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

SENATOR GLENN: Thank you. Questions? Comments? Craig?

MEMBER : I'd like to ask Gail Shroyer a question.

SENATOR GLENN: Just come on back up here. You can both be up here answering questions.

MEMBER: While you were giving your presentation, I was trying to mentally relate schools of education to schools of engineering, to schools of business, etc. And I really am interested in if you see any unique difference between a school of education and another professional school in terms of the relationship between the school and the post-graduation involvement of the graduate. It seems to me that the issues are entirely identical.

And is there something unique about schools of education in terms of customizing their curriculum to be relevant to the outside world that other schools have an easier time of, or more complicated time?

DR. SHROYER: I think that when we compare colleges of education to other professional schools, I think that there are a lot of similarities. But I think that the skills and knowledge that we are trying to develop in future teachers is very complicated. I think that it's one thing to understand information for yourself and apply it in your own work environment. It's an added dimension to also understand it well enough to be able to teach it to students.

And I think that the life of teachers is such a complex profession. I mean, we talk about teachers having to make decisions, multiple decisions every minute of their working hours. I think few professions have that same level. Yes, all professions have many, many challenges to them, but for teachers, what we're trying to do, oftentimes in four years, is to prepare them for something that I think perhaps demands more than four years of preparation to do well. I think that again what they need is once they get out into the field, which is why people have been talking about the one-year induction program. And the three-year mentoring program is similar to what was mentioned with the alternative certification, is somebody is there constantly to debrief and to talk to them about it.

We also don't have as clearly defined knowledge base in education, as a lot of other fields do. It's not as easy to be able to say, this is exactly what you do in this situation. If a child does this, then you respond by doing this, because it may or may not work, depending on what child you're talking about.

MEMBER: There's always a tendency to think that you're unique. Maybe I'll just leave it at that.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Walter.

MEMBER: Yes, Ms. Sclafani, quick question. What is the ethnic mix of alternatively certified teachers given the estimates of the schools? And secondly?

SENATOR GLENN: Could you use the mike there, Walter, so everybody can hear you there.

MEMBER: What is the racial and ethnic mix of the teachers you're recruiting for the ACP program? And secondly, it sounds very fascinating, are you learning things from this program that can be folded back into a traditional teacher education program?

DR. SCLAFANI: The ethnic mix of our alternative certification program interns is similar to that of our school district. It's about a third white, it's a third African-American, it's about 25 percent Hispanic and about 10 percent other. And as a school district, we are about 38 percent white, about 40 percent African-American, about 22 percent Hispanic, and the rest Asian and other. So the mix is about the same. It's about one-fourth male and three-fourths female, which again is about the same as our regular teaching force, so it's very highly reflective of our city, which is a very diverse city. It's about a third, a third, a third in terms of ethnicity.

And we're pleased with that, that we continue to try and attract more males because that is a shortage area, particularly in our elementary schools.

As to what we're learning, yes. It is not only something that we share with all of our colleges of education because we work closely with them through our urban systemic initiative grant. We have a coalition of all of the colleges and universities in the city and in the region. And we talk about what we're finding there. It also has changed somewhat the University of St. Thomas' program. They have taken what they've learned from our program and done it in theirs.

Probably the major difference is how critical it is to have assistance and support for the teachers, particularly in their first year. We have a mentor program for all of our first-year teachers. The state had talked about doing this about 10 years ago, and Houston as usual jumped on board and said, okay, we're going to do it. The state never decided to make this a formal requirement, but we saw the value of it. There is a mentor program for all first-year teachers. But the additional assistance of the alternative certification program specialists on a 1-25 teacher -- specialist ratio has been a phenomenal improvement in the quality of the people going through.

And so we have in our district used instructional supervisors to do that same kind of work with our new teachers through each of our 12 decentralized school systems, each school district within our district.

MEMBER: Just a comment on the ethnicity and the changes it's bringing on in this country. I think I read a short time ago, and maybe some of you saw the same article, California I think, within three years we will not have a predominant ethnic group. In other words, nobody will be over 50 percent. And the United States will be that way within 25 years, I think, or by 2025 or 30. So that's rapidly changing -- it really changes the face of things.

