Tech Teachers Are the Prize in Tug-of-War for Workers

Sustained economic prosperity has created a magnet of private-sector jobs that is drawing math, science and technology teachers out of classrooms all across the country.

In today’s job market, even minimally competent computer science teachers can double or even triple their salaries by taking such jobs as computer programmers and trainers. And thousands are doing that.

But schools are fighting back. They are finding new ways to fatten long-term financial rewards. They are developing “grow-your-own training programs.” They are offering travel opportunities and other perks traditionally available only at the college level. They are playing on fears of job insecurity in the private sector.

And, looking beyond teacher colleges and other traditional academic hunting grounds, they have discovered new sources of classroom talent in unexpected places.

Steve Rose, for example, has strong academic credentials. He has a wealth of the real-world experience that is rare but treasured in U.S. classrooms. And, with four years of teaching high school math and computer science under his belt, he is just at the point where many such teachers get lured away.

Yet Rose has no interest in leaving Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in suburban Virginia. “What could be better” than teaching? he asks. “If there were something better, we’d be doing it.”

On the Front Lines of Recruiting

Rose is a retired Air Force officer with long experience in computer programming and systems analysis. And the Armed Forces, cutting back since the end of the Cold War, have become a godsend for school officials in need of math and science teachers. Ex-military personnel are not only well trained and imbued with a sense of duty, they also tend to be inoculated against the lure of fatter salaries in private industry.

“People in the military have made their peace with that. When they went in, they knew it was not for the money,” said Jeff Jones, principal of Thomas Jefferson, a magnet school that ranks among the best science high schools in the country.

Jones is on the front lines of the battle to recruit and keep good math and science teachers. Virginia’s Fairfax County, just across the Potomac from Washington, is a microcosm of the challenge nationwide.

Like comparable parts of California, where the problem is also acute, Fairfax County is a relatively affluent area that offers its students high-quality instruction in science and technology and its teachers good salaries and benefits. And like school administrators in the South Bay area of Southern California or Silicon Valley in the north, they also face intensifying competition from local high-tech companies.

A booming private sector is not the only factor in the shortage of math and science teachers. A mini-boom in the nation’s student population and a widespread move toward lowering class sizes also are factors. So is the trend toward creating science and technology magnet schools like Jefferson. Such schools have proved to be a popular and successful way of responding to concerns about educational quality, but they also have increased the demand for qualified teachers and created a high-profile hunting ground for private industry.

“Not a day or a week goes by that a job offer isn’t dangling out there in front of one of our teachers,” Jones said.

Of the nation’s roughly 3 million elementary and secondary education teachers, about half a million teach math, science and computer technology--the vast majority concentrated in high schools and, to a lesser extent, middle schools.

Though exact numbers are not available for the current year, studies by the National Center for Educational Statistics indicate that attrition among math and science teachers is substantially higher than among reading and social studies teachers.

To meet the challenge, Jones said, “we pursue a lot of different strategies.” Recruiting from the military is one. So is finding ways to boost salaries in hard-to-fill jobs by offering such teachers opportunities to teach summer school or manage in-service training programs. Some teachers also do outside consulting work.

Making Teaching More Satisfying

Just as important, school officials said, are changes that help with such intangibles as personal growth and job satisfaction.

“I’ve had more job offers in the last year than I’ve applied for in my life,” said Pete Morasca, manager of Jefferson’s 800-terminal computer network and a 25-year classroom veteran with two master’s degrees and teaching certificates in math, physics, chemistry, earth science and computer science.

Now 52, he plans to retire relatively soon and seek employment in private industry. Meantime, the school has labored to hold him as long as possible. It selected him to serve as a consultant to the State Department, which yielded recent trips to India and Katmandu--the kind of travel prized by college professors.

Jefferson also supports Morasca in working with area businesses--consulting projects that reward him now and will help him shift to the private sector later.

Another mechanism that officials find helps them hold good teachers is professional enrichment. “If you want to make teachers excited about what they’re teaching, you have to give them an opportunity to grow,” said Jerry Berry, 51, who teaches at Jefferson but also works with computer science and other teachers at the county’s 22 other high schools. “Teachers love kids, but they need to have new things to offer them or they get stale.”

Training Faculty to Teach Technology

Berry is deeply involved with the county’s program for developing its own technology teachers. It takes young, interested teachers and trains them in such areas as computer science.

Some leave when they get the necessary expertise, but enough stay to make the effort worthwhile.

Competitive pressure also has driven school administrators to become more responsive to teachers’ proposals for new programs and other professional development. Paul Thomas, who studied math and advanced technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, illustrates what can happen if a system seems unresponsive:

“I always knew that I would teach someday,” Thomas said. “I was the kind of kid who, when I was sitting in math class, would be saying to himself: ‘If I were teaching this subject, here’s how I’d do it.’ ”

For six years, Thomas taught math and loved it. “Every time you’re in a classroom and see the light bulb go on in a student’s head,” he said recently, “that’s the high point of your career right there. And there were a lot of high points.”

But he is not a teacher today. And he insists the fact that he is earning $75,000 a year and has had two promotions since January is not the primary reason he turned to private industry.

Rather, Thomas said, what got him was professional frustration. During one summer break, he worked on a National Science Foundation-sponsored project to write a new core curriculum for high school math. Working with brilliant mathematicians, he said, he was free to create what he considered the best possible courses.

But when he returned to the classroom, he grew frustrated because introducing changes in a large school system is almost inevitably a slow process. “The reality in school was not as forward-looking as I wanted,” he said.

Berry and other Fairfax school officials do not expect to win them all. Equally important, they understand that no victory is necessarily permanent--as the case of math and computer science teacher John Myers demonstrates.

Money Can’t Always Replace Stability

Myers was glad to see a former student who dropped by recently after finishing college--until the student described how a classmate had landed his first job, paying $54,000 a year. “It took me over 20 years to get to that level,” said Myers, who is beginning his 25th year as a teacher. “I could probably retire next year at about 50% pay and replace teaching with a job of equal salary.”

Why doesn’t he do it? With a son and daughter nearing college age, the dependability of a teacher’s paycheck looms large. “People in the computer industry are constantly leapfrogging. As soon as you get one job, you start looking for the next one. That makes me feel a little unsettled.”

Still, the battle for Myers is not over. As the stories of teachers who doubled their salaries pile up, he said, “there’s always something in my mind asking would I leave and would the money be enough incentive to leave.”