It’s a g-r-e-a-t time to be a high-school geek! (Definition: One who is academically accomplished and advanced. A positive term among friends and insiders.)
Every college in the nation is in hot pursuit of high-level academic students, particularly those with math-science skills and interests. To sweeten the satisfaction, substantial scholarships and grants are being offered to those willing to sign on the dotted enrollment line.
Driven by its own goals, as well as the behest of state, federal and corporate voices, Washington State University has been doing its homework the past year, preparing a comprehensive strategy titled the “Pipeline.” The goal of the plan is to nurture, lure, land and promote stellar math-science students, who ultimately will graduate from WSU in high-demand fields, thereby helping meet the needs of business and education and fueling the state’s economy.
$3M requested
To enact the plan, the university has requested $3 million for the next biennium from the 2007 Legislature. That petition is part of a larger $14 million request designed to expand the number of graduates in high-demand fields. (Note: Although it shares similar goals, the Pipeline proposal is unrelated to Gov. Chris Gregoire’s recent plan to reorganize the state’s K-higher education system.)
The challenge is complicated. First, as the demand for math and science classes is exploding, the shortage of qualified and certified K-12 math-science teachers is increasing. In addition, there aren’t enough math-science scholars coming out of the K-12 system to fill the expanded openings at universities, and the level of competency of many students is lackluster at best.
The evidence, unfortunately, is replete:
• The Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that employment in science and engineering will increase about 70 percent faster than the overall growth rate for other occupations.
• In Washington, 48 percent of expected job openings in the five-year period beginning in 2007 will require degrees in areas of science, mathematics or engineering.
• Zeroing in on WASL scores, more than 50 percent of state high school juniors failed the first round of the WASL math test earlier this year.
The trend is not peculiar to Washington. Overall, the United States has plummeted from the top of the heap to the bottom among industrial nations in math and science. A 2005 study ranked U.S. 15-year-olds at 24th out of 29 industrialized nations on practical math applications.
Not a new concept
The first step in preparing WSU’s Pipeline plan, said Larry James, associate executive vice president, was to “create an inventory of all the programs we are doing of that nature.”
The list was 16 pages long and included 37 different programs. To say the least, WSU is no newcomer to the concept of nurturing and attracting qualified math-science students.
The challenge, James noted, is identifying those programs that are the most effective, then devising a system that allows them to work in a cooperative, complementary manner to meet needs and achieve goals.
Rather than creating another program, the university plans to build on those that have proven effective, like the 4-H program, administered statewide through WSU Extension.
“It is one program we have that no one else does,” said James. “It’s a broad, active statewide network that we can immediately plug into, and it offers federal, state and county funding sources.”
Specifically, WSU hopes to tap into 4-H programs offered through the Center for Youth Workforce Preparation at WSU Vancouver. The plan is to expand some of these out-of-school programs statewide through WSU Extension. These programs enable precollege students to explore career opportunities in such areas as computers, robotics, engineering, human anatomy, crime scene investigation and other related fields.
A second critical segment of the Pipeline focuses on WSU helping prepare and certify more new K-12 math and science teachers. This includes working with school districts to offer professional training for teachers and counselors and helping equip those teachers with curriculum and equipment. Again, WSU hopes to tap into existing related programs.
Refocus at WSU
WSU leaders know there are two ends to the pipeline. Not only does the university need to help prime the pump on the front end, it also needs to ensure that freshman students are encouraged to pursue math-science majors and that they can be successful.
“The most important items at WSU,” said James, “are to motivate and support outstanding teaching of gateway (entry-level) courses and to encourage or attract top-ranked faculty to teach those lower-division classes in chemistry, math, physics, biology that lead to science-based majors. There are people who have a special talent for that.”
Teaching vs. research
The hurdle is that the current tenure and advancement system emphasizes scholarship and research, rather than teaching.
“Currently, you can be awarded tenure and promotion fairly easily based primarily on excellence in research alone, even if you do a poor job at teaching,” said Barry Swanson, professor of Food Science and Human Nutrition. “Conversely, if you do an excellent job teaching, you probably will not be promoted unless you document a minimal level of research and scholarly activity… It doesn’t have to be Nobel Prize winning research, but there needs to be an understanding, appreciation of research and scholarly activity and an effort to contribute. I’m not sure that’s fair, but that is how the academic world looks at teaching and research accomplishments now.”
Ken Struckmeyer, chair elect of the Faculty Senate, agrees and sees himself as an example of that pattern. Struckmeyer, who also is a university ombudsman and an associate professor of landscape architecture, has been at WSU since 1971. He says he has “chosen to focus on teaching and service, rather than research.” As a result, he remains an associate professor.
“We used to think of WSU as a teaching college,” he said, but today the focus has turned more toward research, particularly since the university’s focus is on being recognized as a world class research university.
Swanson concurs: “We’ve said for 20-25 years that teaching needs to become a more influential factor in the consideration of faculty tenure and advancement. We believe we’re making progress.”
Tenure and advancement requests are evaluated by peer faculty, chairs, deans and advisory committees.
“Unfortunately, many of the older faculty still lean heavily toward research as an evaluation tool, primarily because research can be easily evaluated,” said Swanson. “You can count (grant) money and you can count publications, whereas evaluating teaching is not the easiest thing to do.
No quick tenure fix
As a result, changing the tenure and promotion system “is not going to be a swift movement,” Swanson said. “It will accompany the maturation of the faculty.”
The problem, said Struckmeyer, is that “everyone blames everyone else — the faculty says we can’t change because of the chairs, the chairs say we can’t change because of the deans, the deans say we can’t change because of the provost, and the provost says we can’t change because of the faculty.”
“I’ve been here 34 years, and I believe we are becoming more balanced in terms of evaluating teaching and research, and that needs to continue,” said Swanson. “I think if we could promote WSU as an institution that evaluated teaching singularly — if that was the appointment that a tenure-track faculty member was assigned to — that would be a major move in the right direction toward rewarding faculty based predominantly on teaching
.”
But, will that change come in time so that WSU can create a pipeline to supply state employment needs in math-science fields?