DR. SCLAFANI: Yes, it does.

MEMBER: Just a quick follow-up on that. I wanted to pick up on a question that Walter asked. No matter how you look at it, the United States is not a dominant majority in the rest of the world. There's 96 percent of the world's consumers that live somewhere else, so pick whatever ethnic majority or minority you want, in the world competitiveness we can't claim majority status in any sense.

What Walter raised as a follow-up question or comment, I think, is worth following up on. There are so many strong similarities in what works between the two presentations here today, and yet the time period over which it's accomplished is dramatically different. The similarities, for instance, in the Houston program, or at least time to observe master teachers, substitute days to visit other schools, debriefing sessions for the induction period, practice sessions, participation in professional development, mentor teachers, principal assessments -- you look at all those factors and say, in both cases, you talked about how they worked. At least what the vision ought to be.

Yet what I see in Houston is an accelerated schedule to bring somebody into the profession. You just need to do it. There's a sense of urgency. That's the one thing I sense that we have grappled with here and have yet to come up with a solution. So in a sense, what I pick up from your presentation, Susan, on the Houston situation is that you have the urgency, you have to fill. There is no choice.

DR. SCLAFANI: Absolutely.

MEMBER: You have to do something. So all the theories and the what-ifs have to be set aside because you have to have somebody in class.

Starting from your 1,400 vacancies, how many other vacancies might there be if somebody were not teaching more or less out-of-field? Would you have -- do you allow teaching out-of-field in some of the other positions?

DR. SCLAFANI: We allow teachers in the state, in fact, as a whole, one class out of their general certificate area. I cannot tell you how many of those we have, where they're teaching one class out of the five that they might teach during a day that are out of their certificate area. I know that overall we do fairly well. We've got about 85 percent of our people teaching in their area, that's the majority of their assignment is in that area. The ones who have one class out, I don't know, we don't know the numbers of.

MEMBER: But do you do as intensive a program for teacher development for them as you would for the alternative certification program?

DR. SCLAFANI: Yes, we do, and in fact, what we've created is, particularly for those who are coming in where we can't find people, and so we're hiring long-term substitutes. There are people who have background in the field that have no teaching experience. And we've brought them into our alternative certification program their substitute year. They've missed our deadline, they've missed our cutoff to be part of it if they come to us in August because our program starts in May, but we bring them through a similar program of support during the year in which they're substituting. I mean, officially they're known as a substitute. And then we bring them into the alternative certification program on an even more accelerated schedule during that next summer, so that we are providing support and assistance to them. We are getting them engaged in the college coursework with the local university, and they are able then to have a support system for the year that they're a substitute.

They then go into the alternative certification program. So it's almost like a two-year alternative certification program for them because we saw that we could not leave these people out there without a lifeline.

MEMBER: Mr. Chairman, if you didn't indulge me -- where I want to take this is, it seems as though, when you're pressed by necessity, you do things differently. And that's one thing I've always noticed about being in the business world. Where you have to adapt, you do.

You don't wrangle over it. You just have to take some action and Houston has done that. What I detect in Gail's comments, though, are so many things in vision that are the same thing.

It's a schedule we go over. It's who gets to be the gatekeeper, who sets the standards, who determines what the content knowledge would be. And I'm tempted to say, in the presentation from Houston, that the most important part is the content knowledge if you then spend enough time for the mentoring, the induction, the development as you're doing it.

And Gail, you said the same thing -- that the partnerships that are developed, if you put the teacher into the classroom quicker, you engage them in the pedagogy, if you will, but content is most important.

Colleges of education, the teacher preparation institutions, only recently have gone from teach the entire content knowledge in the college of education to -- if you're math and sciences, you get your courses in arts and sciences. I think that's where it should be. But that's only a recent development.

What should I make of this? Because it is almost -- it's tempting to jump to a conclusion here.

DR. SHROYER: I think, for one thing, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a recent development. I think most colleges have always had the content courses offered through arts and sciences. They may not have degrees. There has been a more recent move to have the degree come from arts and sciences rather than education. But there actually is a minority of colleges that the college of ed actually teaches the content.

