-by Christopher Maynard, Consumer Affairs

“Teachers and school faculty work day in and day out to ensure that their students are successful, but one measure that some educators often fall short on in evaluations is their ability to develop young people’s emotional intelligence – their ability to identify and manage their own emotions and the emotions of others.

While some experts agree that fostering emotional intelligence should be a primary focus for educators, a report asserts that their ability to do so should not be factored into their performance records. The findings come from a systemic review of the issue by researchers from RTI International and the National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY).

“Recent research has found benefits of social and emotional skills,” said lead author and senior research education analyst Elizabeth Glennie. “However, we need to learn more about the role of educators in building these skills.”

Can’t control for all factors

For the report, a series of focus groups comprised of three panels of NNSTOY teachers investigated how emotional intelligence could be nurtured and what role teachers could play in developing them. They concluded that while educators have the ability to help students grow socially and emotionally, they should not be evaluated on their ability to do so.

The groups argue that there are many factors that go into developing students’ social and emotional intelligence that are beyond any school’s control, and that teachers cannot possibly be expected to account for all these influences.

Further, the groups say that it isn’t yet clear which interventions have the greatest impact on forming students’ social and emotional intelligence, and that many supports need to be specifically tailored to meet student needs.

Supporting students

While the groups say that teachers shouldn’t be graded on developing social and emotional skills in their students, they do admit that it should be a primary focus for all educators since it is a crucial life skill. They recommend that schools provide teachers with the support and resources they need to learn how to allocate time for helping students and what steps they can take to be successful.

“Data about social emotional learning can help teachers support their students,” said Glennie. “However, such data should [be] used in a way that ensures that schools and teachers get the resources they need to do that.

http://www.nnstoy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Social-and-Emotional-Development-Accountability.pdf

At his Harvard University commencement speech, Facebook chief executive Zuckerberg had some tough words for the Class of 2017. “Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks,” he said, adding, “When our parents graduated, purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community. But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void.”

Gates, the founder of Microsoft earlier this month, sounded the same warning.
Gates said he didn’t want to sound like the guy from “The Graduate,” which celebrates 50 years this year. In that movie, old Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) was given this very famous piece of advice: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word …Plastics,” And today? That word would likely be “robots.”

Gates took his 34.8 million Twitter followers by the virtual shoulder and said “artificial intelligence” would have a huge impact. In other words, why not join the revolution? After all, that’s exactly what Zuckerberg and Gates did with social media and computer software.

But that’s not the only response to the robot revolution. Last February, Gates also told Quartz that robots should free up labor “and give graduates an opportunity to focus on jobs that only let us do a better job of reaching out to the elderly, having smaller class sizes, helping kids with special needs. You know, all of those are things where human empathy and understanding are still very, very unique.” Gates said there is a counter-intuitive way of approaching the rise of robots. “So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces …then you’re net ahead.”

Zuckerberg too spoke about finding meaningful jobs and purpose in this new automated economy.

“Class of 2017, you are graduating into a world that needs purpose. It’s up to you to create it,” he said, adding, “Taking on big meaningful projects is the first thing we can do to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose. The second is redefining equality to give everyone the freedom they need to pursue purpose. Many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers.” Today’s graduates, he said, will need to carve their own path, but have the freedom to fail and to try again.

They’re not wrong
Robots are expected to create 15 million new jobs in the U.S. over the next 10 years, as a direct result of automation and artificial intelligence, equivalent to 10% of the workforce, a recent report by Forrester Research found. The downside: robotics will also kill 25 million jobs over the same period. So in one way Gates is correct. Artificial intelligence and automation is an area undergoing a seismic shift, just like computers did in the 1980s and plastics did 30 years before that, and how people around the world changed how to communicate and share information about themselves (and, yes, data about themselves) 10 years ago.

And what field will be hot 50 years from now?
Some 65% of Americans expect that within 50 years robots and computers will “definitely” or “probably” do much of the work currently done by humans, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. Some 38% of jobs in the U.S. are at “high risk” of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next 15 years, a separate estimate by consulting and accounting firm PwC found, which is still lower than Germany (35%) and the U.K. (30%).

