**Archived Information**

**U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION**

**NATIONAL COMMISSION ON MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE TEACHING FOR THE 21ST
CENTURY**

**MARCH 6-7, 2000 MEETING**

**PRESENTATION OF IRIS METTS**

*Transcript by:*

*Federal News Service*

*Washington, D.C.*

DR. IRIS METTS: Good morning, Senator. I did just make it in time. And I
apologize for my delay. We\'re out of school today, and I didn\'t quite
time my entrance into D.C. properly. First of all, I want to tell you
that I am honored to be here today and to tell you my background, in
addition to being a superintendent in a relatively large school
district, we have about 130,000 students in the Prince George\'s school
system, my background includes two degrees in physics and mathematics.
So the interest of science and mathematics is very dear to my heart.

And I don\'t know if you know a lot about the demographics of the Prince
George\'s school system, but in addition to being about the 17th largest
school system in the country, demographics are changing very rapidly. We
moved from being a very rural community to a very metropolitan community
in the Washington, D.C., area. And indeed, our socioeconomic
demographics changed very rapidly, too. Prince George\'s County has been
described by some as being the most affluent predominantly
African-American county in the country. And I think that\'s to some
extent a misnomer, because we do have, I think, a variety of not only
ethnic groups, including a growing Latino population, but also we have
minorities in many, many varieties. Principal among those may be people
of color who are coming directly from the islands, and also from Africa.
So it\'s a very diverse population, with socioeconomic differences of
very affluent people and people who are still struggling and trying to
move up the ladder, so to speak.

Endemic to all of this is the desire of our county to be a hotbed to
develop technology, particularly in view of the growing digital divide
within the country. And a lot of people fear that people who are coming
from very poor circumstances will not be able to take full advantage of
the opportunities that will be afforded most people in the information
age. Coupled with that is the tremendous problem of recruiting teachers,
particularly in science and mathematics, to a community like Prince
George\'s. I know you\'ve reviewed all of those problems, wage
differentials, just getting people to come to work in a metropolitan
area, where expenses may be rather high for young teachers coming into
the area. And last but not least, just the lack of qualified candidates
in mathematics, in science, to fill those teaching spots.

You need to know that my experience as a superintendent in this
particular county is rather limited. I have only been there for about
eight months. But we see immediately the problem of hiring fully
certified teachers in math and science. In fact, it does not please me
to report that one of the missions that I must pursue as a
superintendent is to dramatically reduce the number of uncertified
teachers that we have within our county school system. We're approaching
at this point upwards of about 19 percent. And that\'s across all
categories. I testified yesterday at the Maryland General Assembly
before a committee that actually has oversight over the school district
to talk specifically about how we\'re going to recruit and maintain a
quality staff.

Now, my vision for Prince George\'s County is to really identify that
cadre of people who can make a difference by being fully certified, or
by at least coming into the system with some sort of incentive that we
can get those people ready to be the best teachers in math and science
possible. We have an uphill battle. And basically what I wanted to share
with you briefly is our concept of our recruiting plan for the coming
year.

First of all, we will offer incentives, financial incentives, and we
find that even with offering financial incentives of \$1,000 in those
high need areas, that\'s a pittance compared to the incentives that are
being offered around the country. Some are reportedly as high as
\$10,000 for those teachers in critical areas.

Number two, we will extensively use technology to recruit, using the
Internet, moving to filling out applications and trying to align
ourselves with the major dot com employment facilities of the Internet.
We think it\'s critical to at least get a pool of people who are
qualified. Number three, we want to recruit out of the country. We have
found some success in recruiting specifically in Canada. In that way, I
believe there\'s a fifth year requirement in Canada, and if we can find
people who are, that can legally work in the United States, we have a
large source of math and science teachers, fully qualified, that are
there that could perhaps be transported to our country. And we have a
large number of those teachers who are working with us right now, and
hopefully we\'ll take several more trips to Canada, because of that
fifth year requirement, a lot of those teachers are eligible to teach
math and science in this country.

The problem that I see is either a problem of inadequate preparation in
the content area, that people come in that are not well grounded in the
content area of math and science, or problems in instruction and
pedagogy, where other recruits will come in from industry or other
backgrounds and have not been properly trained in instruction and
teaching within the classroom. So I think that what has to happen is not
only must you have incentives, not only must you have laws that will
allow us to bring in people from other countries, but we must also look
at people within the business community, downsizing, and all those
opportunities that are there, and because I worked in Delaware for a
long period of time, I know there are many, many opportunities to
recruit people who are well rounded in the content area, in the business
area, back into our school systems from the chemical industries, that
are downsizing rapidly across the country, and the pharmaceutical
industries, in some instances.

