Ex-CEO eyes stronger K-12 education
What will it take to maintain the United States' position as a hotbed of innovation? Robert J. Herbold has an answer: improve K-12 education.
The member of President Bush's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology knows something about innovation: He is the former executive vice president and chief operating officer of
Last June, his panel released a report examining ways to improve the nation's "innovation ecosystem," or its science, mathematics, and engineering capabilities.
Herbold addressed a dinner sponsored several months ago by the Pioneer Institute, a libertarian think tank in Boston.
He argued that the most important way to maintain American scientific and technological prowess is to improve K-12 education in those areas by hiring better-trained teachers and establishing national standards.
Herbold, who holds a doctorate in computer science from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, spoke with Anand Vaishnav of the Globe staff:
Q: What is the problem you describe in your report?
A: The problem is we have a risk that we're not going to be able to innovate at the rate we have been in the past. . . . Typically, that is dependent on the technical capabilities of the country in two senses: On a broad scale, does the country have a good, sound talent base in that area, and are citizens equipped?
And number two, do we have specialists, primarily at the PhD level in the physical sciences and engineering who could potentially create the real inventions that spawn entire industries?
Our share of the global talent areas -- science, technology, engineering, and math -- is decreasing.
Q: Why is it decreasing?
A: If you go back to the K-12 formative years, the number of teachers that are well-equipped in these areas to teach and thus be able to excite students is really on the decline.
As you see from the statistics [from a 2003 report by the Committee on Economic Development, a nonprofit group], if you're a middle school student, and you take a science course, you have a 93 percent chance of being taught by an out-of-field teacher. And if you're in a math course, you have a 70 percent chance of being taught by an out-of-field teacher.
What are the chances that teacher will be able to excite you about these fields?
Q: What's behind those statistics?
A: We think the best and the brightest in this country look at the field of K-12 teaching and don't find it all that exciting.
It's not a merit system, so if I'm a performance-driven person, that's not a world where I'm going to feel emotionally like they appreciate me because I'm really good.
It's not a world where they're going to pay me because I'm really good, and thirdly, it's a world where there aren't many elements of discipline that surround the job that protect the teacher from some of the disciplinary traumas that can occur in a school.
Q: What does it take to change this?
A: You have to put in place a performance appraisal system and a salary differential system so teachers can make $125,000 or $150,000 if they're really good.
Q: That much?
A: Why not? Don't get the idea that you need more money to do that. K-12 education is a world that only spends 53 percent of its money on instruction. You only need a percentage point or two to pay people what they should be paid. That's a core issue in terms of making it right with these teachers. You should give premiums for hard-to-find disciplines like math and science, and make it an exciting environment.
The teacher unions have come out on a national basis and said we believe performance appraisals are a bad idea, and we're all in this together and have very little difference in terms of the amount of merit.
Q: Whose responsibility is it to change this?
A: That's the $64,000 question. The teacher unions have such a lock on K-12 public education that they've been able to build an impenetrable shield around them. . . . One might say, how did other countries do it? Ireland gutted the school system and took it over nationally and said schools won't exist unless each has a performance appraisal process. . . . The chances of this happening are slim because there's very little backbone in Washington, D.C. on these issues, to stand up to the teacher unions. Setting criteria that must be followed is a little different than creating a huge bureaucracy. Today, you do have to have a catalytic converter on your car. There's no department of catalytic converters in Washington. That's what I'm really talking about: This is the curriculum for fifth-grade math in America, period. You don't have any choice.
