We need to improve and we need to do so in a decade or less. He expressed concern that Texas demographics are rapidly changing and that minority populations are becoming majorities. The state must respond to the educational needs of this rapidly growing population to maintain its economic vitality. Fitting that profile is the Texas Center for Reading and Language Arts, which last year trained nearly 16,000 kindergarten teachers in reading instruction through training sessions held around the state. This year, the program will train all first grade teachers in Texas public schools and all second grade teachers will be trained in summer 2001.
Leverage means focusing on programs that can be replicated throughout Texas.
UTeach, the program that seeks to provide Texas schools with an increased supply of secondary math and science teachers, is one such initiative. UTeach is aimed at teacher supply where there's a severe under-supply in the state. One of the ways in which we've tried to do that is to develop a summer institute for AP teachers where we train the teachers but then have those teachers develop materials that can be put on the Web to other teachers across the state. He points out that many high schools simply do not have the capability of teaching AP courses. So we're trying to expand the capacity of the state to teach Advanced Placement courses so that kids in those high schools don't operate at a disadvantage.