Somewhere between the President's State of the Union speech and the release of his FY07 budget, some zeroes must have gone astray. While Bush won immediate bipartisan praise (mission accomplished) for his proposal to "bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms," the budget that was released yesterday allocates a mere $25 million for the program. In case the speech left you with the impression that the feds were going to pay for these teachers, think again. The allocation works out to $833 per teacher.
Let's move past the President's pointedly misleading statement. Besides, the Department is on relatively solid ground not funding the base salaries of the adjunct corps. After all, it's not for lack of basic operating funds that math and science teachers don't get hired; it's because there are not enough of them. On the other hand, $833? After you knock off a few hundred for the state department of education to administer the program, there may be enough left to pay for teachers' bus fares. In the Department's budget brief, there's no longer any reference to the corps being 30,000 strong, but even if they sliced that number in half, it's not clear what the Feds could expect to achieve.
Besides doing some basic things differently themselves, districts desperately need two things to help them attract qualified math and science professionals. First, they need regulatory waivers allowing them to bypass both state certification and federal highly qualified teacher requirements to recruit otherwise qualified professionals to teach one or two classes. (District budget offices also need to allow principals to easily hire part-timers, something they often discourage.)
Second, no matter where the money comes from, schools shouldn't have to find volunteers or go out looking for corporate benefactors. These teachers need to be paid, fully accountable to a school principal--not doing everyone a favor by showing up. And if we want to keep them, they need to be paid fairly well.
So what should the Feds have done? What could they still do? They need to put up enough money that there's some leverage; if that means funding an adjunct corps that is only 5,000 strong in the first year, so be it. A multi-thousand dollar annual stipend (assuming some administrative costs) as a supplement to a district's base salary is not an unattractive offer. Second, in return for states' acceptance of these funds, the Department needs to exempt these teachers from meeting the highly qualified teacher provision of NCLB, which in their case would mean they shouldn't have to go take a year's worth of education classes for the privilege of teaching. One, while there may be many working professionals and graduate students who would love to teach a class or two, that interest would dissolve immediately if they were also told to go take ed coursework for a year. Two, there's sufficient research on student achievement in math and science to support such a policy (see here). In lieu of taking coursework, these teachers should be allowed to complete school-based induction programs.
While the money may be peanuts now, this is an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a bigger program. Presidential blustering aside, that's not all bad.