The Urgent Truth About Science Education Advocacy — And Why We Can't Wait

 Science teacher vacancies are approaching 17% nationwide — and almost nobody is talking about it. In this episode, recorded live on the exhibit floor at the NSTA Anaheim conference, hosts Andrew Kuhn and Patrice Semicek sit down with James Brown, Executive Director of the STEM Education Coalition and NSTA policy advisor, and Juan Carlos Agular, Director of Innovative Programs and Research for the Georgia Department of Education, to dig into one of the most underreported crises in American education. From the ripple effects of COVID wiping out advocacy momentum, to the stark reality that some districts are staffing science classrooms with whoever they can find, this conversation pulls no punches. But it doesn't stop at the problem — James and Juan Carlos lay out what individual teachers, organizations, and communities can do right now to make their voices heard where it counts most: in front of policymakers. 

Transcript

Andrew 0:00

Well, Patrice, this show is extremely interesting and intriguing because it is a very vital and important part to science education and one that we probably don't talk about enough.

SPEAKER_04 0:12

We definitely don't talk about it enough.

Andrew 0:14

So here in the exhibitor hall for the NSDA conference in Anaheim, we are going to get into science education advocacy. We have two honorable guests, James Brown and Juan Carlos Aguilara. Welcome both. Would you mind introducing yourselves to our NSDA voices audience?

SPEAKER_03 0:34

Well, thank you so much. I'm James Brown. I wear a number of hats at the NSTA conference. So I'm proud to be a policy advisor to the National Science Teaching Association. It's great to see all these people here and feel the energy. Also associated with NSTA for more than 20 years because they were one of the founding members of the STEM Education Coalition, of which I serve as executive director.

SPEAKER_04 0:54

I have lots of questions about that.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Well, good afternoon, man. Thank you for having me here. As you said, work with the Georgia Department of Education, the Director of Innovative Programs and Research. As of three months ago, also I direct mathematics education in the state.

SPEAKER_04 1:08

Oh my goodness, congratulations or condolences.

SPEAKER_02 1:10

I'm just holding by the way. So I am the past president of the Council of State Science Supervisors. On that position about 10 years ago, I was also the chair of the alliance of affiliates that works with NSDA. So I have been doing all those kind of activities. Very tiny career.

SPEAKER_04 1:32

You haven't done a whole very tiny career. Yes, exactly. I haven't done much.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Just sorting out.

SPEAKER_04 1:37

Yeah. Wow. Very impressive. I'm just a teacher.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Never say just a teacher. You are a teacher.

unknown 1:45

I am a teacher.

Andrew 1:46

One of the things I'd love to get your perspective on from each of you and hear a little bit more about is there is an undeniable teacher shortage that we're having in this country. And I think there are a whole host of reasons that that come into that. But I'd love to hear a little bit of your insight and even your perspective from where you sit, what are you seeing?

SPEAKER_04 2:04

And maybe the impact.

Andrew 2:05

Sure. Short-term, long-term impact.

SPEAKER_03 2:07

You know, happy to talk about that. You say undeniable, and that's clear, but it's also overlooked.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Yes, very much so.

SPEAKER_03 2:14

You know, just to start with the data point. So the last data I saw said the biggest shortage of teachers in any field is in special eds, around 20%. And a very close second is science teachers, about 16, 17% of teacher openings. To put that in perspective, you know, that's several hundred thousand teacher openings across the United States, potentially. Right. If you talk about there to being three and a half million teachers in the United States, something like 500,000 science teachers, about 20% of those are openings. You know, so you're talking about a large number of openings for science teachers. I think when you start talking about implications, I'll start by saying there's many parts of American life where nobody would ever tolerate those kind of vacancies. I'm from Oklahoma. Football is the religion in Oklahoma. If you had 20% of the football team absent, that would be a riot.

SPEAKER_00 3:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:03

Right. In terms of implications for science teachers, I think one of the things we're feeling is, you know, the United States is in a domestic investment mode right now. Just to look at data centers, for example, I've seen reports with as many as $9 trillion of investment scheduled for data centers over the next several years. That might be a really big number. If it's only 5% of that number, you're talking about $450 billion of investment in data centers alone. Just data centers. That's crazy. Not the electricity to power them or anything else, just the buildings and the CERP, right? If you just think about that, you know, the size of American investment in education all in is about $1.2 trillion, state, federal, local, right? So we're talking about an enormous investment just in one sector. And so many of the companies that are investing in that area are starting to realize very starkly that when they go to schools and they want to seek partnerships, they don't oftentimes have somebody they can talk to about those partnerships. And those are the absent or non-existent science supervisors, the science department heads that have extra time to devote to partnerships outside the building. Because when you're, you know, 16, 17% down in terms of workforce, everybody's doing more than one job. Everybody's overwhelmed, and you don't have any extra time to deal with things like trying to build your community's investments in science and technology and talk about all the workforce issues that the governors and business community leaders and others talk about.