But for those who don’t want to work in artificial intelligence, there are some “robot-proof” careers, at least for now. They include composers and artists, nurse practitioners, home health aides, elder care specialists, child care workers, engineers, teachers and, finally, human resources executives, a report released earlier this month by careers firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas concluded. What’s more, many traditionally blue-collar jobs will be hard to replace, including carpenters, plumbers, electricians. And, of course, robot engineers will not be replaced by robots.

Low-paying jobs appear most at risk from robots, economists predict.
For those who want to avoid being replaced by robots, a college education will likely help. As MarketWatch previously reported, there’s an 83% chance that automation will replace a job that pays $20 per hour, according to a White House report released last year. It found that there’s only a 31% chance that robots will take over a job that pays between $30 and $40 per hour, and only a 4% chance that automation will replace jobs with an hourly wage over $40.

Gates also cited biosciences and energy as a good bet for the Class of 2017.
Traditional energy and energy efficiency sectors employ around 6.4 million Americans, according to the 2017 U.S. Energy and Employment Report. These sectors increased in 2016 by around 5% on the previous year and account for roughly 14% of all those created in the country. A job in biosciences are increasing at a rate of 10% per year, the latest report on the industry by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization estimated, and employs nearly 1.7 million people in the U.S.

And Zuckerberg also had some words of wisdom for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.
“Let me tell you a secret: no one does when they begin. Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started,” he said. “If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook. Movies and pop culture get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven’t had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started.”

-by Sarah Mosle, October 2016

“Substitute teaching has to be education’s toughest job. I’m a veteran teacher, and I won’t do it; it’s just too hard. The role magnifies the profession’s biggest challenges—the low pay, the insufficient time to plan, the ordeals of classroom management—into an experience that borders on soul-crushing. At the same time, the job drains teaching of its chief joy: sustained, meaningful relationships with students. Yet in 2014, some 623,000 Americans answered school districts’ early-morning calls to take on this daunting task. Improbably, among their ranks was Nicholson Baker.

Baker has written more than a dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction. Whether in pursuit of new material or because the economic plight of even acclaimed literary authors is more dismal than we knew (or both), he applied to be a sub in a “not-terribly-poor-but-hardly-rich school district” within driving distance of his home in Maine, where he lives with his wife. The criminal-background check sailed through, though you might wonder why a writer of novels so raunchy that he’s earned a reputation as a highbrow pornographer didn’t get any further vetting. Imagine the texted OMGs and weeping-laughter emoji had Baker’s students dipped into his notorious 1992 novel, Vox, an account of a man and woman having phone sex on a pay-per-minute chat line. (At one point, the guy runs into trouble xeroxing his penis for a co-worker he is trying to seduce—ah, the pre-sexting inconveniences!)

Baker calls the worst of the hectoring teachers “paid bullies.” At 700-plus pages, Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids is a surprisingly hefty contribution to the life-of-a-teacher genre, especially given that Baker clocked only 28 days in the classroom—a place he’d love to liberate kids from. (He enjoyed a 1970s school-without-walls progressive education himself. ) Scattered across three months and six schools, grades K–12, each of those days is chronicled with the moment-by-moment vividness that Baker has made one of his trademarks. In his novel The Mezzanine, for example, he plumbs an office worker’s thoughts during an escalator ride; fireplace rituals receive punctilious attention in A Box of Matches. Well before his teaching stint has ended, Baker the substitute has shifted into saboteur mode—the reporter as mischief-maker.

Don’t mistake me, though, for a starchy pedagogue. I’m the first to appreciate Baker’s skill at doing what is too rarely done—and what his book convinced me all of us teachers should do at least once a year: follow a student through a whole hectic day in our own schools to soak up the experience. Baker often filled in for “ed techs,” aides who shadow students with special needs, so he was ideally positioned to get the kid’s-eye view. And the kids, in his telling, are mostly all right—funny, genial, and curious, even if exhausted. Start time for the middle and high schools in his district is an ungodly 7:30 a.m., and bus rides are long. How Baker kept all the students straight (a thousand names to learn!) while taking notes and juggling his official duties is beyond me—not that anyone could call him out on mistakes, since he uses pseudonyms throughout.