So we've always had similar situations, whereas I said, up to maybe two-thirds of the program is in arts and sciences and maybe one-third is in the college of ed. So we're really, we're not talking about, in a lot of cases, you're not talking about much more than a year of concentrated college -- of education work anyway.

It's just a matter of whether or not it is conducted while students are taking their content classes, which I find to be -- in our program at least -- that has been very, very beneficial to be able to interact with the students as they're taking the content. But if the content were taught in a way that we would like to see it taught in the first place, if it were modeling the kinds of things, then we would be even further ahead. Then, I don't think it would be as critical to be having interactions with students as they're going through the content program.

But I think, in both cases, what has really been essential is providing that one-on-one support once they're in the schools. And I think that that's where a lot of alternative certification programs have failed is that they put the teachers out there in the field and they are not supported.

I would like to see more than, as they're doing in the example provided, I think that it even needs to be more than one year of support for them. One year intensely, and then you ought to move into some sort of a mentoring program, which would be a longer time frame.

MEMBER: Then the conclusion I'm tempted to jump to is maybe we don't need colleges of education. I'll let that soak in for a minute.

If we did not have a college of education course for developing teachers, but we had a curriculum that developed the content knowledge and then had the intensive professional development, as Houston has done - and I don't know, because this is only an anecdote today, if I should even draw that conclusion - but it's tempting to make that leap.

DR. SHROYER: Well, I think lots of people have made that leap, and I think that, in states where they have made that leap, they haven't found it as beneficial as they thought that it was going to be. I think what we're missing is we're missing the partnership that is the most powerful part, and that's what I keep going back to.

The partnership between arts and sciences, college of ed, and our campus - it's that partnership that helps the arts and sciences faculty think about what it is that they're doing and how they ought to be teaching their classes or how they might be teaching their classes to make the adjustments for teachers. And it's also the partnership with the schools that is also essential.

I think it's only when you get those three partners together that you see the kinds of benefits that are possible in education.

MEMBER: But that partnership is with the college of education, not with the college of arts and sciences.

DR. SHROYER: No, it's with all three. I mean, what I'm advocating is that it's a partnership across all three - arts and sciences, college of ed, and school districts.

DR. SCLAFANI: May I just add that we have significantly fewer college hours acquired in the alternative certification program because they get credit for the Monday night meetings and the things that we do with them during the summer. Their formal course work is anywhere, depending upon the area in which they're to be certified, nine hours to 18 hours. And obviously, our special education teachers need more work on how to work with special needs kids.

But for our teacher of mathematics, who's going into a secondary school, nine hours is the only formal course work that they do, which is one of the reasons why there's such an interest in alternative certification programs, and a feeling that to go and do a full masters degree program, to be able to teach and determine whether that's even what you want to do seems like too much to many of our applicants.

MEMBER: Didn't you have a mentoring program in Houston, too, with business and people sort of role models that you bring into the schools a lot more than you used to do?

DR. SCLAFANI: Yes, we have a school-business partnership...

MEMBER: I think I read something about that.

DR. SCLAFANI: ... that brings them into all of our schools.

MEMBER: Has that been a major factor in interesting the kids in what they're studying? They see a light at the end of the tunnel that, once they get out of school, there's some way they're going to use it?

DR. SCLAFANI: Yes. Yes.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Paul.

MEMBER: Gail, I just sort of -- two questions for you. And I'll set the context in that I am a school superintendent. So I'm looking at the aspect of employment.

There are two things that I wondered about with respect to what you said, and your recommendations.

One is you were attempting to bridge preservice to continuous professional development, and I would say to you that I also work with a consortium of 18 school districts in mathematics and science. And seeing Don here, who is on the advisory board of Project 2061, I would only say how many programs or people attempting to set forth for school districts to work with and would your idea just be one more competitive entity for schools to try to sift through for what you've used as high-quality, which I wonder -- in all the recommendations, it says "high-quality," and I'm curious as to what you deem high quality to be.

And then second, and I take no exception to your recommendations. I think you have very good ideas here but one that I think is absent is, what assurance do schools, school administrators, have that when they employ your graduates, they come with that content knowledge that you're talking about?