Andrew 4:28

I love your connection to football. And then when you were saying that, I was trying to imagine what part of the team would be missing. That's almost like missing your entire special teams.

SPEAKER_03 4:36

Yeah. Everybody has to play both sides of the ball, right? Yeah. We know how that doesn't work. There's like usually it's a it's a miracle if you have one player that can do that, right? We're expecting everybody in the science staff to play both sides of the ball and special teams and coach.

Andrew 4:48

And and I also really appreciate what you brought in the aspect of you know, all these additional roles that you need to take on, because even in that team situation, when you have to pull back like that, we don't have the funding for assistant coaches. So I'm just the coach who's also the defensive coordinator and I'm covering all of these different positions and roles. So now the focus changes to become more broad instead of being able to really focus in and harness in on the important aspects of education. They're all important. But when you when you have to look more globally, it's hard to focus in locally.

SPEAKER_03 5:18

I mean, it really is, and it makes you know Juan Carlos's job so much harder as a science leader at the state level to really deal with these challenges because you don't have people you can talk to in every school and every district that have the time to deal with these challenges. And these challenges are real.

SPEAKER_04 5:33

So, Juan Carlos, how is it impacting what you're doing? Just like James said.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

Well, lack of teachers is real.

SPEAKER_04 5:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:41

Lack of teachers with experience is more dramatic. The lack of teacher workforce, especially in the science area, has forced a lot of school systems, especially the ones that are isolated, are small, to bring in people from the workforce. Sometimes with the right qualifications to do the job, sometimes you were closely related to something that looks like or smells like science. We really need you here. Actually, I have the experience just over the past six months working with a small system in which they lost their complete group of middle school science teachers. Oh my god. Three of them for two middle schools. And they had to bring in para pros in order to take those jobs. Now, those para pros have gone through some type of training, not specifically to science, but just how to teach. In Georgia, for example, we adopted standards aligned to the framework in 2016. If you go to our schools right now, one of the major needs is to do the professional learning and bring all the new teachers that we have. By now, 62% of our teacher population did not go to that training and do not have the tools to understand what three-dimensional learning is all about. And this is not just Georgia, this is across the nation when we see these kinds of problems. Yes, there is a problem about lack of teachers, but it's also a problem about the need to continuously be training the workforce that we have because they are it's a young workforce.

SPEAKER_04 7:32

It kind of needs to be cyclical. Yeah, cyclical. Yeah, because of the turnover. Wow. I didn't even think about that part. That's that's intense.

SPEAKER_03 7:39

It's not just the openings, right? It's leadership. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_04 7:42

Yeah, and it's labor-intensive, it's costly because you have to constantly sometimes take time away from students to be able to train teachers, and it costs money to train teachers, it's a bigger problem than we realized.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

Yeah, you mentioned about leadership. I mean, in Georgia, we have close to 186 different local education agencies because you have to include the charter schools that are their own uh entity. But we have 52 science coordinators across the state. So I mean 52 of those 180-something districts have a person at the central office that is actually associated with science. It doesn't mean that it's the only thing that they do, but they are associated with that. So it's not even a third. Wow.

SPEAKER_04 8:29

No, I'm just in joke.

unknown 8:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:31

Well, it's an even more stark issue in California because California does not have a science supervisor at the state level. They don't have those positions at the district level. And it's an issue that you know the California Association of Science Educators are working on and looking for partners on and starting to make the case in terms of advocating for that. I mean, this is something you see across the country. Georgia has done a really good job being an example of science leadership at the district level, but not every state is in that position.

Andrew 8:58

Yeah. And when you had mentioned, Juan Carlos, about certification, having certified educators, it made me think that if I were to go to a dentist and they said, Well, we don't have any dentists here right now, but we have a plumber who knows how to, you know, do certain work. I'm like, I'll come back. He can drill. Yeah, he can drill. We know, you know, we we'll find it the problem. And again, the the perspective that I feel like both of you bring is this idea of in other fields, this would be completely unacceptable. That dentist office would be shut down if they didn't have the person who was certified to be in there to do that work. And yet we have a different charge in education that we can't just shut down. We have to find a way to continue to offer education to all of these students. So I'm going to use that as my transition to say, what does science education advocacy look like right now? What are the needs? I know we started with future shortages, but where where else do we have needs? Where else do we go?

