**Archived Information**

**U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION**

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

**MARCH 6-7, 2000 MEETING**

**PRESENTATION BY DENNIS BARTELS**

*Transcript by:*

*Federal News Service*

*Washington, D.C.*

DR. DENNIS BARTELS: Thank you very much, Senator.

I should tell you the reason why 15 minutes keeps coming up in all of
our speeches is the staff warned us ahead of time that the Senator has
no problem cutting us off at the knees when we hit that moment. So I
think that\'s why all of us are moving as quickly as we can through our
presentations. I won't say what you really said. But it\'s been a
delight to work with the staff. It\'s actually a supreme delight to be
here today with you and with this incredibly important and extraordinary
charge that this commission has before it.

I come from the Exploratorium. The Exploratorium is the house that Frank
Oppenheimer built, who some of you may know is the younger brother of
Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project fame. And he built what has
been called sort of the ultimate physics playground where we have 600
science interactive teaching exhibits at our disposal. Many of you may
know this place, but probably not many of you know that we\'ve been in
the teacher development business for 22 years. And at this point we\'ve
worked with over 2,000 teachers, alumni, active alumni, science and
mathematics teachers in the Bay Area, more than half of whom keep coming
back to us for inservice throughout their entire career.

We produced last year about 100,000 hours of professional development
for teachers, and we have two very large programs. Both that receive
significant support from the National Science Foundation. The first
works with elementary science school teachers, was actually four years
ago funded as one of five national centers to accelerate elementary
school reforms, specializing in inquiry and this particular program, I
just want to point out, even though it\'s not the topic of my
discussion, has moved up from working with teachers to working with
staff developers. So one important issue I want to place before the
commission is who is worrying about the education of staff developers,
and helping them create powerful, quality designs of learning for
teachers. I would submit not many folks are worrying about that one. But
that\'s not what I\'m here today to talk about.

It\'s our other program, our middle and high school program, which two
years ago in 1998 was funded as a pilot teacher induction program, at
that time the only one we are aware of that was discipline based
specifically for science teachers. We received pilot funding from the
National Science Foundation, from the Noyce Foundation, which of course
has ties to INTEL Corporation, and from a postsecondary Eisenhower
grant, which was very significant in getting it started.

And I also want to introduce my colleagues Dr. Linda Shore, who
conceived this program and is also the director of it, and you\'ll have
a chance to interact with her during the discussion session. But she\'s
the one who really understands this work at its greatest detail.

We\'ve learned a lot of things. We\'re not taking the program to scale.
What I would love to do, and I\'m so tempted to do, is tell you about
all the different lessons we\'ve learned doing this work, because we\'ve
learned one heck of a lot of stuff. But, actually that\'s not my
purpose. I hope we can bring that into the discussion. What I\'d rather
do is bring a different message to you, and to this commission, that a
focus, taking up the issue of teacher induction may be the single most
critical thing that this commission can do for the nation. And I\'ll
have to back that story up, so let me try my best.

The first thing, let me do it by starting with a small story. In our
coaches\' training, because we have coaches who are released fully from
the classrooms to work with our novice teachers, that turns out to be
critically important. We have them inside our institute to prepare them
to think about their first year of teaching, and to remember it,
actually write about it, get a bottle of scotch if they needed to, go
back to those first vivid days when they were teachers and just to go
back and remember and report back out the next day what they did recall.
And we expected all the horror stories, right. Five different preps,
didn\'t have my own classroom, couldn\'t find any help at all.

And we were surprised. Half the stories actually were that way, horror
stories, but the other half of the stories were absolutely beautiful,
these lifelong friendships, these colleagues, these people across the
hall who came in and helped that first teacher make it through their
classroom that first year, you know, friendships that lasted 20, 25, 30
years, going forward. And what really hit us was that whether you got
that support or not was left up to complete random chance. It was
complete serendipity whether you just had a caring colleague next door
or not, or down the hall. And that, in fact, there is no system to
support beginning teachers in this country, and that is tragic.

Let me just give you a sense of the magnitude of this problem. In the
State of California last year we needed 26,000 new teachers just to make
up for the class size reduction mandates, another 4,000 needed to fill
positions created by the booming enrollments in the state, 7,000
teachers were needed to replace retiring teachers, and 15,000 new
teachers were needed to replace teachers who were leaving for reasons
other than retirement, so the attrition rate. So that\'s 52,000
teachers. The state\'s teaching force is only 284,000 teachers. So one
out of five teachers were new to the classroom. At the same time the
state college system, and the independent system, only produced about
17,000 teachers to be credentialed a year, and only about half of those
actually go into teaching.