Yesterday, we heard about Praxis or someone talked about the Praxis exams and that.

Is there something that you're recommending that I'm missing that stipulates that you intend to say that this license or degree that we grant to you assures you that the people that are coming to you have this content knowledge and have had the necessary preservice experiences?

DR. SHROYER: Well, one of the issues, it's difficult to cover everything in 20 minutes, but if you, if I'd had a little bit more time to talk about what some of the NCATE standards are or what some of the INTASC standards are for new teachers, they actually recommend a blend of everything from performances that would be a part of regular course work in classes, so that it would be, it would include anything from tests and projects and so forth that would be conducted within the content classes, to also including testing that would be conducted, so it would be, for example, the Praxis. I think most states are moving towards that.

And then it would also include performances in the school, and one of the criteria they look at in terms of performance in the school would be student achievement. What indication do you have that your teachers, when they go out into the schools, can actually increase the achievement of the children that they're working with.

So it would really -- when I talk about developing these performance-based standards, that's what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about really a combination of assessments -- performances within courses and performances within the school. And I think, through that combination, that you would have good assurance when you would hire an individual that they would be able to have, not only the content, but also the pedagogy that would go along with that.

MEMBER: And professional development?

DR. SHROYER: And the professional development, what I'm referring to when I talk about blending that, is that most colleges of education that have worked with partnerships. There's a lot of different terms for them. I coordinate our professional development schools. That is our partnership. That is our partnership between arts and sciences, college of ed and teachers.

As a matter of fact, today, while I'm here, we have a meeting going on at Kansas State, which has 60 faculty members that are coming from -- about 30 of them -- from arts and sciences, 30 of them from college of ed, and we have about 50 teachers that are going to be there.

And they're all on planning teams and they're going to be looking at our program and again talking about how we can improve our entire program.

So, professional development schools are just one example. They have many different names. But the idea is that, in that kind of a partnership, it shouldn't be one more thing that the school has laid on it or that the school has to do. Instead, it should be a way of working together.

One of the things that I do as the coordinator of professional development schools is I sit down with the teachers and administrators at the school. We look at the achievement data of children. We look at what enhances it. It's called quality performance accreditation, which looks at the achievement. And we identify what are the areas in the school that you could use assistance with. And then we talk about how can the students that are going out for their four field experiences throughout our program, how can they be a part of helping to achieve the goals that the school has set for themselves?

As part of that, teachers are interacting. The teachers in the schools are not only responsible for their children, but they're also responsible for helping us think about what makes good teachers. So, a tremendous amount of growth that occurs there.

I, as a faculty member, am not only thinking about what's important for my college students, which are the future teachers, but I'm equally concerned about what is good for the K-12 kids that I'm working with.

So, rather than it being one more job for anybody, it's more of a blending of jobs. It's more of a blending of roles and responsibilities. And we pull lots of different entities into that collaboration. We have the National Educational Association, at the state level, the national level, and also at the local level is very involved in the partnership.

We have community that is involved in the partnership -- parents. So, you know, again, I think that when you talk about partnerships, you're really looking at the whole range, and you're looking at partnerships for mutual benefit, not just the benefit of the college program.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Jeff.

MEMBER: I have a question for each of you.

Susan, in the data that you showed, Teach for America, after five years, 70 percent drop. Only 30 percent remain. If you could talk to the reason for that large figure.

And Gail, you made some reference to changing of the mathematics courses, made reference about algebra and so forth and so on.

In a similar context, keep in mind that in the elementary schools, you're dealing with typically kindergarten through sixth grade. And given the fact that in the elementary school teacher's lifetime, she's likely or he is likely to teach more than one grade.

Coupling that with the fact that a lot of assessment now is doing clusters -- there is an earth science cluster, a physical science cluster, life science cluster. Putting that all together, what is your sense of what needs to be done in terms of providing a quality content science background for college students to become teachers?

Either one of you, first or second.

DR. SCLAFANI: I'll give the short answer first.

