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

DR. IRIS METTS: Good morning, Senator. I did just make it in time. And I apologize for my delay. We're out of school today, and I didn't quite time my entrance into D.C. properly. First of all, I want to tell you that I am honored to be here today and to tell you my background, in addition to being a superintendent in a relatively large school district, we have about 130,000 students in the Prince George's school system, my background includes two degrees in physics and mathematics. So the interest of science and mathematics is very dear to my heart.

And I don't know if you know a lot about the demographics of the Prince George's school system, but in addition to being about the 17th largest school system in the country, demographics are changing very rapidly. We moved from being a very rural community to a very metropolitan community in the Washington, D.C., area. And indeed, our socioeconomic demographics changed very rapidly, too. Prince George's County has been described by some as being the most affluent predominantly African-American county in the country. And I think that's to some extent a misnomer, because we do have, I think, a variety of not only ethnic groups, including a growing Latino population, but also we have minorities in many, many varieties. Principal among those may be people of color who are coming directly from the islands, and also from Africa. So it's a very diverse population, with socioeconomic differences of very affluent people and people who are still struggling and trying to move up the ladder, so to speak.

Endemic to all of this is the desire of our county to be a hotbed to develop technology, particularly in view of the growing digital divide within the country. And a lot of people fear that people who are coming from very poor circumstances will not be able to take full advantage of the opportunities that will be afforded most people in the information age. Coupled with that is the tremendous problem of recruiting teachers, particularly in science and mathematics, to a community like Prince George's. I know you've reviewed all of those problems, wage differentials, just getting people to come to work in a metropolitan area, where expenses may be rather high for young teachers coming into the area. And last but not least, just the lack of qualified candidates in mathematics, in science, to fill those teaching spots.

You need to know that my experience as a superintendent in this particular county is rather limited. I have only been there for about eight months. But we see immediately the problem of hiring fully certified teachers in math and science. In fact, it does not please me to report that one of the missions that I must pursue as a superintendent is to dramatically reduce the number of uncertified teachers that we have within our county school system. We're approaching at this point upwards of about 19 percent. And that's across all categories. I testified yesterday at the Maryland General Assembly before a committee that actually has oversight over the school district to talk specifically about how we're going to recruit and maintain a quality staff.

Now, my vision for Prince George's County is to really identify that cadre of people who can make a difference by being fully certified, or by at least coming into the system with some sort of incentive that we can get those people ready to be the best teachers in math and science possible. We have an uphill battle. And basically what I wanted to share with you briefly is our concept of our recruiting plan for the coming year.

First of all, we will offer incentives, financial incentives, and we find that even with offering financial incentives of $1,000 in those high need areas, that's a pittance compared to the incentives that are being offered around the country. Some are reportedly as high as $10,000 for those teachers in critical areas.

Number two, we will extensively use technology to recruit, using the Internet, moving to filling out applications and trying to align ourselves with the major dot com employment facilities of the Internet. We think it's critical to at least get a pool of people who are qualified. Number three, we want to recruit out of the country. We have found some success in recruiting specifically in Canada. In that way, I believe there's a fifth year requirement in Canada, and if we can find people who are, that can legally work in the United States, we have a large source of math and science teachers, fully qualified, that are there that could perhaps be transported to our country. And we have a large number of those teachers who are working with us right now, and hopefully we'll take several more trips to Canada, because of that fifth year requirement, a lot of those teachers are eligible to teach math and science in this country.

The problem that I see is either a problem of inadequate preparation in the content area, that people come in that are not well grounded in the content area of math and science, or problems in instruction and pedagogy, where other recruits will come in from industry or other backgrounds and have not been properly trained in instruction and teaching within the classroom. So I think that what has to happen is not only must you have incentives, not only must you have laws that will allow us to bring in people from other countries, but we must also look at people within the business community, downsizing, and all those opportunities that are there, and because I worked in Delaware for a long period of time, I know there are many, many opportunities to recruit people who are well rounded in the content area, in the business area, back into our school systems from the chemical industries, that are downsizing rapidly across the country, and the pharmaceutical industries, in some instances.

