Erskine Bowles Wants More Physics Teachers
By Christopher MoorePresident Clinton’s former chief of staff and current president of the University of North Carolina, Erskine Bowles, wants his school to pump out more physics teachers. Here’s why from his own mouth:
At a time when the world is clamoring for science and engineering talent, about two-thirds of the students in U.S. high schools studying chemistry and physics are taught by teachers who are not certified in the field and didn’t major in the subject. Think about this: In the past four years, our 15 schools of education turned out a grand total of three physics teachers. Three!
Three physics teachers from 15 different schools in four years is pretty pathetic. My school, Virginia Commonwealth University, has spat out eight that I know of in the last four year. And that’s one school. But an important point to be made is that of those eight, only two went through the School of Education. The rest just received physics degrees and used Virgina’s Alternate Route to Licensure to get jobs.
I don’t think it odd that 15 Schools of Education couldn’t manage to produce more than three physics teachers. The reason is people who like physics hate Schools of Education. See here and here.
Away, how is Bowles going to “fix” his university system? Here he is again:
Here’s what your university is going to do. For starters we are going to operate more efficiently and effectively in order to redirect every single dollar we possibly can to the classroom. With our own house in order, we’re going to focus our efforts in areas that can give North Carolina the best chance to compete.
The first facet of this prism is improving K-12. Nothing is more important. I promise the people of North Carolina that your university will do everything it possibly can to support and strengthen our public schools so they can deliver that sound basic education our Constitution demands.
Our state has a crying need for more teachers, better teachers, science and math teachers, stronger curriculum and better trained principals. The university cannot solve this problem alone, but we’re going to do our part. We are going to lead, and we will recruit more teachers, train our teachers better and we will mentor those teachers.
I quote all of that so that you can see that our good politician friend used three paragraphs of words to offer NOT ONE concrete solution. … full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Look up that quote and figure out what comes before the “…” and you’ll see what I think of Mr. Bowles’ and his tale.
Maybe North Carolina needs an alternate route to licensure like Virginia. Maybe North Carolina should started hiring people with physics degrees to teach physics and stop worrying so much about what education degrees they have. Maybe they should take a good, hard look at the education culture and find out why people who enjoy studying physics don’t see eye-to-eye with English teachers and school administrators. Maybe then North Carolina will have physicists teaching physics and staying around longer than a few years.
Hopefully Erskine Bowles has some real solutions hidden in his coat pocket. And hopefully he has more success with them than his ideas had against Senators Dole and Burr.
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