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

GOVERNOR JIM GERINGER: We began our group by saying -- have we appropriately defined the problem. In other words, what problems have we resolved by the Commission recommendations?

We spent some time then talking about what will be the thing that stimulates the sense of urgency or the notion that there is a problem out there that has to be resolved.

As I would, I'll hope, I'll try to summarize a little bit where we see the problem occurring and how, then, the recommendations might resolve it.

And we didn't complete our work, I'll tell you why.

The urgency is in the economy, that if we see a declining capability in math, science and technology in the workforce, including teaching, then overall, we will suffer as both economically and socially. So there's a societal and a business impact if we don't do something about achievement in math and science.

And, at the urging of a couple of us, we wanted to at least understand that technology can play a role in that understanding. So, there needs to be a math and science literacy overall in society, and then in particular, a math and science capability to assure the economic success.

So we start from the premise of it's a threat to personal economic security for society and for business. The second point would be, to resolve that, we need a quality skilled workforce to have a quality society.

To achieve that, the third point would be, we have to have competent, quality teachers and competent, quality learners, all supported by a network of preparation and support.

Then, the question becomes, what leverage points will most affect the achievement of providing those competent, quality teachers and the competent, quality learners?

We wrangled with that for some time as to whether or not we'd done enough to where we could write the headline that comes out of the Glenn Commission report.

And the only one that was suggested, and he shall remain anonymous, was "Americans Are Just Too Dumb to Know How Bad Off They Are."

That's very catchy. It's probably not....

MEMBER: A real vote-getter.

GOVERNOR GERINGER: Probably not politically wise to say that.

So, it was not intended to be the summation of the Glenn Commission report.

But what we need are what was referred to in -- let's see, Paul, I guess, came up with this suggestion that we...

MEMBER: I didn't make that other statement.

GOVERNOR GERINGER: No, you didn't.

I will give attribution where it most favors you.

Paul mentioned the big, hairy, ambitious goals. And we pledge to use the word "ambitious." BHAG -- big, hairy, ambitious goals that we need -- BHAGs, more BHAGs out of this.

Now, where do we go with the recommendations to resolve the problem?

The -- boy, this is interesting from here on. As I go to result or recommendation number one. The three recommendations were the beginning point of our discussion.

Recommendation number one as stated was to significantly increase the supply of knowledgeable math and science teachers. That was somewhat felt to be subjective and behind goal number two or recommendation number two, which is to increase teachers' knowledge of effective teaching methods and content.

But I want to talk about why that is so.

In point number one, recommendation number one, we want to increase both math and science teaching, as well as math and science learning. Again, a shared responsibility, not just focused on the teachers. We'd be too narrow if we only just defined our problem as a shortage of teachers. What we lack in our society is a shortage of the ability to apply math and science productively.

And recommendation number two, that captures part of the essence of what we wanted, but not entirely -- for instance, it's not a one-time event to provide an increase in teachers' knowledge in teaching methods because it's an iterative process. It's a matter of daily, continuous improvement, and it doesn't occur by the teacher by just that teacher's activity. It occurs through collaboration with other teachers, with others who will affect the educational environment, as well as the ability of the teacher to impart both knowledge and the content.

One of the suggestions was that we might consider the Baldridge criteria as a way to assure an ongoing improvement in the quality improvement process.

Teachers need to be understood more as knowledge workers. And one of the factors that was advanced is that, if we don't realize how much more time a teacher needs, we won't be able to achieve a continuous improvement. That brings about, again, a contradictory trend.

If we are seeing a decline in overall availability of workers, and yet an increase in expectation of what those workers have to provide, those are not compatible trends. One is going to overcome the other or you will have to define teaching in such a clearly articulate way that it becomes an incentive by itself to be a teacher, drawing from other professions, where they are drawing from teaching today.

So, recommendation number two was acceptable, but modified. Recommendation number one was seen as backing up recommendation number two. So what we looked for was an overarching definition or a strategy of how to approach resolving the math and science literacy that's needed for America.

Recommendation number three was also seen as a subset of number two.

We -- here's where we had some blending of ideas.

How will we provide the incentives? And is it as simple as defining a career ladder or is that just an action step as part of number two in enhancing the teaching profession?