The Teach for America program is designed to engage bright young people, college -- first-year college graduates in two years of service to under-resourced schools in America. So they make a commitment to come for two years. The fact that there are still 30 percent of them nationally who are in teaching after five years says that they have made a commitment, that they've been brought in by the satisfaction of being a teacher and have decided to make this a career.

So, we're pleased that any of them are there, frankly.

And even if they only stayed for two years, what we have found is that, based on their knowledge and their commitment and enthusiasm, their energy, that they've been able to turn around schools, that their example of coming early and staying late, of working with kids and assuming -- as all of our alternative certification teachers do, and this has really been one of the key factors we have seen and a difference.

If the students aren't learning, they ask, "What am I doing wrong?" "What can I do differently?" They assume that it's their skill and knowledge that need to be improved. They don't blame it on the kids. And their willingness to work with students and families has really been a force within our schools.

Now, we group them. We don't just put one Teach for America intern in a school all by himself or herself, same with the other intern. So that you've got this synergy of energies working with the school.

And just as somebody coming into your home for the first time points out things to you that you've grown so used, that you don't see anymore, when they're asking "Why are we doing things this way?" suddenly other teachers on the campus say, "You know, that's a good question. Why are we doing it that way? Let's try to do it a different way."

So we're happy to have them for however long they're with us and we're delighted if they stay for more than their two years. And as you saw, we have a better retention rate in Houston than they have nationally in Teach for America. But it is still a limited tenure.

MEMBER: Let me raise the question this way. If you're delighted to have them, I'm glad that you are, but what about the possibility of overlap? Why couldn't the ACP program take those that might, with the proper kind of support, want to continue?

DR. SCLAFANI: Oh, they are in our alternative certification program. But many of these young people have plans to go on to graduate school in specific areas to become doctors or lawyers or accountants or business people. And so they're giving two years of their life to this because they believe that they need to offer something back to their country.

So, it's like the Peace Corps. And we don't expect everyone to stay in the Peace Corps for an entire career. In the same way, we don't expect them to stay at Teach for America. We're delighted when they do.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: We've got three more names - oh, I'm sorry. You had a second question. I apologize.

MEMBER: Gail, in terms of the - dealing with the elementary problem.

DR. SHROYER: Well, you've asked a huge question there because people have been trying to determine what kind of science and math elementary teachers need for a long time.

As I mentioned, most people agree that the most important aspect for elementary teachers is that it's broad-based, but that it's also deep. In other words, in science, you wouldn't want somebody to just take all their classes in biology. You would want them to have earth science and physics and chemistry and biology. But you would want those courses to probably not deal with the overall coverage of many, many, many areas, but rather to go in depth to the concepts that are most critical to that particular field.

And you would want the students to have opportunities that you'd want them to then provide to their own students. So in other words, in science, you would want them to have opportunities to engage in inquiry, to do experiments, to do investigations.

In math, you would want them also to have opportunities to do mathematical investigations, to engage in, you know, what we call discourse, rather than just having a superficial coverage of the content area.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Bruce.

MEMBER'S DESINGNEE: It seems to me we've talked about education schools and teacher preparation for years. I remember, John Goodlad. We don't seem to make enormous progress.

My question is how do we get some competition in this system because, I think, if we had some competition, it would be good for us. So my real question is how much of the stuff that, say, Thomas is doing or that you're doing, could be done through a system of learning that works over the Web, so we could get some prototypes so students have a choice? I'm going to either take this course from my ed school or I could take it alternatively from another source.

So you, first of all, do two things. You create a competitive system so the ed school that doesn't want to change may have to change if their students start voting with their feet.

And second of all, you get some real prototypes of what we consider good teacher preparation courses visible to people because -- I'm a scientist so I know what good science is even if I'm a student. I could read a good science paper and tell that, where I'm working, they're not doing good science. But I think many people who are in teacher preparation courses don't even know that they're not getting prepared adequately.

DR. SCLAFANI: In fact, we have a program through a grant with the U.S. Department of Education and Rice University to develop online course work for our alternative certification teachers, which we then plan to share with all of our teachers. So we're already starting to do that because we recognize that it's difficult to get everybody at a certain place at a certain time to do anything.

