Innovation Missing from President’s Educate to Innovate Program
Sarah Torre /
The Educate to Innovate campaign recently announced by President Obama may become the latest addition to the Department of Education’s hall of inefficient and costly federal programs. The President revealed a plan to increase taxpayer funding for teaching programs by $10 million and lauded a promise by 75 public universities to graduate thousands of new science and technology teachers over the next 5 years.
Dave Saba, President and CEO of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE), a non-profit organization that provides an alternative route to teacher certification for experienced professionals, points out the shortcomings of the President’s initiative:
According to the President, public university presidents have committed to training 10,000 new math and science teachers annually by 2015. Later in the speech we find out this is a whopping 2,500 over what these schools do now. And there were 75 universities that made this pledge. So we do some simple division to find out that this is a staggering 33 new math and science teachers per school.…But we read further and find out that you can’t take this on all at once – no – they will achieve this groundbreaking innovation 5 years from now. In essence, each school has to add 6 new teachers per year.