Teaching is not well enough defined, or at least well -- not well enough perceived as a profession to be singularly defined and clearly sought after. If it were, it would be easier to describe career ladders and incentive programs that would accomplish that.

Should more money be the only application? That was not -- we talked about how money could incentivize or enhance the opportunity, but how that might eventually enable it wasn't clear. Differential pay scales are the norm out there. Yet, they don't recognize individual capability. Should we then partner - if most policy makers -- as governor, I'll take the blame for everything, so let's start from that premise.

If there is something wrong out there, the governors are to blame. If there's only so much money available in the education pot, and we're only talking about dividing that up in different ways to incentivize teaching, will that answer the problem or is there another way?

Considering that business today, by one estimate, spends $300 million a year on additional education that could have been provided through the teaching process, the teaching and learning process, can we demonstrate to business that education now will deliver that and then, in turn, business invest in education, such as through summer internships or consulting opportunities where the business pays the teacher to join them for a period of time, over the summer or in some process, bringing the sense of what business needs back to the classroom, and at the same time, business contributing an incentive to the teacher to improve. That was one possible suggestion on not necessarily a career ladder, but how to incentivize teaching.

I would finish with another observation that cannot -- I drew this from my experience, not from the committee, so again, I'll take blame if it's the wrong direction. What I perceived is that we are facing a decline in overall employee availability - skilled employee availability - and an increasing economy. Those are not compatible trends.

In 1996, one major company said they had 70 applications for every one person that they hired in a position because the people were not qualified to fill a position. Today, we face at least as high an expectation for that same position, but only may get 10 applications or even one. How do you bring that person up or assure that that person is up to the standard of being able to perform as a result of public school education so that business doesn't have to provide the remedial training to bring them up to a standard?

Now, as far as what the Glenn Commission is all about.

If you, as was mentioned in our group, if you look at tab number 5, and I think Diane brought this up -- look at tab number 5 in your book, at all of the other recommendations that have already been completed. What we need to do as the Glenn Commission is to connect with everything else that's going on.

Dennis further enhanced that by saying, if we don't connect with legislative initiatives that are out there, such as the -- Rush, I believe, you're cosponsor on a bill for -- and I've forgotten the name of it. It's the Math and Science Education Act 2000 or something like that. Is that -- am I getting close to the title?

MEMBER: I can't remember the title.

GOVERNOR GERINGER: You don't ...

You just signed on.

MEMBER: Tell me what it does. I...

GOVERNOR GERINGER: Well, take credit where you can.

We need to realize that, if we build on others' work and others' activities that are going on, we're much more apt to see an impact as a result of our recommendations. Because nationally, when we are trying to achieve a consensus on which way to move our country, we depend on a commission -- in this case, the Glenn Commission, to knit it all together.

But while we certainly have built on our capacity to understand, both through our personal interactions and by the presenters that are here, what we're doing is distilling down the wealth of information that's out there. We're not inventing new information. It's our role to clarify it so that we can focus on recommendations.

Just to close with a little bit of light-heartedness.

Again, to get people's attention, if you say "I'm from the Glenn Commission, and I'm here to punish you if you don't do this, maybe that would get their attention."

As a Commission, though, it's our role to knit it all together, not to invent it new, but to knit it all together so that people feel confident that they can move forward. I'd yield to anyone else on our working group to see if I've missed any salient points or just missed it all together.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Why don't we turn to the next group, which I think -- if I'm looking at the scribe from group one -- is now going to be group three? OK. And I -- Javier, you're reporting back.

JAVIER GONZALEZ: Thank you.

Last time I had to report back because I was late, this time because I sat next to Brit. So I don't know what I'm going to do next time around. We didn't get to answer all the questions. In fact, I think we only got to number one, but we went out on different areas that were also very important.

We began with the main question, which was "What problems should the Commission recommend or focus on?" and we went back to the document, and Linda's presentation this morning of the main four, which were -- a shortage of teachers, teachers without the proper math and science background content-rich preparation in the elementary level, empowerment of teachers as professionals, and making teachers -- the teaching career more attractive.

That was the issues that were in the recommendations, and before we began to see which ones to focus on, we had to clearly define the statement of the problem. And here's what we came up with.

The problem statement would be: Our American youth are not performing poorly in math and in science, otherwise stated as: "Too few students succeeding in math and science." Or a third version: They're not learning what they need to be learning.