Baker describes a din sufficient to derail any train of thought: ceaseless PA announcements and interminable bongs between classes. (One school where I’ve taught replaced the bongs with classical music, a minor change with a major effect.) Teachers hector students constantly: “SIT UP STRAIGHT, EYES ON MRS. HEARN.” “IF I HEAR VOICES, YOU—OWE—RECESS!” Baker calls the worst of the yellers “paid bullies,” and he’s not at tough-love charter schools that swear by rigid discipline. He also captures the small silences, “those coincidental clearings in the verbal jungle.”

Baker transcribes the onslaught of acronyms, too: smile (Students Managing Information and Learning Everyday), fastt math (Fluency and Automaticity Through Systematic Teaching With Technology), smart goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely). The litany conveys the obvious: The proliferation of packaged pedagogical tools and rubrics is testimony not merely to the churn of reform interventions, but also to an enduring absence of actual reading, or much focused academic work of any kind. I will note that Baker doubtless saw a disproportionate share of vacuous handouts, from sites such as superteacherworksheets.com. Busywork is just about all that teachers suspect subs can manage, a view Baker confirms as he struggles to keep a lid on the classroom chaos.

School-issued iPads provide portals to websites—BrainPOP, Quizlet, Edmodo—that supply further distractions. You needn’t be a technophobe to conclude that the machines, which he describes being “put away in their cases and swung around like medieval maces,” are more trouble than they’re worth. Baker isn’t even in school very often, and he finds the internet connection constantly down or too slow to be of use. Kids forget passwords to online accounts or are locked out for other reasons. An attempt to repair a software glitch erases one student’s work entirely. The result is yet more interruptions and hectoring. Sometimes the iPads get confiscated unpredictably, sabotaging the teachers who haven’t given up trying to design tablet-based lessons. And of course, when the iPads are actually functioning, students are primarily playing games, watching YouTube, or listening to music on them. That doesn’t bother Baker at all, given what he considers the deadening alternatives on offer—and his own allergy to goody-goody obedience.

As the book progresses, that allergy intensifies. Baker lets his rebellious inner Rousseau loose in an environment that, as he repeatedly remarks, is notably short on men. (We encounter no more than a couple per building.) When one student in a high-school remedial literacy class mentions an assignment on Rousseau, Baker duly notes the French philosopher’s sexism. Rousseau’s ideas about education “only applied to men,” he explains to the class. “Women were supposed to serve and prepare and make everything, and then the men would be able to go wild and have a free existence.” Yet Baker is curiously deaf to his own rogue-to-the-rescue style as he warms up to the task of second-guessing the mostly female school staff that toils away in what he considers a killjoy fashion. All the while, of course, he can look forward to resuming his wild and free existence as a writer.

Baker’s idea of good teaching seems to be showering students with empty compliments. When eighth-graders show him drafts of their papers on a short story, his constructive criticism doesn’t extend much beyond exhorting them to “tell the truth.” Blithely challenging the diagnoses of students with special needs, he makes his credo clear: Stultifying school is always the culprit. At various points, he wonders why this or that child is taking medicine for ADHD when, in his snap judgment, the kids don’t need it. (How could he possibly know, given that he’s seeing them on medication?) In the most egregious example, he takes it upon himself—after just one class with a 12-year-old who Baker has been advised has “some issues with emotional stability”—to urge the boy to cut back on whatever drug he’s taking. In this case, Baker does finally bring his concerns to the nurse—the only time he does so in the book—and she’s in no need of his wisdom. She’s already completely on top of the situation.