Now, what you need to have, however, is I think a return to some of the
post-Sputnik incentives to train people, where we do have at the cost of
the system, or at the cost of the state or the federal government, some
program to make sure that if you are grounded in the content area, but
you\'ve not taught before, that we can provide extensive training to
help you make the transition, or if it\'s the opposite way around, if
you do have the instructional and pedagogy background training, but are
not grounded in the content area, that we will offer the specifics to
help you gain that knowledge.

I think in the coming millennium, significant long-distance training is
going to be absolutely necessary, even if people are thinking of taking
early retirement, to enter the picture very early, to have technology
train those people if they\'re considering a career switch into
education. We cannot go out and recruit when someone has filed
retirement papers, and expect to have an appropriate segue into the
classroom and into teaching. We\'ve got to be more proactive, we\'ve got
to reach out, we\'ve got to look at the pool of people that will be
available in the future, who are well grounded in those content areas,
and actually design programs to make those transitions back into the
classroom. If we wait until we go out on our own and recruit, and then
train, we will lose valuable time, teaching time, from people who may
not be experts within classroom practices, or people who may not be
experts within the content areas to come in and work with our children.

Now, what\'s the relative number of people that we recruit in a district
the size of the one that I\'m superintendent of right now? We recruit
about 1,500 teachers per year where, I would think, roughly about 400 to
300 need training in science and mathematics. So we\'re talking about a
large turnover every year. A lot of our problem in Prince George\'s is
our lack of attractive salaries as compared to counties surrounding us,
such as Fairfax, Montgomery. The whole metropolitan area, however, I
think suffers from the same problem, just not having an adequate pool.
So I think that what we have not done, as school districts, and perhaps
as a country, is to look at the database of what\'s possible,
transforming those candidates rapidly, into good classroom teachers.

We need a more sophisticated approach to analyzing the numbers that are
needed, we need networks to connect school systems in order to share and
to make sure that we have some idea of the need within those school
systems. While I know that we want to be independent as school
districts, and as various entities within the public school structure,
what I know we cannot afford to do any longer is not connect to each
other, and not connect to some national databank system that will allow
us to meet our needs. I was trained, and I attended college at William
and Mary, with a fellowship after Sputnik, and that whole impetus to
better train our teachers, to better prepare us is, to me, needed in
this situation.

We don\'t treat this as a crisis. I think it\'s a growing crisis, and I
think if we don\'t have some connectivity on a national level, on a
state level, where we figure out how many people are in the pipeline,
how we can rapidly train them, and how we can move those people to the
appropriate school systems, I think we\'re going to have continuous
problems in developing the potential of all of the students in our
country. And significant in the development of future scientists are
people who are in poverty, people who are of color, people who form the
minorities within our population. I think I enter all those categories,
plus I\'m a female, which gives me an extra classification of perhaps an
under served population, but I had an opportunity, through a very
carefully designed national program, to move forward, to be well
trained, and to have an opportunity to teach others.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the outcome of a national program
to recruit, to retrain, and to make sure that there are adequate people
of all ethnic backgrounds within the pipeline was recently when I met
again a young man who I taught in high school. You have to understand
that my high school was in the center of a neighborhood that was in
poverty, a distressed neighborhood. And this young man came up to me and
he was vice president of the Oracle software company. So a second
generation of people who are being produced in math and science, and are
leading our industries. You know, I would have been perhaps happier if
he had been a teacher, but you have to take what you take. And hopefully
we can convince a lot more people that we need to train all of our
citizens. And my reference to the digital divide perhaps could be
stretched to the scientific divide, the mathematics divide, all of those
elements of our society where if we do not bring all of our citizens to
a certain point and recruit extensively to get the very best within our
classrooms that we will lose a lot of talented people in the future.

I have no idea how long you wanted me to talk, and I\'m probably not as
scientific as the prior presenter, or as data driven, but what I know
that we do not have is a system. We have no databases, we have no
systems, we don\'t use technology extensively. And we have no outlets to
recruit from outside of the country. And thirdly, we have no systems to
rapidly train people if they can meet standards, we have no support
mechanisms within systems. And all of the things that I mentioned will
probably take some laws from Congress, will probably take some federal
programs, will probably take support to the states, and by all means
will probably take money.

Thank you.

\[END OF PRESENTATION.\]