And so that is our statement of the problem, and the basic research we used was either the TIMSS Report or the NAEP examination report as well.

Some of the comments included making this a -- which is what Anne brought up earlier - making this a problem, a national security issue. The problem is not the teacher shortage, which deals with our first recommendation, which you just heard Jim go over. We basically have four issues that we need to focus on and number one is the issue of quality, which is more important than the issue of quantity.

It was stated that we always have a teacher shortage, but come September, when it's time to open up our schools, there is always a warm-bodied teacher that's freezing in the classroom. We always manage to deal with the teacher shortage.

However, that person may not be a quality person teaching our children.

We have found ways to deal with quantity, but we need to focus on quantity and that might mean that we may need to do a whole lot of in-service at the front end, and also some ongoing professional development throughout the year. So our main focus and our basic discussion dealt with this particular recommendation.

And if we go back to our blue form that we were reading, I took out a quote, or we talked about a quote that says that the results are striking. "Students in many other countries outperform U.S. students in mathematics and science," and that's where our statement came from.

So, number one was dealing with quality, not necessarily with quantity.

Number two was technology for instruction, not necessarily putting computers -- a computer lab in every school, but integrating the instruction so that the teachers are using the technology for instruction and to enhance student learning.

Also, along the way, we also need to use technology for professional development. That means improving practices of teaching. This also took us into the discussion of the data bank that was in part of the recommendation.

The recommendations lack -- let's see - no ...

Improving the flow into the technological industry. We know that our students need to be graduating understanding more about technology and so that's why we felt that this particular recommendation was one that was very important.

Number three -- what was the richness of curriculum, and I believe there was a quote, again, going back to our reading assignment. "Curricula in mathematics and science are scattered and shallow." If we dealt just with that particular quote, we felt that it was very important for curriculum to be something that we definitely focus on. And the word that was used in our discussion was "deepening the existing curriculum."

Also, ending the discussion of curriculum was the importance of having the proper stuff, the materials for teachers to conduct their instruction properly. This may mean technology, one more time. This may mean having the proper computer, oh excuse me, the proper science labs in the science courses or any other tools that are necessary for teachers to be successful, which are not necessarily there.

Finally, our fourth recommendation is a recommendation of rewards and recognition for both students and teachers, and underlined for high performance.

Other areas that we went into the discussion was that we did not disagree on the fact that it is important for us to have either centers, academies or institutions. We felt that they were very positive. There was some discussion as to how big of an effect they would have. Nevertheless, we all agreed, whether it was small or large, that they were very positive and we should continue with those recommendations.

A reminder about the partners. Again, they are the federal and the state, not forgetting, of course, the industry, the business world, local school district, and one that was very important that sometimes we have put aside, higher education. We thought was very important.

As far as the structure of these academies, we have in the recommendations that we should perhaps have about 10. There was a recommendation that we should go to 30 to 50. Well, for Craig that wasn't enough. He thought that we should go to a million teachers a year, which would probably be about a third of the teaching population for every school district.

And finally, there was a discussion on funding, which included, again, the business world becoming our partners and providing us with some resources.

The state and the local match-ups, and again, looking at the national surplus, looking at the fraction of - a fraction of that money which was Anne's proposal earlier this morning.

And then something that came out that some of us were not aware about, of Richard Elmore who's going to be one of our provocateurs, mentioned that there is lots of money out available in Title I that we might be able to reach out and tap into as far as using for professional development that we should also consider.

I probably missed a whole lot of other stuff. If I did, please help me out.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Could I just add one as a member of that group?

I think that Craig made it clear that, if we were imagining that one of the streams of money would come from business and industry, it had to focus on item four, which was rewards and recognition. And so I'll say it for him.

Anybody else from that group wanting to add to the report?

OK. The first group -- I think Deborah, you're the reporter?

Sure. Actually, we need...

DR. DEBORAH BALL: Bruce was a really good group leader. He didn't use whatever framework you gave him, I don't think. And it wasn't a set of questions, I don't know. He got us engaged in a very substantive discussion but he left before he had to present it.

MEMBER: Deborah, do you need this one? You left a transparency.

DR. BALL: No, I don't need that. That's one that Bruce wrote that I can't read.