Baker starts actively undermining school routines, encouraging one girl in a middle-school math lab to flout the protocol of signing out of class. He tells another girl in the same lab, which is for struggling students, that she might be better served by homeschooling. For students who aren’t academically inclined, he has concluded that vocational education is the answer—and brooks no dispute. Two high schoolers, one of whom has already revealed that he spent time in “juvie,” are in a metal-tech class when Baker loses his cool. They are goofing around, playing on an iPad, and then they lie about having completed their work. Baffled to discover the teens are as disengaged in this class as they have been in any other, Baker gets furious. “This is a fucking screen,” he says, pointing at the iPad—not the real, hands-on stuff he endorses. He berates the boys for refusing the path that he is sure is best for them.

So much for Baker’s indictment of bullying teachers—though he seems to make excuses for the men in the profession. “I liked Mr. Walsh,” he confides late in the book, even though his arrival features more all-caps yelling: “SHOULDER UP, ELBOW OUT.” “WE ARE GOING TO MOVE ON.” Now Baker doesn’t mind the raised voice, which he perceives as macho, like something you’d hear on a shop floor. “The only way he could survive as a middle school tech teacher,” Baker reasons, “was to develop a voice like a union activist’s and shout all talkers down.” Suddenly I had to wonder: How bad were the female teachers he’d witnessed yelling earlier? Were they truly over the top, or in Baker’s head, did women’s raised voices turn them into harridans?

Baker wishes his students could be happy and more carefree.
Baker, a specialist in fantasies, can’t resist indulging some pedagogical ones, too—of school days cut back from six hours to two; of only four or five kids per class; of “new, well-paid teachers who would otherwise be making cappuccinos” driving in “retrofitted school buses that moved like ice-cream trucks or bookmobiles from street to street, painted navy blue.” Just kidding, he sighs, offering a bizarre verdict on K–12 education. “Ah, but we couldn’t do any of that, of course,” he writes. “School isn’t actually about efficient teaching, it’s about free all-day babysitting while parents work.”

Which is not to say that Baker envisages more-serious work getting done in the school of his dreams. He keeps saying “I love these kids” and wishing they could just be happy and more carefree. Even 15- and 16-year-olds, in his view, are too young and sensitive to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust, or read The Things They Carried, about the Vietnam War. But loving students—especially adolescents—is exhausting, time-devouring, demanding work, rather like parenthood. That’s also why teaching can be so rewarding, not that Baker sticks around long enough to find out.

Whether Baker is aware of it or not, his sub’s perspective on some very average schools delivers a message Americans still need to hear: K–12 education, as the province of children and mostly women, regularly inspires panic, but all too rarely receives the serious, sustained attention it actually merits. It’s not just students who sink under an onslaught of obligations in school, with no moment to think or have an unhurried conversation or discover a new approach to a lesson. So do the adults who “serve and prepare and make everything,” to invoke Baker’s paraphrase of Rousseau. His book is a reminder that kids and teachers are often in the same boat, and both deserve better.

By Dan Berrett SEPTEMBER 09, 2013, Chronicle of Education

“Students learned more when their first in­struc­tor in a dis­ci­pline was not on the ten­ure track, as com­pared with those whose in­tro­duc­tory pro­fes­sor was tenured, ac­cord­ing to a new pa­per from Northwestern University.

The paper, “Are Ten­ure-Track Professors Bet­ter Teachers?,” was re­leased on Mon­day by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it sheds new light on the hot­ly debat­ed top­ic of whether the in­creased use of ad­junct instructors is help­ing or hin­der­ing stu­dents’ learn­ing.

The re­search­ers found “strong and con­sis­tent ev­i­dence that Northwestern fac­ul­ty out­side of the ten­ure sys­tem out­per­form ten­ure track/ten­ured pro­fes­sors in intro­duc­tory undergraduate class­rooms,” wrote Da­vid N. Figlio, director of Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research; Mor­ton O. Scha­piro, the uni­ver­si­ty’s pres­i­dent; and Kev­in B. So­ter, an as­so­ciate con­sult­ant at an organization called the Great­est Good, which uses economic methods and data analysis to help businesses.

