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BILL G. ALDRIDGE

Bill Aldridge took dual undergraduate majors in physics and science education. He then taught high school physics and math for six years. After completing three graduate degrees in solid state physics, educational evaluation and science education at Kansas and Harvard, he taught physics at the college level for seventeen years.

Mr. Aldridge has directed three NSF course development projects in applied physics, technology, and modern electronics (including computers). In addition, he served a three-year assignment (1976-1979) from his college to the Division of Science Education Development and Research at NSF as a Program Manager before taking his present position as Executive Director of the National Science Teachers Association. Mr. Aldridge has published science and math textbooks and numerous articles in magazines and journals. He has served in a variety of capacities on advisory boards, committees, etc., and he is currently a member of the Scientific Manpower Commission. The National Science Teachers Association, which he directs, is the largest science education organization in the world, and it is concerned with the professional aspects of science teaching at all levels.

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INTRODUCTION

There has been a perception that the science education community lacked consensus on what should be done to resolve the problems in pre-college science and mathematics education that NSTA and others have documented. Recently, presidents and executive officers of the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the National Association of Geology Teachers formed a group called the Council of Science Teaching Associations. The education division of the American Chemical Society is also represented on our Council, although we are not permitted officially to represent their views.

The Council of Science Teaching Associations represents science teachers, science administrators, science educators, and teaching scientists at all levels. Thus the Council is fully representative of the subject matter disciplines--physics, chemistry, biology, and geology--at colleges and universities, as well as science teachers in these fields in elementary and secondary schools. Council organizations also include local science supervisors, state science supervisors, as well as those in schools of education who train science teachers. No other organization or group either includes this representation or reflects our views on the professional aspects of science education accurately.

The crisis in science education at the pre-college level has received widespread publicity. As the primary source of data documenting the crisis, the National Science Teachers Association has been deluged with requests for detailed information and suggestions for solutions.

The NSTA data have been collected through several different surveys conducted over the past three years. Through these survey results and other studies, the crisis in elementary and secondary school science and mathematics education can be summarized as follows:

1. There are shortages of qualified secondary school science and mathematics teachers. The shortages are critical in mathematics and in physics;

2. There is a serious mismatch between existing secondary school science and mathematics course content and the needs and interests of the vast majority of students; for those students who would aspire to careers in science or engineering, course content is obsolete;

3. There have been few attempts to alter instruction in schools in ways consistent with the growing body of new knowledge about how people learn science or mathematics;

4. Supplies, equipment, and other resource materials are severely limited or obsolete in most science classrooms and laboratories; those that exist are inappropriate to the science course content and teaching methods needed to update pre-college science education;

5. In elementary school offerings, science content is nearly nonexistent. Teachers are ill-prepared, resources are lacking, and the focus is on the so-called "basics" which have tended to ignore science.

The Shortage of Science and Mathematics Teachers

Supply

The shortage of science and mathematics teachers is documented by looking at supply and demand. The NSTA fall 1981 survey of 600 colleges and universities which prepare science and mathematics teachers showed a shocking ten-year decline: a 79 percent decline for mathematics and a 64 percent decline for science. (See attached paper by Shymansky and Aldridge.) Data from the NSTA fall 1982 survey show a further decline. (See attached graph.) According to NCES data, the decline over this same period for teachers in other fields was only about 25 percent, and the decline in students was even less, about 20 percent.

Demand

The demand for science and mathematics teachers has been documented by Howe and Gerlovich at Iowa State in surveys of state science supervisors. NSTA derived "demand" data from surveys of secondary school principals. Our fall, 1982, survey showed that secondary schools employed 2 percent more science and mathematics teachers in 1982-1983 than in the previous year. With widespread calls for increased requirements for science and mathematics in high schools, we can expect further increases in the demand.

Use of Unqualified Teachers

Given that the supply of science and math teachers has dropped so drastically, how can the schools be finding teachers to fill classes? They have been employing unqualified or underqualified teachers. Last year half of the newly employed science and mathematics teachers in the U.S. were unqualified. Hiring such teachers is made possible through provisional or emergency certification, or through extremely low certification standards. The emergency measures have made possible the reassignment of teachers from physical education, home economics, social science, elementary education, and other fields where surpluses exist. more common problem is transferring teachers within science, that is, from biology to chemistry and physics, without sufficient qualifications in those subjects. Over 30 percent of all science and mathematics teachers in grades 7-12 are unqualified or are severely underqualified to teach the subjects they have been assigned.