I'm just going to take us back to the triangle we saw at the second meeting, because what we talked about then, just as a very simple framework, was that the improvement of mathematics and science instruction depends on improving the interactions among the things in this picture - that is, improving the way teachers...

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Deborah, excuse me. Could you just be miked?

Thank you.

MEMBER: To mike is a verb.

DR. BALL: Is mike a transitive verb?

So -- now can you hear me?

So the point we were making there was that the improvement of instruction depends on improving these interactions. And there's a number of ways to do it, and that also includes attending to the environment in which this takes place.

And I think all of our discussions have in one way or another kept pushing on parts of this, but I think we've, in some sense, often neglected the interactions. We focus on one or another. We've focused on environmental factors and trusted that they would impact instruction or we focused on things about teachers and trusted that they would impact instruction.

For what we've seen, our group felt as though we needed a somewhat different approach. So I'll try to present how we approached taking that picture seriously.

I know what I need. I need -- there's a piece of yellow paper there that I need.

We went back to the yellow pages, where we thought there was a pretty clear statement of what the goal of the Commission should be, and I'll just read it to remind us, from this text.

If we consider that the goal of the Commission's recommendations should be to ensure that every student every year is taught mathematics and science by a highly qualified K-12 teacher, and second that all students master the scientific and mathematical knowledge needed for success in the 21st century.

We tried to assess -- so where are we relative to that statement.

And what we thought was -- what the system currently has is standards, assessments, curriculum and professional development, but what characterizes them is that they're fragmented. These are each approaches to that picture I showed, that target one element or another and assume that the relations will improve.

And so we tried to figure out what we lack then in that case, and what our design might be to help mediate between where we are, what we have, and what we lack. So we thought we lack teachers. That's been discussed quite a bit at this meeting. There's a critical shortage.

We lack knowledge. Jim Stigler started us on that at the first meeting.

We lack effective professional development. There's tons of professional development, so anyone who says what we need is more professional development needs to take seriously that that's not the issue. The issue is creating professional development that has an impact on what teachers do and what their students learn.

And we lack environments for these three things -- that is the development of knowledge, the development of effective professional development and teachers, and we lack incentives for all of those things to be created environment.

So what we lack essentially is coordination of efforts that would target those key features.

So we tried to conceive our goal a little bit differently, which I think intersects well with some of what we've been talking about.

We thought that the goal was to build a system of continuous improvement of the teaching and learning of mathematics and science, and the three phrases that are underlined are all important to our group.

One is that it's about continuous improvement -- building a system that can continuously improve the way mathematics and science are taught; second -- that it focus on teaching and learning; and third -- that it focus on mathematics and science, that our special charge, our special mission in the current environment is to keep those three things in play.

There are many problems with the teaching profession and with schools. Our special charge, we thought, was to address these three features.

So, then there were principles, we thought, of what would characterize such a system. And they were these features. I think this is kind of messy. But the thing about these features is that they all address what we said lacked on the previous slide. They all address, addressing the teacher shortage problem. They all address the creation of knowledge. They all work on effective professional development, environments and incentives.

They involve different kinds of expertise, which is something we've talked about many times, and is clearly needed. And they're not tied to any single institution or setting. In other words, they take substantive and principled underpinnings and suggest that there would be a variety of strategies that could be developed that would take these features as the core of what we're recommending.

And the features were, first of all, that approaches that we design should be focused first and foremost on students learning mathematics and science; second, that they also be focused on practices that lead to students learning, that these also be focused, that the system be focused on teachers' learning that supports the development of practices that develop student learning, and so on.

You can continue this. It can become kind of infinite in a sense.

But that finally, it's also crucial to recognize that it's about the learning of others - mathematicians and scientists, school leaders, parents, the public. All of those people would also have to learn in ways that would support these other things.

But we started with student learning. And we'll give you two or three examples of the sort of thing we thought integrated concern for these features, were undergirded by these principles, and we thought of as examples of what it might mean to build a system of continuous improvement of the teaching and learning of mathematics and science.

So, I'll illustrate one and then just mention the others.

The first one we talked about at some length was something one might call summer mathematics and science academies, and I'll just sketch the kinds of elements we saw as featured.

We were aware that many urban districts face an acute problem of student failure -- high student failure rates, and one of the strategies used by school districts like Chicago and others is to create summer schools as a place to remedy the failure rate.