So where does the state make up this 40,000 teacher difference? Fully
one-fourth of the teachers do not have the credentials to teach the
subject they are teaching, 13 percent are emergency credentials, another
10,000 came in out of retirement, but of course you can imagine the
situation is even worse in math and science. In math and science alone
you have a one in three chance as a middle school or high school student
of catching a teacher in their first or second year. And we know even
the very best teachers over time never, ever do their best teaching in
the first and second year. This is a huge impact. Think about it for a
second. If I have a one in three chance of getting a teacher in their
first or second year of teaching, and we also know from a recent study
that if I\'m a person of color or I\'m from poverty, I\'m five times
more likely to hit that teacher than not, I mean, the mathematicians
can ‑‑ but random chance is one-third. Then you times it by five. I\'m
virtually guaranteed as a minority student percentage of catching a new
teacher or an unqualified teacher in the state.

So this is not a unique California problem. It turns out across the
country the same policies that created our crisis \-- the reducing class
size, the new teacher certification systems, beginning teacher work \--
are hitting classrooms across the country. And in fact, in a survey last
year there were 37 states, 21 were considering or starting beginning
teacher programs, but it turns out only 9 provided any sort of funding
for them. Most of them were unfunded mandates to the local school
systems just to help those new teachers. But no system was in place, no
guidance whatsoever. So I find this one a staggering opportunity. If you
look at this new generation coming in and the opportunities, the states
have moved up a couple of years ago from putting about \$20 million into
the beginning teacher programs to last year about \$80 million, and that
number is going to continue to rise, a great opportunity to influence
the direction of these beginning teacher programs.

Here\'s another reason why I think it\'s so critically important, and
that is that we\'ve learned from research now that the first two years
of teaching may be the most critical and steepest part of a teacher\'s
learning curve; that even in reform minded teacher preparation programs,
that, in fact, when a teacher hits those first couple of years there\'s
an immediate conservation effect; it\'s the first time without a safety
net; and so they go right back to the textbooks and right back to their
traditional methods. And that, in fact, the patterns and habits that
they form in those first two years have a much greater impact on the
ways they\'ll teach for the rest of their careers than whatever
education they receive in the preparation programs.

A helpful analogy I might give to you is that of a parent. As a parent
waiting for your first born you have all the theory, right? You\'ve read
all the books: what to expect when you\'re expecting. You get great
advice from your family and friends, and then suddenly that baby
arrives. And all that goes straight out the door and you\'re operating
completely by instinct and survival. How many of you are parents? I know
there\'s more than a few of you who know this feeling. And then one,
two, three years later suddenly, in fact, some of that theory comes back
and some of that advice comes back, and you get much better as you go
along. Well, I think the same is true for beginning teachers.

Which brings up another point, which is that beginning teachers are
completely different. They are a unique animal, they are qualitatively
different, their needs are qualitatively different than those of teacher
candidates or veteran teachers. That\'s all to say that we need a new
model or a different type of institution to serve beginning teachers.
That\'s not simply taking the inservice we\'ve always done and dropping
it into the first two years, nor taking those pre-service programs and
extending them out for a couple of years. But, in fact, we need
something different.

Another point there is that I really firmly believe that these programs
must be discipline based. Why do I believe that? You have to ask the
question, what are you inducting these teachers into anyway? Most states
as they start these programs are putting in what I would call generic
programs. They\'re very good programs, and they do focus on teaching and
learning, but they never get down to the content specific areas. That
was really true up to a couple of years ago when Connecticut, which
we\'ll hear from in a second from Michal, and California started to
worry about discipline base. But if all you\'re doing is inducting them
into a beginning teacher program, the problem with that is in two years
they\'re no longer a beginning teacher, the label fades away, and
they\'re left out there again. But if you\'re inducting them into
communities of practicing exemplary science teachers, many of which
exist across this country, many funded and started by the National
Science Foundation, others done by the states \-- Gary Hart will be with
us later on this afternoon \-- the California Subject Matter Projects,
the systemic initiatives, et cetera, then they never go away; they
become part of your ongoing community of practice forever.

So I think we need a new model. So let me just for a second -- Linda,
thank you for these transparencies \-- here\'s the old model. One thing
I think we need to stop doing is expecting the colleges to do it all. If
you could go ahead and please turn the AV on please, the overhead.
**\[See Slide 1\]** I think one huge disservice that we\'ve done is
we\'ve asked colleges in a one or two-year program to give a teacher
everything they could possibly need to teach for the rest of their
career. In time every void that we\'ve had we\'ve put a new requirement
on those colleges, and now they\'re teaching many things that aren\'t
even related to the disciplines anymore, everything from conflict
management to AIDS education, to everything else. The fact of the matter
is if colleges really did nothing more than ensure the content
background of the teachers for what they were going to teach we would be
so far ahead of the game.