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When promising but underqualified teachers are taken from the elementary school and reassigned to secondary schools, the situation is doubly tragic. The secondary school science or mathematics students are instructed by an unqualified teacher while the elementary school students lose a teacher with promise in mathematics or science. The situation at the elementary school

level is especially serious, and we need teachers at that level with interest in and some knowledge of science or mathematics.

Principals are faced with an overall declining secondary school enrollment, a surplus of teachers in some areas, and a shortage of science and mathematics teachers. Who can blame a principal who reassigns a long-time faculty member from a non-science field into a science or math slot when no qualified teacher can be found? Moreover, even if a qualified person were available, tight budgets and teachers' contracts may preclude a principal from hiring a new staff member; thus the principal is forced to meet the need through staff reassignment.

Not Offering Needed Science & Mathematics Courses

The demand for science and mathematics teachers is even greater than indicated by open positions. According to NSTA's fall, 1982, survey results, for lack of teachers and/or resources, some 32,000 classes in science and mathematics were needed, but could not be scheduled in 1982-1983. Instead, some 640,000 children who wanted to take science or mathematics were required instead to take courses in other subjects for which no teacher shortage existed. Of the 17 million children in grades 8-12 this school year, 6.3 million are not taking science, and 6.4 million are not taking math.

Magnitude of the Problem

Supply of New Teachers

Approximately 4,000 of the 7,000 persons prepared to enter secondary school science and math teaching positions for 1982-1983 actually accepted teaching positions. The schools hired 12,500 entirely new science and math teachers to replace those who retired or left for non-teaching employment. In addition, 8,700 changed employment from one school to another. These data suggest that some 8,500 teachers, or 68 percent of those employed, were from sources other than colleges and universities that train teachers. These sources include business and industry, but mainly other teaching fields, like physical education, social sciences, home economics, etc. Many states are considering increases in science and math requirements. A one-course increase in either science or math in the nation's schools would require a 20 percent increase, or 40,000 more science and math teachers. Where will they come from?

Unqualified and Underqualified Teachers

Some 30 percent of the present secondary school science and math teachers are unqualified or underqualified, amounting to 60,000 teachers. Since half or more of the newly employed science and math teachers are unqualified, within 6 years, half of all such teachers in the schools will be unqualified or underqualified. Even if federal or state scholarships or loans could be awarded by the fall of 1983, before these students could graduate, 4 years later, the number of unqualified or underqualified teachers will have reached 44 percent.

Re-Training Unqualified Teachers

There are about 10,000 secondary school science and math teachers in the U.S. who are completely unqualified. Those in public schools have no certification, not even on an emergency or provisional basis. These teachers typically have never studied the subject they have been asked to teach, or those studies have included at best one or two introductory college courses.

If these teachers are to remain in the classroom, they need an intensive program of evening and Saturday course work during the school year, plus full-time study during the summer. They need individually designed programs of two or three years in duration, to allow for sequences of courses in math and science.

Since about 2,000 of the 12,000 science and math teachers who are newly employed each year are completely unqualified, the number needing retraining will increase by 2,000 per year until the supply of qualified teachers can be increased. This will require retraining a number larger than 10,000 and over a longer period of time than three years.

Upgrading Marginally Qualified Teachers

There are about 50,000 underqualified or marginally qualified science and math teachers in secondary schools of the U.S. This number is increasing dramatically each year. These teachers could

be helped greatly by summer institutes, workshops, short courses, part-time study during the academic year.

The Outdated Curriculum

The lack of sufficient numbers of trained teachers is compounded by the mismatch between science and mathematics courses and the needs and interests of students.

The science and mathematics courses in U.S. schools today are, for the most part, only slightly modified versions of those developed after Sputnik by teams of scientists and teachers. Yet,

or

as Jerrold Zacharias, MIT physicist, and originator and developer of one of the first National Science Foundation course projects, PSSC Physics, said,

"We had aimed only at the college-bound and college students
because we could not do everything at once" (in testimony
before the Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Technology of
the Science and Technology Committee on February 19, 1980).

They

Our present science and math courses neglect the needs and interests of the vast majority of students. They focus on pure science and are largely devoid of practical applications, technology, or the relevancy of science to society's problems. do not prepare people to enter the myriad of non-science Occupations, which require general technological knowledge for which science is the base. Nor do these courses properly take into account the utilization of the computer and modern electronics.

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