Too many students in America's schools are disengaged, uninspired and headed for dead-end jobs, while higher-paying jobs in science, math and technology fields go unfilled, the chief executive of an organization that promotes science and math education said Tuesday.
Vince Bertram, president of the Indianapolis-based Project Lead the Way kindergarten-through-12th-grade education program, told the Rotary Club of Little Rock that there must be a national imperative to ratchet up the teaching and learning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- known as the STEM subjects.
The Project Lead the Way organization is supporting that effort by providing activity-based curriculum and teacher training in those subjects in 6,500 schools in the 50 states, including 82 Arkansas schools.
Three of those Arkansas schools are in the Little Rock School District, and 12 are in the North Little Rock School District. Still other participating schools are in diverse locales such as Star City, Bryant, Malvern, Dumas, Gravette and Osceola, as well as in the Northwest Arkansas districts of Fayetteville, Springdale, Bentonville, Rogers and others.
"Our goal is to develop critical-thinking, problem-solving, collaboration skills," Bertram said of the organization. "We want our students to think differently. It's about giving them skills that are transferable across all sectors and all industries, and will allow them to adapt to change."
At the high school and middle school levels, Project Lead the Way problem-solving elective courses are in the areas of engineering, biomedical science and computer science. At the elementary level, newer hands-on, activity-based lesson units were made available by the organization for the first time this school year to supplement the traditional math and science courses.
There are 20 million unemployed and underemployed people in the United States, yet 3.8 million jobs are unfilled because employers can't find skilled workers, said Bertram, a former superintendent and high school principal. And jobs in the STEM fields are projected to grow over the next five years at two times the rate of jobs in fields not directly tied to the science and math fields.
In Arkansas, there are 1.4 STEM-related jobs for every unemployed person and 4.4 unemployed people for every non-STEM job, he said.
"We know STEM is where the jobs are at today and where they are going to be in the future," he said.
Schools aren't a satisfactory pipeline of workers for those jobs, he said, not because there aren't enough students but because the students don't have the skills or interest.
"We have 54 million children in K-12 education. It's not a shortage of people. We just have too many uninspired, unengaged, talented young people who are headed for dead-end jobs and a life of poverty. We have to correct it. It's a crisis that we can fix," he said. To do so is essential to the nation's productivity and security, he added.
The programs are provided at a flat, annual cost of $750 per school at the elementary and middle school levels, plus first-time startup costs for teacher training and equipment purchases, said Jennifer Cahill, a Project Lead the Way spokesman. The annual fee for high schools can range from $2,000 to $3,000.
Businesses in a community are invited to help schools with the costs, and 100 percent of those contributions go to the local school, Cahill said.
Project Lead the Way dates to 1986 and is the work of a New York high school teacher who developed pre-engineering and digital electronics classes to his students to encourage the study of engineering.
Teacher Richard Blais in 1997 expanded the high school engineering course to 12 schools in upstate New York with the support of a charitable foundation.
Over time, the organization expanded into other states. In 2003, NASA partnered with Project Lead the Way and in 2004, the U.S. Department of Education held up Project Lead the Way as an exemplary program.
In 2005, former Arkansas first lady and then-New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton introduced the program to the U.S. Senate, saying that the program is changing lives of middle and high school students and building a workforce to meet the needs of the 21st century.
Blais was the first leader of the program. Bertram became the organization's third president in 2011.
Metro on 10/01/2014