They also found that stu­dents who were rel­a­tive­ly less qual­i­fied ac­a­demi­cal­ly fared par­tic­u­lar­ly well when they were taught by fac­ul­ty members out­side the tenure sys­tem, es­pe­cial­ly in courses where high grades were gen­er­al­ly tough­er to earn.

“We tried ev­ery pos­si­ble thing we could to see if this re­sult was frag­ile,” Mr. Figlio said in an in­ter­view. “In ev­ery sin­gle speci­fi­ca­tion we tried, this re­sult came up.”

Mr. Figlio and his fel­low re­search­ers based their findings on a study of the ac­a­dem­ic per­form­ance of the eight co­horts of freshmen, totaling 15,662 students, who en­tered Northwestern from the fall of 2001 to the fall of 2008.

They an­a­lyzed stu­dents who in their first term took, say, an in­tro­duc­tory eco­nom­ics course taught by an un­ten­ured in­struc­tor and an in­tro­duc­tory po­lit­i­cal-sci­ence course led by a pro­fes­sor who was ten­ured or on the ten­ure track. Then the re­search­ers stud­ied what courses the stu­dents took dur­ing their second term: Did they take eco­nom­ics or po­lit­i­cal sci­ence? And how well did they do?

The stu­dents were more like­ly to take a second course in a dis­ci­pline if the first had been taught by an un­ten­ured fac­ul­ty mem­ber, and they were more likely to earn a bet­ter grade in the next course com­pared with students whose first course in the dis­ci­pline had been taught by a ten­ured or ten­ure-track pro­fes­sor.

“A nontenure-track fac­ul­ty mem­ber in­creases the like­li­hood that a stu­dent will take an­oth­er class in the sub­ject by 7.3 per­cent­age points,” the authors wrote, “and in­creases the grade earned in that sub­se­quent class by slight­ly more than one-tenth of a grade point.”

Northwestern uses a four-point scale for grade-point av­er­ages, which Mr. Figlio said is a bet­ter proxy for learn­ing than stu­dent-sat­is­fac­tion sur­veys or standardized tests. “It’s not per­fect,” he said, “but frank­ly it’s the only thing I can think of.”

‘Rar­efied’ Students

The fact that the study was con­duct­ed only on stu­dents at Northwestern makes it both use­ful and lim­it­ed for its broad­er ap­pli­ca­bil­ity.

Northwestern’s stu­dents come from “a rar­efied por­tion of the prep­a­ra­tion dis­tri­bu­tion,” the authors wrote, and are “far from re­flec­tive of the gen­er­al stu­dent population.”

In fact, stu­dents who were de­scribed in the study as less-qual­i­fied ac­a­demi­cal­ly, ac­cord­ing to the five-cat­e­go­ry sys­tem used by Northwestern’s ad­mis­sions office, still posted an av­er­age SAT score of 1316.

Indeed, a similar study of students conducted at a less-selective institution yielded less-striking results than Northwestern’s. Matthew M. Chingos, of the Brookings Institution, analyzed 281 sections of algebra taught by 76 unique instructors at Glendale Community College, in California. Students whose sections had been taught by full-time instructors were about four percentage points more likely to earn a C or better on a common final examination than were those whose teachers had been part-timers, instructors whose working conditions more closely mirror those of untenured faculty members elsewhere.

But an un­ten­ured fac­ul­ty mem­ber at Northwestern may not look much like the stereotype of a part-time instructor cob­bling to­geth­er teach­ing gigs on mul­ti­ple cam­pus­es. Northwestern’s were gen­er­al­ly well com­pen­sat­ed and en­joyed longstand­ing re­la­tion­ships with the uni­ver­si­ty, said Mr. Figlio.

He add­ed that 99.4 per­cent of the un­ten­ured fac­ul­ty mem­bers in the study had taught at Northwestern for at least six quar­ters.

“This is not some­one we’re hir­ing once to fill a gap and then get­ting rid of,” he said.

Northwestern’s part-time fac­ul­ty members earn from $4,200 to $7,334 per course, ac­cord­ing to eight re­spon­dents to The Chronicle’s Ad­junct Project, a Web site that crowdsources sal­a­ry data for con­tin­gent fac­ul­ty members.