People have their own individual family needs and work needs and they can't be working with kids after school and in a class at the same time.

So we're looking at that throughout.

We're also looking at virtual schooling for our kids, so that they also have some options. If their school doesn't offer a course, that they have an alternative way to get that as well.

DR. SHROYER: I might add that we've also been looking at a lot of distance learning opportunities. Being a rural state, that's a big issue in our state. And we have, for example, right now, an ESL program that is a distance program across the state. Our distance programs have worked better, however, with older students.

They've worked better with practicing teachers who are going for additional areas of certification, such as special ed and ESL. And they've worked better with the older students that are in the program as compared to the traditional 18-to-22-year-olds.

It just seems to be very difficult for them -- I'm not saying it would be for all. But that's one of the challenges that we have faced in trying to do distance delivery.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Rush.

MEMBER: I have a question for Susan Sclafani.

I am still wondering where we're going to get the 2.2 million teachers over the next 10 years. And if you said, I missed, the analysis that you've done or have you done for the other categories of your alternative teachers? You've broken out the Teach for America students and looked at how those Teach for America, how their students have performed and what their retention rate is and other measures of success there.

What about the retirees, which is a large category? What about the mid-career people who come into teaching?

DR. SCLAFANI: We haven't broken those out. But it's something that we're looking at.

Each year, we add another component to our evaluation program and it is something that we're looking at.

One of the things that we found was that, because we were relying on TAAS as our major form of analysis and it only was three through eight and 10, it didn't enable us to look more broadly at other groups in other teaching assignments or in science, for example.

So, now that we're giving the Stanford 9 each year, and we've got two years of data, now we're going to start looking at that data and one of the things that we planned to look at was those people who come in in math and science through the alternative route, as compared with the others, particularly in the achievement of children in math and science.

But looking at it by age categories is something else that we could do and just hadn't thought about doing. It's a good idea.

MEMBER: It looks like the recent graduates in Teach for America are about a quarter of your alternative group. What are the fractions for retirees and for mid-career?

DR. SCLAFANI: Our mid-career and retirees are over half, together. I don't know that I could break out for you specifically how that breaks down further.

MEMBER: Thank you.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Deborah.

MEMBER: I have a hypothesis about what we've been hearing that would link the two presentations we've had in a different way than they've been linked so far. Because, as I said yesterday, it's always convenient for us to end up talking about structures and who's working with whom and what happens in schools of ed.

There have been several comments suggesting maybe schools of ed. aren't the place to do it. My point isn't all about any of that.

I think we actually see something here that is a clue to what we need to concentrate on in the next day, and I feel as though it's absolutely crucial that we do so.

And also, my comment also, that I'm about to make, links to what Craig asked earlier about other professional schools.

At the University of Michigan, out of 21 units in the university, 17 of them are professional schools. And so this is a question that has been of great interest to us. What is it that other professions face as they prepare practitioners who require foundational knowledge, yes, but who have to, in the end, be effective in the practices that they engage in.

And it's actually a very useful resource for us to break out of the usual ways we have of thinking. Architects face these problems. Nursing schools face these problems. Law schools face these problems.

We tend to look only at medicine. Medicine is a very useful place to look, but there are a number of other professions that offer very important resources for us if we want to break out of, as Bruce said, this kind of continuing agony and browbeating or breast-beating, or whatever it is, about how we fail to prepare teachers.

What I see in common in both these presentations this morning, and I'm curious about our presenters' reactions, is what we're hearing about is a curriculum increasingly focused on practice.

It doesn't matter so much that it's in the Houston schools and that it's alternative certification and who's coming in. It happens to solve a critical need that Houston has. But if you paid careful attention to what was shown to us about that program, it's different than some alternative programs in that it's situated directly in the work that those teachers are learning to do.

They get together and they talk about the problems of their students learning particular content, as I understood it. The curriculum is designed around the work. It's not designed around some ideas about what knowledge would later help you. It's designed around the work.

And what Gail is also talking about is increasing movement on some parts of some schools of education to try to situate teacher preparation much more around this very combined kind of work that practice is where you study student thinking, you figure out what problems kids typically have.

