INCENTIVE PROGRAM FOR STEM TEACHERS
 |
| Image created by Alejandro Flores |
It is no secret that
President Obama consistently supports Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education. A strong STEM workforce will make America
competitive internationally. It will lead to economic growth, strong national
defense, clean energy usage, disease prevention and longer, healthier lives.
On July 17th,
2012, the Obama Administration announced the President’s plan to create a
national STEM Master Teacher Corps.
The program will devote $1 billion to the training of exceptional STEM
teachers. It will start out with 50 master STEM teachers in 50 schools
across the nation and will expand to 10,000 teachers within four years. These master
teachers will be responsible for inspiring and training other teachers in the
STEM fields at their locations. They will lead professional development courses
and have significant input to the new lesson plans in order to improve science
and math teaching. As an incentive for the teachers to stay in the program, the teachers are awarded up to $20,000 annually in addition to their regular salaries. In addition, they will have enough funds for all their teaching needs (e.g., supplies materials, calculators, books, training conferences, etc).
The purpose of the
program is to train and retain good STEM teachers. Often, teachers are
under-appreciated and underpaid. Those that are overqualified leave for jobs
such as engineers or mathematicians within five years of teaching. The master
teacher program aims to help schools maintain their most talented teachers and
give new teachers goals to work to.
While the program still
needs Congress to approve its budget of $1 billion (click here for the progress of the act in Congress),
the Department of Education can immediately put $100 million from the Teachers
Incentive Fund (TIF) to start the program. The TIF is a performance-based reward system. It rewards teachers who have
the largest impact on student learning across all subjects. It is a way that we
can encourage teachers to do more than the bare minimum.
As a math major who aspires
to become a teacher, I strongly support the Obama’s Master Teacher Corps
program. I believe in a reward system that is based on performance. By doing
this, teachers will take individual students’ achievement seriously and will
try their best to help students succeed. The program will incentivize STEM
teaching and raise the bar of STEM education across the nation.
While the potential benefits of
the program are high, there are also potential problems that we cannot overlook. One is the possibility of jealousy within the
education system as STEM teachers were the only one chosen in the program. Two
is the issues associated with the way the success of the program is measured.
It is good politic to measure how well the program works by testing students’
performance. But what type of test should we use to measure students’
achievement? When teachers are too focused on the award, will they base their
teaching mainly as a way to “counter” these performance tests? Will students, at
the end, suffer and learn nothing new?
As always, I would
appreciate any comments below. Do you think that the program will work?
Like you, I'm very concerned with the idea that any metric you implement to gauge success will be gamed. If you use test scores, people will make easier tests or worse, prevent under-achieving students from taking them. Either way, it'll still be trying to teach to the lowest common denominator. Overall, I think the only real indicator of this would be student recommendation. I think students develop a real relationship with teachers who inspire them. I know I personally have written recommendations for a few of my teachers in high school when they were nominated for awards and I think a similar system would work here: have teachers be nominated by coworkers or students and then have those people write recommendations as to why the teacher is deserving of it. I hope that if they do find a good metric, this program could be highly successful. All too often, one bad teacher can have a student turn away from a subject for life. I truly believe that one good teacher can do the opposite.
ReplyDeleteThanks Kelsey,
DeleteThat's a really good recommendation. I also believe that teacher nomination is a good way to award exceptional teachers. The way that most education system measure teacher's performance is through both students' achievement and in-class observation. Unfortunately, these two can be subjected to manipulation.
I fully support the program and I think it's a great idea - if you look at the amount of women that are in technology fields specifically, there are only a few. I've been at Mason for two years now and I still haven't met a single female other than myself who is majoring in Computer Engineering. That is the most important thing. The second most important thing to have are female teachers and I definitely agree that teachers are overworked and underpaid. Having come from a household where my mom worked as a teacher, I saw her devotion and desire to see her students succeed and I will always remember those late nights she use to stay up to grade student's papers on time, give them feedback on how to improve, and stayed after with them for as long as they needed.
ReplyDeleteI think the concerns you raise are legitimate - it would definitely cause jealousy between people, and would make those in the field want to get the award rather than want to learn. Likewise, quantifying the results would be difficult - maybe you could see the success of the students based on what they create at the end of their studies? Just to see how much they've learned?
I think the STEM Master Teacher Corps program is a great idea. It probably gives the teachers all of the knowledge and resources that they need to teach well. I didn’t realize STEM teachers are actually training teachers, I thought STEM was a program for students so your post was very informative and interesting. I think it could help improve student’s performance in science and math, but I do agree that the teachers can’t focus on the award or performance tests. They need to focus on teaching students what they need to know for college and a career, not just to do well on a test. As long as the teachers do this, I think the program will work.
ReplyDelete