Now, you could think of that as an immediate sort of problem, and it is. But, as Maria said at one point, it's a missed opportunity because summer academies could be a very strategic site for doing many of the things we were talking about. They could be environments in which teachers were working together -- that's one of the things we've been talking about -- to work on these students' learning -- they're among our highest risk students, who are desperately in need of expertise focused on them.

So, from the beginning, it starts with student learning, but it's focused on teachers' opportunities to try things with those students that would have as their bottom line the improvement of those students' accomplishments.

But, meanwhile, teachers would get to work together. There are other kinds of people who could be involved -- perhaps people who are considering entering teaching as a career, perhaps mathematicians and scientists who would have a great deal to learn that would enable them to contribute. The summers would be good times for that.

They could involve community members. They could also be research and development environments in which the sorts of practices that were tried in these summer academies could also be captured in various digitized or other forms and, through some process of peer review - which we only sketched and didn't discuss in detail - could contribute to our second idea, which is already one of the recommendations - that is a database of effective practices.

So, what we thought of this as being was solving or working on several issues at once that were on our list of principles, focused on student learning of mathematics and science, focused on teacher learning, focused on the generation of knowledge and overall development of capacities of many of the players who would have to be involved if we were serious about a system of continuous improvement.

It could be a site for learning content, and so on.

We can talk more about it if anyone wants to know, but we spent some time on that.

This could contribute to this database that was mentioned in our yellow pages - that is, this could be one site for research and development, which would generate examples of good and less-good student work, videotaped segments of discussions or work that students were engaged in. It could involve capturing other elements of good practice that could be put into this practice database.

So you see that these all involve content and teaching and students - all the examples of what might go in this database.

A third example we discussed was taking advantage of the fact that there's been a huge investment in curriculum development in the last decade, and that one thing that would be perhaps less radical to design but very important to design would be to take a lesson from what we're learning about the Japanese and other Asian systems in which, given a national curriculum, a kind of systemic professional development is possible in schools.

Teachers are teaching the same things. They talk to one another. Admittedly, there are many cultural differences between what's typical for teachers' work in those countries and these. But in the principled sense, this idea is not unrelated to that one, that is, to take advantage of the fact that teachers are working with new curricula into which a great deal of thought has been given, and yet, whose enactment will be very difficult.

This is an opportunity for teachers of the same grade level to discuss how are these curricula working, what difficulties are students having with particular lessons, how might lessons be modified. It's a place where mathematicians and scientists and others could be involved to help mediate or remedy or help thing about or even learn, perhaps, what some of the issues are as these curricula find their way into schools.

Without them, they'll likely find their way on to shelves, as so many other curriculum reforms have.

Given the investment that's already been made, it's systemic. It's out there. Curriculums already something teachers use. We might be smart to really consider how could serious professional development be connected. And this wouldn't be summer work. This would be serious ongoing grade level bound multiple kinds of expertise work where teachers study what their kids are doing and how the curriculum is working and adapt and modify it.

And finally, one example, another example was to design tools taking advantage of the capacity of new technologies that would support teachers making and studying records of their own students' work, and their students' learning, which again, would give them resources for working with others, as well as looking at their own students' work.

And in some work that we've seen, you see that when teachers get repeated data on -- not even data, but evidence and records of how their students are doing, it enables a kind of discussion and focus study that's not possible when you're in the whirlwind and you're teaching and you mean to listen carefully or you mean to look at student work.

Technology could be very nicely mobilized to design all kinds of tools that begin with the fact that teachers are responsible for keeping records. Start with that and think about what imaginatively could records look like and how might that impact teachers' learning?

So, what's in common about all these, and we intend them principally as examples of what it means to build a system of continuous improvement that takes learning, teacher learning practice, and others' learning as the core, and considers the problem of teacher gap.

For example, if we built these sort of things, they would be as good for the preparation of teachers coming into the system. They would help in Houston schools. They would be of use to that.

These aren't in opposition to other things we've talked about. They're our attempt to fill in the middle about what it will take, such that what we're describing doesn't create just the conditions for improvement, but actually works on improvement.

That's, I think, the best way to understand what we've been doing.

Does anybody in my group want to add, change, deny?

This page last modified June 28, 2000 (gkp)