Suzanne Wilson spoke to us about that two meetings ago. You figure out what are strategies to help students overcome those problems.

I think one of the things this Commission has to do if we're going to make a difference is to break out of thinking of who needs to be at the table and where this has to be located because there are many configurations that would work if we had what Bruce was talking about in a sort of break time yesterday -- a curriculum that was focused on the essential practices that people have to learn.

And that includes knowledge, but it includes being able to pull it off. And I think what we have is an enormous capacity problem. If we don't face the capacity problem, it doesn't matter how we restructure all the deck chairs. We won't get improvements.

So all of the structural issues are important, and I think we should keep in our recommendations a variety of structures that might enable that. But if we don't focus on how to shift the preparation of teachers and the improvement of teaching toward practice, we won't get the improvements we need.

I was very struck with what Gov. Geringer also said earlier about how crisis, I think you said, crisis push people to act in certain ways that gain effect, something like that, when you're really pushed.

What if we shifted our assumption that the crisis is the teacher shortage, which is a crisis, I agree. But it's not the ultimate crisis. The ultimate crisis is that we're failing to educate kids in math and science in this country. We need teachers in order to achieve that. I think we've got our eye slightly looking in the wrong direction at the moment.

We need to get more people into the profession, but we need people who can do what we've just heard about, which is learn to work effectively with kids.

What if we -- instead of saying that the crisis was the teacher shortage -- what if we assume that that's part of our crisis? But what if we turned our attention back to the real crisis, which was we're not teaching people well in schools? What if, for example, we said - "Look at all of the kids who are failing in math and science right away within the first two or three years of school."

And what if one of our recommendations was to propose curricula of practice that were situated in summer schools? What if we launched a series of summer school programs in which both teachers and kids worked on mathematics and science teaching out of which practices were derived that could be put up on a Web for other people to study?

What if mathematicians and scientists worked in these summer schools as well? What if these became sites where children had opportunities to increase their opportunity to learn at the very same time? It sort of would be based a bit on what both of these presenters talked about, but it would be novel and different and would so something directly for our real crisis at the same time that we generated knowledge about improved practice.

There are many more things that could be said about something like this. But as I sit and listen to us, I have this feeling that we're not yet cutting into where the real crisis is and that these structural things we're hearing will be very important to us in order to frame how these things could be brought to bear.

But what I hear here is a serious effort -- and I want to underline it for us -- a serious effort to prepare teachers to do the practices that would improve mathematics and science achievement. And I think that's where we need to try to turn out thinking today, and to use these presentations to help us.

But if I've got it wrong, tell me. That's what I hear from both of you.

DR. SCLAFANI: Yes, I think you have it right. And in fact we have a program with Rice University.

The Rice University school math project that works very intensely in summer school with teachers and students. And they work together in the morning with the students, and then they work in the afternoon with the teachers, talking about what they've done, how it worked, why it worked. Did you see how when so-and-so was doing the demonstration lesson, the students were responding in these ways?

I think that that's the missing piece because, when you do it theoretically, then, you're having to try and make that transfer when you walk into a classroom. And that's where most teachers, no matter how they're prepared, have the difficulty -- is what does that mean I do when I walk into the classroom on the first day.

MEMBER: And the point is it doesn't have -- it can be done in the school of ed, it can be done in the school district.

DR. SCALFANI: Sure.

MEMBER: It can be done in summer school. It can be done with artifacts on the Web. The point is what's the "it?"

DR. SHROYER: I would agree with that 100 percent also, which is why I was trying to come back repeatedly to the idea that we need to be able to identify what it is we want teachers to do and that part of what we want them to do is to improve learning of children.

And so by connecting those -- and then I would also add that I do believe in everything that we've heard. Also you've seen collaboration from many different partners, but it is collaboration to be able to come together to improve learning for children.

SENATOR GLENN: Thank you very much. We are going to have to break here because we have to move on to the rest of the program here.

But we've let this run over about 25 minutes because there was a lot of interest here.

[Part 1: Shroyer]

[Part 2: Scalfani]

This page last modified November 28, 2000 (eal)