Administrators of colleges where ad­juncts do not enjoy sim­i­lar­ treat­ment “should not say this proves we should re­duce the ten­ure sys­tem,” said Mr. Figlio.

In­stead, he and his fel­low authors wrote, the re­sults of­fer ev­i­dence that des­ig­nat­ing full-time fac­ul­ty members to fo­cus chief­ly on teach­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly at research-in­ten­sive uni­ver­si­ties like Northwestern, may not be the cause for alarm that many see. It may even improve students’ learning.

“Per­haps,” they wrote, “the grow­ing prac­tice of hir­ing a com­bi­na­tion of re­search-in­ten­sive ten­ure-track fac­ul­ty mem­bers and teach­ing-in­ten­sive lec­tur­ers may be an ef­fi­cient and edu­ca­tion­al­ly pos­i­tive so­lu­tion to a re­search uni­ver­si­ty’s mul­titask­ing prob­lem.””

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/sen-ben-sasse-says-america-is-in-a-crisis-of-public-trust/

2 in 5 High Schools Don’t Offer Physics, Analysis Finds
Smaller schools least likely to offer subject
By Liana Heitin
August 23, 2016
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/08/24/2-in-5-high-schools-dont-offer.html?cmp=SOC-SHR-twitter&override=web

“Physics, as champions of the subject will remind you, is the cornerstone of many professions, including those in engineering, health care, aerospace, and architecture. And for students hoping to pursue those and other science, technology, engineering, and math fields during college, getting a jump on physics during high school is all but a requirement.

Yet, across the country, 2 in 5 high schools don’t offer physics, according to an Education Week Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights.

The numbers are worse in some states than others: In both Alaska and Oklahoma, about 70 percent of high schools don’t offer the course. Florida and Utah are close behind, with nearly 60 percent of high schools lacking physics. Iowa, New Hampshire, and Maine do much better, with only about 15 percent of schools not offering the subject.

A closer look shows that the problem is associated with school size: Nationally, the high schools that offer physics have an average of about 880 students. Those that don’t offer it enroll an average of just 270 students.

“When you have graduating classes of less than 80 to 100 kids, sometimes you have to make decisions in terms of what licensure you have teachers come in at,” said Doug Paulson, the STEM specialist for the education department in Minnesota, where about half of high schools have physics.

In any case, STEM advocates agree that every high school should ideally offer the course—and all students should have the chance to take it.

“Physics is often seen as an elite discipline that requires a lot of math and is only for college-bound students,” Monica Plisch, the associate director of education and diversity at the American Physical Society, said in an email. “This view is not only outdated, it risks underestimating students’ abilities and cutting off their future opportunities in STEM.”

Small Schools, Small Budgets

For small schools, perhaps the biggest hurdle to offering physics is being able to fit such classes, which just a few students might want to or be eligible to take, into the budget.

Steven Maier, a physics professor and the chairman of the department of natural science at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, said more than a dozen counties in his state—most of which are rural—don’t have any high schools offering physics. In small districts, “there’s often one science teacher teaching high school and maybe some middle school courses,” he said. “Districts can’t justify paying someone to come in and just teach physics.”

In Alaska, the large high schools tend to offer physics. But of the 250 schools that serve high school students across the state, about half enroll fewer than 25 high school students—so creating a stand-alone physics course is often just not feasible.

“We have village K-12 schools that have literally two or three high school students,” said Eric Fry, an information officer for the Alaska education department. “Teachers may teach all subjects and all grades. Those small schools do not have the capability to offer physics.”

According to Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the federal Education Department, schools were allowed to include virtual courses in reporting to the federal government whether they offer physics, but it’s unclear whether schools did so consistently.

Across the country, about 80 percent of alternative schools, which also tend to be small, don’t have physics, the OCR data show. Juvenile-justice facilities are even more unlikely to have physics: 9 in 10 don’t offer the course. (Those facilities were removed from Education Week’s national analysis.)

