into some political concerns and some equity issues there, as well.

In terms of the recommendations on recruitment, and I want to focus maybe more on recruitment, because I think recruitment is the hardest of these areas, as long as teachers salaries remain where they are, and as long as we're not creating more math and science graduates from our colleges, this is not going to be a problem that's going to be solved. We can sort of work around the edges, and that's what I'm going to do. But we shouldn't kid ourselves about the magnitude of the problem, I think, in terms of recruitment.

Three or four comments on recruitment. I thought that Governor Hunt's comments today were extremely important in terms of developing some kind of a national recognition program for people who pursue math and science careers. And I'll be a little bit parochial here. This year Governor Davis has proposed a program for $20,000 fellowships for students who pursue teaching careers, not in math and science, but in hard-to-serve geographical areas of the state. But there's no reason why that concept couldn't be applied to something like math and science at the federal level. The question I think that needs to be asked of Governor Hunt, or anyone who puts it forward as he did, if I understood it correctly, it's a bonus for teachers for their first year of compensation, or instead of compensation, maybe for discretionary materials that's not quite as much of a red flag in terms of the politics of the issue.

We're proposing in California a fellowship, because a fellowship I think avoids some of the issues of equity that are part of the collective bargaining process that Tom just made reference to. And I think by having a fellowship you may be able to influence people earlier in the process. And I think there's something with a fellowship -- we have Fulbright scholars, we have MacArthur fellows, there are all sorts of names now that are sort of associated with prestige that I think are good things, and it's a good way to capture people's attention.

There's a lot of talk about loan forgiveness. We have loan forgiveness in California in a big way. It doesn't -- it is important, and I wouldn't neglect it, but I don't think it's enough. And I think having something like a fellowship, and we think of fellowships for graduate students oftentimes, who are post-doc, or something, that I think to have that concept apply to people who are in their undergraduate years, or in their fifth year, would serve a very useful purpose.

I also, secondly, want to make reference to alternative certification. There have been passing references to it. But we've had some I think significant success in California with alternative certification. And I think when we're talking about math and science teachers, it's particularly important to talk about alternative certification, because alternative certification is a way for someone who is in another career to get into teaching. And what we have, and a couple of our presenters this morning made reference to this, is that people have expertise in math and science; they don't have it in the pedagogy. And this is a way to capture that expertise in what I think is a cost-effective mechanism.

And alternative certification is very powerful, because it provides a bridge by which candidates can receive either full salary, or close to full salary as they're in transition. And these candidates usually have family responsibilities; they can't give up going back to school for a year or two without salary. We also find through alternative certification that retention rates are much higher; the people who tend to pursue this route are more mature; the dollar pays off more ostensibly. So I think there's a role for the federal government to play in terms of alternative certification.

Tom just made reference to part timers. One part timer, in terms of job share, that I don't think anyone has referred to today that we need to do a better job of exploring, are community college instructors. I don't know in other states, but in California we have a large number of part-time instructors that are exploited in terms of the salary and benefits that they receive. They are desperate to get a decent wage. They oftentimes are doing remedial math in community colleges. I think we ought to be reaching out to examining some of our community college, particularly part-time brethren, as people who can be enlisted to participate in alternative certification programs that will lead to teaching positions.

Thirdly, I want to make reference to national board certification when we're talking about salary differentials. This gets back to the issue of bonuses. But I think an easy way, a relatively speaking easy way to deal with this difficult issue about equity is through national board certification, because the NEA and the AFT have bought into national board certification. They're very comfortable with this process. In California we offer $10,000 now for any teacher who's nationally board certified, and we're proposing this year an additional $20,000 for any teacher who serves in a low performing school. So it's potentially $30,000. And again, I want to get back to the first point about fellowship. I think we need to be talking in $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 increments, not loan forgiveness, but scholarship, and one-time awards. And it would seem to me that it would be appropriate for the federal government to match states in terms of bonuses through a national certification process. And maybe there're some other ways that we can do this kind of recognition, but national board certification seems to me to be the most credible, the most rigorous, and the one that has the fewest political land mines.

Lastly, on recruitment, I wanted to make reference to higher education. Someone made reference to this, this morning, it was in a couple of points in the literature. It's just a shocking statistic, and that is that half of the people that are trained as teachers don't teach. What a waste of person power and not having, you know, a very functional system. And it seems to me if there's anything that this Commission could do to focus on this issue, it's a very serious and persistent problem. One way to do it, it would seem to me, would be to have some mechanism for incentives, for colleges and universities that maybe train more math and science teachers than they're currently doing. That's the sort of first stage. The second stage is they get even more money if they're actually able to place someone in a school and document that the person's been placed. Maybe they get even more money if they place a math and science teacher in a low performing or a hard-to-staff school, and then they get the Regis $1 million if they able to show that they're able to retain that person over a number of years. By having them be involved in retention, that's an important part of what higher education responsibility, it seems to me, ought to be in the future.

