The Silver Spring native is the rare American who loves math enough to make it her college major. She has also wanted to be a teacher since the sixth grade, when she got a mini-chalkboard as a symbol of her career ambitions.

"Teachers have such an influence on whether students leave loving a subject or loathing it," said Sweigart, a rising junior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "Working with kids, seeing that light bulb come on, those are the rewards I want in a career."

From the White House to the Maryland legislature to the offices of university presidents around the nation, experts are becoming increasingly concerned that the United States doesn't produce enough teachers like Sweigart for public school systems. Many who do end up teaching science, technology, engineering and math aren't expert enough to spark the next generation of scientists and innovators. Thus, the U.S. finds itself in grave danger of falling behind growing economic powers - such as China, India and South Korea - that excel at teaching those disciplines, known collectively by the acronym STEM.

Next month, a panel created by Gov. Martin O'Malley will release its plan for improving STEM education in Maryland. One of the most ambitious goals will be to triple the number of such teachers produced by Maryland colleges and universities by 2015.

The state's schools need about 350 STEM teachers a year, but Maryland institutions produce only about 120. Maryland colleges and universities have created dozens of programs designed to bolster the ranks in those areas.

"There's no question that it has become a major focus of our campus," said Donna Wiseman, dean of the College of Education at University of Maryland, College Park. "We hear it from the governor, we hear it from our president and our chancellor."

But if every school and university system in the country shares the same desperation, how can the shortage be filled?
Sharper recruiting
The answer seems to be a mix of sharper recruiting backed by financial incentives, creation of streamlined programs for potential math and science teachers, and aggressive efforts to lure math and science professionals into career changes.

"So many things need to change at the same time," said Michelle Cahill, a vice president at Carnegie Corp., which recently released a sweeping report on the STEM problem. "But I think there is more of a push for it. People are starting to see that the world has changed dramatically. They're seeing it in the job opportunities that are out there for them and their kids."

Though state and federal officials have recognized for many years a drastic need to improve math and science education, public attention seems to be catching up. With the rapid deterioration of traditional job providers in the U.S. and the simultaneous rise of mathematically and technologically capable work forces in India and China, better training in math and science no longer seems like a luxury or an abstract need.

"We know that the quality of math and science teachers is the most influential single factor in determining whether or not a student will succeed or fail in these subjects," said President Barack Obama in an April 27 speech to the National Academy of Sciences. "Yet, in high school, more than 20 percent of students in math and more than 60 percent of students in chemistry and physics are taught by teachers without expertise in these fields. And this problem is only going to get worse; there is a projected shortfall of more than 280,000 math and science teachers across the country by 2015."

That shortage is the root of a much greater problem, education officials and corporate leaders agree. Without students getting excited about math and science in high school, the nation will be deprived of future researchers, inventors and engineers.

"If we continue to use the same models, we will not get where we need to go," said John Winn, chief program officer for the National Math and Science Initiative and former secretary of education in Florida.

The Carnegie report describes a complex problem. Not only do universities and school districts need to recruit more math and science majors to teaching, they need to increase the number of total students in math and science courses, provide financial incentives to compete with private industry, make sure future teachers are taking challenging courses, improve support programs for new teachers and push for continued learning by veteran teachers.

And that's just the top of a long list.

The good news, Cahill and Winn said, is that some universities have bolstered their production of math and science teachers by creating programs tailored to that goal.

The most talked-about and imitated program is UTeach, an initiative begun at the University of Texas in 1997. Science professor Mary Ann Rankin saw that the university offered no clear track for STEM majors who wanted to teach, so she and her colleagues tossed out the old model.

Recruiting of math and science majors would begin before they even hit campus. UTeach students would take the most challenging science and math courses but would also be paired with mentors at local high schools who would guide them through fieldwork every semester. Financial incentives would be available and UTeach would continue to nurture its graduates once they left for the work force.

"They put it all together," Cahill said.

The program is expensive but has worked. Almost 300 students are enrolled every semester, about 10 times as many as when it began.

About 85 percent of UTeach graduates go into teaching and of those, 80 percent are still teaching four years later.

Thirteen universities have adopted versions of the program in the past two years. Another batch are seeking federal funding to join the movement.

UMBC stepped up its production of STEM teachers, using some of the principles espoused by UTeach. It offers a four-year track for future math teachers instead of requiring them to obtain a math degree and then a teaching certificate, a combination that often took five years. Potential math and science teachers are encouraged to enter high school classrooms as early as their freshman year.

