The Impossible Dream? (January 28, 2011)

In US President Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union Speech delivered this past Wednesday (Australian time) he set as one of his goals the training of 100,000 new elementary and secondary school science and math teachers over the next decade and proclaimed that his nation must "out-educate" other countries to produce the type of workforce that can "outcompete" and "outbuild".

Is it a realistic goal, and put into an Australian perspective what might it translate to for this nation of ~22 million?

Science's Jeffery Mervis view's the Obama pronouncement with a cold and calculating eye:

University and scientific leaders are hugely grateful that Obama, since taking office, has been touting the importance of better teacher preparation in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. But in addition to being a tough goal for the government to achieve, even if it did, its likely impact on U.S. science and math education is debatable.

And he refers his readers to the report issued this past September by the President's own council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that the country will need 25,000 new STEM teachers a year—and more if the desired improvement in quality lures more students into classrooms around the country.

Allowing for the fact that the current population of the United States is about 14.4 times that of Australia and assuming that the paucity of competent teachers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics in our primary and secondary schools is more or less on a par with that of the US, Australia on President Obama's figures should aim to inject just over 700 competent STEM teachers into the system per annum. Were we to go by PCAST's assessment the figure rises to 1,750 new qualified STEM teachers per annum.

It's not gonna happen; yet what should be exercising Australians is that there is a likelihood that the nation's relative place regarding STEM education will seriously decline in comparison to its cohort of nations, and that in turn will impact on Australians quality of life, not now, perhaps not even by 2020.   But by 2030?