Now, what you need to have, however, is I think a return to some of the post-Sputnik incentives to train people, where we do have at the cost of the system, or at the cost of the state or the federal government, some program to make sure that if you are grounded in the content area, but you've not taught before, that we can provide extensive training to help you make the transition, or if it's the opposite way around, if you do have the instructional and pedagogy background training, but are not grounded in the content area, that we will offer the specifics to help you gain that knowledge.

I think in the coming millennium, significant long-distance training is going to be absolutely necessary, even if people are thinking of taking early retirement, to enter the picture very early, to have technology train those people if they're considering a career switch into education. We cannot go out and recruit when someone has filed retirement papers, and expect to have an appropriate segue into the classroom and into teaching. We've got to be more proactive, we've got to reach out, we've got to look at the pool of people that will be available in the future, who are well grounded in those content areas, and actually design programs to make those transitions back into the classroom. If we wait until we go out on our own and recruit, and then train, we will lose valuable time, teaching time, from people who may not be experts within classroom practices, or people who may not be experts within the content areas to come in and work with our children.

Now, what's the relative number of people that we recruit in a district the size of the one that I'm superintendent of right now? We recruit about 1,500 teachers per year where, I would think, roughly about 400 to 300 need training in science and mathematics. So we're talking about a large turnover every year. A lot of our problem in Prince George's is our lack of attractive salaries as compared to counties surrounding us, such as Fairfax, Montgomery. The whole metropolitan area, however, I think suffers from the same problem, just not having an adequate pool. So I think that what we have not done, as school districts, and perhaps as a country, is to look at the database of what's possible, transforming those candidates rapidly, into good classroom teachers.

We need a more sophisticated approach to analyzing the numbers that are needed, we need networks to connect school systems in order to share and to make sure that we have some idea of the need within those school systems. While I know that we want to be independent as school districts, and as various entities within the public school structure, what I know we cannot afford to do any longer is not connect to each other, and not connect to some national databank system that will allow us to meet our needs. I was trained, and I attended college at William and Mary, with a fellowship after Sputnik, and that whole impetus to better train our teachers, to better prepare us is, to me, needed in this situation.

We don't treat this as a crisis. I think it's a growing crisis, and I think if we don't have some connectivity on a national level, on a state level, where we figure out how many people are in the pipeline, how we can rapidly train them, and how we can move those people to the appropriate school systems, I think we're going to have continuous problems in developing the potential of all of the students in our country. And significant in the development of future scientists are people who are in poverty, people who are of color, people who form the minorities within our population. I think I enter all those categories, plus I'm a female, which gives me an extra classification of perhaps an under served population, but I had an opportunity, through a very carefully designed national program, to move forward, to be well trained, and to have an opportunity to teach others.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the outcome of a national program to recruit, to retrain, and to make sure that there are adequate people of all ethnic backgrounds within the pipeline was recently when I met again a young man who I taught in high school. You have to understand that my high school was in the center of a neighborhood that was in poverty, a distressed neighborhood. And this young man came up to me and he was vice president of the Oracle software company. So a second generation of people who are being produced in math and science, and are leading our industries. You know, I would have been perhaps happier if he had been a teacher, but you have to take what you take. And hopefully we can convince a lot more people that we need to train all of our citizens. And my reference to the digital divide perhaps could be stretched to the scientific divide, the mathematics divide, all of those elements of our society where if we do not bring all of our citizens to a certain point and recruit extensively to get the very best within our classrooms that we will lose a lot of talented people in the future.

I have no idea how long you wanted me to talk, and I'm probably not as scientific as the prior presenter, or as data driven, but what I know that we do not have is a system. We have no databases, we have no systems, we don't use technology extensively. And we have no outlets to recruit from outside of the country. And thirdly, we have no systems to rapidly train people if they can meet standards, we have no support mechanisms within systems. And all of the things that I mentioned will probably take some laws from Congress, will probably take some federal programs, will probably take support to the states, and by all means will probably take money.

Thank you.

This page last modified May 2, 2000 (gkp)