Sweigart is part of UMBC's Sherman Scholars program, which offers scholarship incentives to future math and science teachers and nurtures them through college and their early professional years.
'Keep the door open'
"Students are already deciding what they don't want to do with their lives by fourth and fifth grade," said Anne Spence, an assistant professor of engineering at UMBC. "So we hope to at least want to keep the door open for math and science instead of having that door close for them at an early age."

Spence has encountered many old biases in pushing math, science and engineering majors toward teaching. Fellow professors, administrators and parents are used to steering the best math and science students to research or lucrative corporate jobs. In recent years, however, UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski III and others have changed their thinking.

"I think they're understanding that if we put good people in the classroom, we're going to end up with better students at the university," Spence said.

Given that shift, she has noticed a slow but steady increase in interest from top-notch math and science students.

Spence also believes that many STEM teachers will have to come from other fields or teaching disciplines. She recently supervised a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation that helped turn 60 career changers into STEM teachers for Baltimore County.

Chris Buckler was an indifferent student who joined the Marines out of Patuxent High School in Calvert County. He left the military after five years and found his way into a college physics class with a charismatic professor. "All of a sudden, that obscure math and science from high school started making sense," he said.

He became an engineering major at UMBC and when Spence suggested teaching as a career, another light bulb flashed in Buckler's mind. There had to be lots of kids like him. Maybe he could do for them what that physics professor did for him.

"People just get so freaked when you talk about math, like you've handed them a fistful of spiders," he said. "Maybe it's because they hear a lot about theory and not about how to apply it."

Buckler, 28, will attempt to change that as an engineering teacher at Chesapeake High School in Essex this fall.

"We need to make sure there are easy pathways for people like that," Spence said. "A lot of these people will have to come from outside of the traditional pipeline."

Wiseman agrees. Her school offers a paid internship that allows career-changers to become science and math teachers in the course of a summer. Another program targets laboratory workers from around Washington who might be willing to shift their expertise from research to high school classrooms.

As at UMBC, College Park administrators are recruiting potential math and science teachers much earlier in college. "We used to stand back and wait for them to come to us," Wiseman said. "But we're being much more aggressive."

College Park's School of Education produced 32 STEM teachers last year, but Wiseman projects an increase to 40 next year and hopes the annual total will reach 65 or 70 in a few years.

Towson University, the state's leading producer of teachers, is also focused on STEM. Last week, the university announced a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that will allow it to offer scholarships to potential STEM teachers.

UMBC's Sweigart believes that as more math and science standouts are lured into classrooms, they will catch the teaching bug.

Asked why more don't follow her path, she said, "I think the main reason is, that they don't know what it means to be a teacher. When you see the kids responding and realize how much difference you make, that has a huge impact on the desire to teach. It has a real ripple effect."
STEM programs around the country
UTeach: Forged in 1997 at the University of Texas at Austin, UTeach is the most widely imitated STEM development program in the country. It combines aggressive recruiting of math and science majors, challenging courses, heavy fieldwork, mentoring by practicing teachers and postgraduate support. The program maintains an average enrollment of about 300, and about 85 percent of its graduates go into teaching. In the past two years, 13 universities have signed on to implement UTeach at their campuses.

Cal Teach: An umbrella program on nine University of California campuses, Cal Teach aims to place 1,000 math and science teachers a year into the state's public schools. Modeled after UTeach in many ways, it offers financial incentives, mentoring and fieldwork to math and science majors interested in teaching.

The New Teacher Project: Founded by teachers as a revenue-generating nonprofit in 1997, the New Teacher Project has since worked with more than 200 public school districts around the country to bolster recruiting. The project tries to create innovative programs to lure talented teachers, break down policy barriers that keep those recruits away from high-need districts and help potential teachers with certification and preparation for public school classrooms.

NYC Teaching Fellows: The fellows program offers a seven-week summer course to help career-changers enter the classroom and subsidizes master's degree course work. Though it targets teachers of all types, it places emphasis on high-need areas, including science and math. In nine years, the program has provided almost 14,000 teachers to New York City schools.

Academies Creating Teacher Scientists: The federal program pairs middle- and high school teachers with mentor scientists who can help them improve their classroom lessons.
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