SPEAKER_03 9:53

You know, one of the biggest challenges we have is I think a lot of people roll their eyes when we invoke COVID as a game changer for a lot of things. But one of the things the pandemic did was swipe away a whole bunch of the in-person events that happened in the education space. And one of those things that used to happen, it used to be a regular occurrence in almost every state where the state science teacher organization would have a Capitol Hill event or something where they had teachers engaged in advocacy. NSTA used to have a summer congress that used to be in DC on a regular basis that would bring a cadre of teachers in. And one of the casualties, and I know we're six years out from this, but it's still we're still reeling with the impacts of this, is the fact that so many in-person events went away, and the budgets for those events and the focus on those events went away. And I think that's one of the things that's characterizing the landscape now is five or six years into that trend, there's a lot of teachers who've never done that before.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:47

And so it's you lose the habit, you lose the muscles, you lose the priority in your school to do that kind of travel or you know, to spend time out of your day doing it. It's not just teachers that are dealing with this, but you know, the in-person events are definitely a casualty of those times. We we just have this challenge where advocacy took a second seat for a while, and we're all feeling the downside of that because there are not those people who are who are making this drum beat of, hey, wait a minute, science teacher shortages have been an issue for a while. Yeah. Those voices have not been heard by policymakers in, you know, in a significant amount of time. Five, six years is a long time.

SPEAKER_04 11:24

I have an uncle. This is so crazy. Both of my uncles actually are engineers by trade. And they both started out, they went to school and they were science teachers for a hot minute. They're not teacher material, but they went to school and they were like, Well, I can't get a job in the engineering field. And this was back in like the 70s. Right. So they like took the test and they were able to be the science teacher. This is gonna sound crazy. But do you think we're kind of going back to that? Like, to your point you said earlier, Juan Carlos, like there are people that are science adjacent or were in the field and maybe could potentially come in and be teachers if they're in the field and they decide they're ready to give back to the community, or do you think there's a different way to go about it?

SPEAKER_02 12:05

No, I think we are in a moment in time in which looking for alternative ways of certification is the way to go. Because there is a lot of people out there that may have started in a physician's career, and a medicine career, an engineering career. The jobs in those areas are also very competitive. Yeah. And they have the calling of going back into the teaching profession to work with kids. And that that's that's a calling. Yeah, not everybody has it, and not everybody has the ability to relate to that. Talking about something that was mentioned before, what we have lost a lot of was that ability of the know-how. Yeah, the know-how to build partnerships in order to solve this type of problem, so advocacy. The state agencies do not do advocacy. I mean, that's not our role. We are designed to implement whatever policy the legislature puts in place. But through partnerships, I mean, you can talk to people in Washington, in Kansas, New Jersey, for example, that when they went to the process of adopting the new standards, the way that they were successful in doing it is by constructing or building strong partnerships with different groups and organizations, with the community. And that's something that the know how to do that is lost a little bit with the new generation of leaders that we have in place. And I think those of us that are still in the business of doing these kind of things, I think that's what I feel is our major task for the next years.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

To help you.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

To just help them understand how to build those partnerships, how to build the ability, those groups to advocate for funding in science education.

SPEAKER_04 13:42

Because I feel like businesses, especially in like the science y realm, actually are coming to realize this is an issue because they're bringing in some people that may or may not necessarily have the qualifications or the skills that they would want. So I'm wondering, in terms of advocacy, and I'm completely ignorant in this area, so I apologize. Does it help or benefit you in any way if there are businesses advocating for you on the back end? Or is that kind of how it works? Is it kind of like a I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine? How does that work?

SPEAKER_03 14:10

Well, one thing I'd say is for those of you like Juan Carlos who are running schools, who are dealing with challenge on a day-to-day basis, there's clearly this hierarchy that says any educator is better than no educator or something like that, right? That's so a scientist is better than not having somebody in the classroom, right? But I think we all want for our children like the best they can get. Yeah, right. Of course. Good enough supervision, you know, getting by is not, you know, that that's what we're doing because we have real needs.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:39

But if you take a step back and you ask, you know, if I were an alien landing on the earth from some other planet, and I ask, well, who's teaching your kids? Yeah, you know, it's gonna seem silly if you say, Well, whoever we can get. The bus driver. Yeah. So I think, you know, and I'll go back to the sports analogy, like in high performance businesses, there is no tolerance for half effort.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:00