I\'m not going to go through this in detail, but I do want to point out
a couple of things. First, just how crowded, absolutely crowded the
college curriculum is, the second thing is how duplicative the inservice
system is, and the third of course is this huge disconnect in between
the two, where no system exists for those teachers at all. So there is
no sort of system differentiation here, everybody is trying to do
everything.

**\[See Slide 2\]** Here, I want to suggest a new system. If, in fact,
in the pre-service education, the focus really was on not exclusively,
but on content, and if in the first two years of teaching, when
instructional issues really become paramount, if the system focused on
helping teachers to teach, and then you had the rest of the inservice
system to kick in and actually then take these teachers from novice
practice to more sophisticated practice, and sort of deeper issues of
teaching and learning. Then you would have a sort of differentiated
system. And sort of bring back that one point that I made, if in that
induction period what you were really doing was introducing that teacher
to a community of practice, they would then follow through with them the
rest of their careers, then they would have sort of this ongoing support
system they would need for the whole time.

This isn\'t, by the way, very much different from the medical
profession, right? It\'s called residencies, you do your residencies.
And one very important other point I wanted to make, we made this
mistake, I think everybody is making this mistake by defining the goal
of these induction programs as retention. That isn\'t the goal. The goal
of these programs, I really firmly believe, has to be successful
teachers. It turns out if the goal is success and effectiveness, then
what happens is retention takes care of itself, because people who are
successful early then stay and do what they are successful at. And I
think we make this mistake. And, again, sort of the medical analogy, the
purpose of residency programs isn\'t to save doctors, it isn\'t to keep
doctors in the profession, it\'s actually to make them better doctors.
It\'s to continue their learning. And I think that has to be the purpose
of induction programs is to make good teachers, to continue their
learning, and just like doctors, to go ahead and induct them into their
specialty, whether it\'s the college of obstetricians and gynecologists,
or cardiologists, or whatever else, what about the college of exemplary
science teaching and learning.

Just a couple of other points, or claims I want to throw out that I
can\'t elaborate on, but we can talk about in the breakout discussion.
The next point is that, in fact, I think this work doesn\'t have to
happen necessarily at colleges and universities, and local education
agencies. If we\'re talking about disciplined based communities, I think
there\'s a whole host of professional organizations, discipline based
organizations I see that Bruce Alberts is here, as well as informal
science institutions across this country that could really take on this
work. And have been effectively, by law and by resource, locked out of
the market up to this point, except in rare instances like our own.

We have 250 informal science education institutions across this country,
devoted to science, mathematics and technology. And it turns out that
we\'ve learned that almost half of the in science inservices that
elementary school teachers receive, they actually get from an informal
science center. So I want to kind of point that out, the wonderful
resource that you have there. And I think they represent what I would
call the third institution, the best of a third institution that can
serve these beginning teachers, and two central elements of a third
institution are this. One, that they ought to be discipline based, or
have some sort of connection or tradition with the disciplines, whether
it be history or science or mathematics. And, second, that they have a
deep pool of veteran teachers that can really serve as the coaches and
mentors for those new teachers.

There\'s two other points, because I know I am running out of time. The
first one is that the time for smart designs is now, because everybody
is pouring their dollars into them. And we have discovered \-- and Maria
Santos is here; I know she\'s exemplary; she\'s sort of the exception
that proves the rule in San Francisco unified school district where in
the beginning teacher program they actually give it over to the
curriculum instruction people. In California I know many programs have
been given just to any district administrator who has any time to
administer another program, whether they\'re special ed, or
transportation, or whatever it might be, because there is no guidance or
mandates, or resources coming from the state. So I think if we really
invest in these programs now, we can really shape and influence them,
because we\'re building them from the ground up, rather than trying to
change existing institutions.

And finally, these programs, I don\'t want to fool anybody, are
extremely expensive. In most cases they run about \$8000 per teacher,
per year. The reason they\'re so expensive is because the difference
between quality and less quality programs is having the mentor teachers,
the coaches, fully released from their classroom duties to work with the
novice teachers, and that\'s key. You have to work in the classrooms
with those teachers, you have to work in the schools to help them. And
David Haselkorn, in his paper, he said, well, I can\'t venture how much
that would cost. I\'m going to take a huge risk here and suggest a
simple equation, \$8000 per teacher, roughly 200,000 new teachers a year
across the United States, and so to really do the job I think it would
cost about \$1.6 billion a year to create this new third institution.

Thank you.

\[END OF PRESENTATION.\]