Just a couple of points on induction and professional development. On induction, it seems to me that the federal government and state governments have been involved for a long time in teacher recruitment and professional development activities. We have loan forgiveness, we have Eisenhower, but we do not have, to my knowledge, an involvement in the induction process. And it seems to me for the federal government to be involved, as we heard Dennis', I thought, very eloquent and persuasive comments earlier today about how critical induction is, it seems to me that this part of the teacher life span needs to be highlighted more by this Commission and by all of us.

And I think it would be appropriate for this Commission to focus upon model programs. I think we have a fairly strong program in California. It sounds like Connecticut and other states may have that as well. But it would seem appropriate to me for this Commission to outline what are the most comprehensive, most thoughtful approaches by which we could put together a successful induction program. And I would be happy at some point, if there are questions, to go into the specifics of the 12-point program that we have in California, in terms of the standards that we utilize.

One of the things that we're learning in California is how hard it is to get these mentors to serve in these induction programs, particularly in our hard-to-staff schools. If you have a school in an urban center that has -- the average length of teaching in that school may be only three years. There are no mentors that may be available. And that leads to, I think, one of the things that we've seen in California, is the employment of full-time people to work in these capacities. If you try to do it on the cheap and have one mentor work with one teacher, or if I heard Javier correctly, he has teaching responsibilities, but also has responsibilities for 13 beginning teachers, that seems to me to be very, very difficult. But if you have someone working full-time in this position you ensure that there are classroom observations, which is an extremely important part of the mentoring area, and you help ensure that if you have full-time people at the district level that low income schools are not going to be discriminated against. I would, in this area, urge you to take a careful look at retired teachers. I think they're a wonderful source for mentors.

One final point on induction, and this issue about time. One of the things it seems to me we're doing in this country is we're investing a lot, at least in California, and I know President Clinton is talking a lot about class size reduction. It's a very expensive program. If you want to give people time off, as many of the Asian countries do, they have much larger class size, and some I think thoughtful discussion of the trade-off between reduced class size and reduced time seems to me to be central to the policy debate.

Lastly, in terms of professional development, just very briefly I wanted to share with you a study in California done by the Rand Corporation about five years ago, and it gets to one of the points that Bill Firestone made reference to earlier today that I think is extremely important, which is that we already invest hundreds of millions. In California over $1 billion in professional development through the salary schedule, where you are able to get additional salary compensation based upon seniority and based upon college credits that are taken. This particular study in the Los Angeles area that Rand Corporation did was to take a look at what was occurring in terms of math achievement for students in California, in Los Angeles.

They found that the English language arts scores of students in L.A. were, relatively speaking, pretty good; math was way down. What Rand did is they went in and looked at what the discretionary professional development courses elementary school teachers were taking. And the elementary school teachers were taking, by and large, courses in English language arts, psychology, human development and the arts. Hardly any were taking it in math, because it was their choice and many of them don't like math, they have math phobia. Maybe we know that stereotype, you know, about math teachers or elementary school teachers. So we have a real mismatch. If you have a system which is completely laissez-faire, people are making the choices, math and science particularly for the elementary school level I think are likely to be neglected. So having some redesign of our existing professional development, where it is not entirely sort of laissez-faire -- again that can be a bargaining issue -- seems to me to be extremely important, to have professional development, given the resources that we have out there, be linked to issues having to do with math and science, and make sure that those are not neglected.

Lastly, I just want to mention that in California we are embarking upon a major professional development program that is a minimum of five days for classroom teachers during the summer time. Teachers are paid a stipend of at least $1000. It's a partnership of higher education. We are focusing on three areas: early reading, algebra and pre-algebra, and English language learners. We will be, if the legislature approves the Governor's proposal, over $100 million to focus on these areas. And I think it's a different approach to staff development that is relevant top the work of this Commission. We're focusing on algebra because it's going to be part of our high school exit exam, and we need to do a much better job of training both algebra teachers and pre-algebra and late elementary school teachers in the teaching of maths. And we're making this a high priority and we're going to put most of our discretionary development resources into those areas. And we're moving away from letting districts decide how they're going to, or schools decide how they're going to do professional development. It's not particularly politically popular with people at the local level. But we think if we're really serious about these issues math needs to be addressed, it needs to be addressed at the state level, and universities have an important role to play.

This page last modified April 24, 2000 (gkp)