Some small schools do a rotation, offering physics one year and chemistry the next, which, as district and state administrators from several states pointed out, the OCR data may not have captured.

Dearth of Teachers

Among the most commonly cited barriers to offering physics by all states is difficulty finding qualified teachers.

“I get a call nearly every day from a school district—especially during July, as school districts are trying finalize their teachers—[that is] looking for a physics teacher,” said Tiffany Neill, the director of science education for the Oklahoma education department.

“Finding physics teachers is hard,” said James Ryan, the STEM executive director for the San Francisco school system, which does offer physics in a majority of high schools. In California, unlike in many other states, teachers need to be specifically prepared to teach physics. “We don’t have a [general] high school science credential,” he said. “So there are just fewer physics credentials out there available to teach.”

Michael Marder, a co-director of UTeach, a STEM teacher-preparation program that operates out of 44 universities, said upping the physics-teacher pool has proven tough. “Increasing the number of math and biology teachers has persistently been easier than raising the number of physics teachers,” he said, adding that only computer science has been more difficult.

Yet, at the same time, there’s evidence that student interest in the subject is growing—perhaps partly because of the recent nationwide push to get more, as well as more-diverse, students interested in STEM.

The number of students taking the Advanced Placement physics exam doubled between 2014 and 2015, according to the College Board, which administers the test.
Data from the American Institute of Physics show that enrollment in high school physics classes has gone up significantly since 1990. About 39 percent of students now take physics in high school. That’s still far behind biology, though, which nearly every student takes before graduating.
Low pay is among the culprits for why it’s so hard to find teachers.

“The median starting salary for a physics major who becomes a high school teacher is about $10,000 less than getting a STEM job in the private sector,” Plisch explained by email, “and that can be after an additional year in college to earn certification.”

Pay has been a particular problem in Oklahoma, which ranks 48th for average teacher salary in a state comparison this year by the National Education Association.
“Many teachers who are teaching physics in public high schools are being offered positions in career-tech schools or business and industry that can pay more,” said Neill of Oklahoma’s education department.

But pay alone doesn’t explain the physics-teacher shortage, since math, biology, and chemistry teachers could also up their salaries outside of education, and yet there are many more of them in schools. Another major factor is that universities simply aren’t churning out very many physics majors—and of those who do get a physics degree, just a fraction will end up going into teaching.

“At the college level, [physics] is one of the least-liked classes on campus and has been for a long time,” said Marder of UTeach. “It’s really hard, and we’ve gone in for grade inflation less than just about anybody else.”

The most prolific teacher-preparation programs in the country are only producing about a dozen physics teachers per year, according to a 2012 report by the Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics, a group formed by the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Institute of Physics.

Most universities are producing far fewer, if any.

Because the pool of physics education graduates is so small, many of the people who end up in physics classrooms have taken nontraditional routes to get there. They may go through emergency certification or professional-development programs or simply take the physics-certification test—often without having ever studied the subject in a university setting.

‘Cyclical Problem’

That’s despite the fact that the American Association of Physics Teachers says a new physics teacher needs an undergraduate major or minor in the subject to reach an “acceptable” minimum level of preparation.

“The teachers teaching physics aren’t well prepared,” said Eric Brewe, a physics education researcher at Florida International University in Miami. “Students are not getting the best educational experience you can get in physics.”

That leads to a few different problems: An unprepared teacher can eventually drive enrollment in the class down, Brewe said. “The students understand, and guidance counselors understand, and probably other teachers understand this isn’t a good course or a good situation.”

Then when funding gets tight, small classes can end up on the chopping block. “As schools introduce budget cuts, that becomes low-hanging fruit,” said Neill.
And either taking a bad physics course in high school or not taking one at all often discourages students from pursuing STEM in college.
“It’s a cyclical problem,” said Brewe.

ESSA Effect

The new federal education law has some STEM administrators on edge about whether finding and training physics teachers may soon get even harder.

The Every Student Succeeds Act eliminates the Math Science Partnerships program, which put about $150 million toward collaborations between higher education institutions and high-need school districts.”