Right. You know, we've lost the notion that a teacher is is somebody who's really, really valuable in society. And we talk about, you know, a lot of half measures in that space, but I don't want people to think of teaching as something they do because they're just because their heart's in it, right? I want them to think this is a great job. I don't have to apologize for being a teacher. I don't have to explain in the cocktail party, oh, yeah, I really want to do it. So that's why it took a pay cut. Like teachers should be valued, and we've gotten away from that. If you looked historically at how we looked at teaching, it wasn't something that people did because they couldn't do something else. Now it's an accepted cliche to say, well, oh gosh, sorry, I you're a teacher, oh gosh, you're a teacher. Like, I don't want our science teachers to feel that way. I want our science teachers to feel like, hey, I'm not, I'm not making a secondary choice because I'm a chemist to be in the classroom. This is what I wanted to do from the beginning. And I'll never forget a stark example. I got invited to give a talk at MIT years ago, and it was such a, I'm an engineer myself. It was such an honor to be invited on that campus. But the dean of engineering made a joke at the very first presentation on campus and said, look, we we doubled our teacher education pipeline this year from one to two. And I don't want, I don't want that to be a joke. I want people to be thinking, hey, I'm I've got great technological skills contributing to education is a mission in itself and not something I'm doing as a charity case for the education system. And that means we need to pay teachers six figures like we pay other things. Means we need to pay a science teacher what a science teacher would make teaching or working in chemistry or some other area, right? We have to make those distinctions. The system we have now doesn't allow for hiring high-level expertise to be in the classroom in certain disciplines. NSTA is taking a strong position on that, saying we as a society should value science teachers and what their skills would command in the private sector. I can't believe that's a controversial statement, but it is.

Andrew 16:54

What you're making me think of is the difference between a job and a vocation. And really, education should be a vocation for our teachers. That they they you know they're willing to be in here for all that includes. So the the highest of highs and then the biggest of sacrifices, but they don't see it as a sacrifice, they see it as part of the cause for education, as compared to it's a sacrifice when it's a job, right? You're like, oh, being asked to go to another dance or to do something else, and you see it very differently as a vocation.

SPEAKER_04 17:23

Well, and it's hard to because of I think maybe shortages or things like that, we're asking for everyone to do more and more and more and more and more in the area of education, period. We're no longer able to just teach. I mean, we were always kind of there as coaches and mentors and things like that, but there's a lot we're asking of teachers right now, and I think that's probably leading to some of it as well. And we're not really able to, as you guys said, there's no funding, there's no this, we're not really able to help our teachers' mental well-being either with all of the load that is being put on top of them.

SPEAKER_03 17:54

You know, I do think we're though we're at the leading edge of an inflection point because a lot of teachers now who are at the end of their service or retiring will remember an era, you know, in the in the midst of the space race, yeah, where in the 60s and 70s, a lot of the retiring teachers now were funded to get into teaching by something called the National Defense Education Act, which was the first federal law. It actually predates the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, like, you know, the 1965 law that created the, you know, the federal footprint in education. In the 50s, 1954, when we were worried about losing our edge in the space race, we absolutely invested in teachers to make sure we could attract the best and the brightest into teaching. These conversations go in cycles, right? We sort of lose sight of the priorities and we come back to the reality that we want good people doing things, we have to recognize them and we have to pay them and we have to provide all the professional supports we do to other people of excellence who go into fields. I think we're at the leading edge of companies realizing I can't just hire away the talent from another company because my competitors are hiring away that talent from me. I have to grow the pool, and to do that, I have to invest in the fundamentals of what generates talent in this country. In the same way that if we wanted to win Olympic gold medals in basketball, we would get every kid a basketball and let them dribble at a really young age. Like we got to get back to dribbling in science education so that everybody is, you know, dealing with that and getting that exposure, not just the math kids or the science kids. Everybody needs that exposure.

SPEAKER_02 19:24

I agree with you, Arnold. I am optimistic because I see these changes that are right now being implemented in literacy education, especially K3, in which a lot of money is being put in the important thing, training for teachers to do their job.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

And I see that like the leading thing, okay, we are changing the way in which we are thinking about the profession. We can not just put them in there and say, good luck.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:49

We need to support them in a continuous basis, year after year. And I think that's what these legislations across the state that are supporting literacy, early literacy, kind of growing in mathematics at this point, are doing. Yeah. So my hope is that they will realize that success happens when you do that, and then you start looking into science education and all the other fields, and that that is the way to create successful outcomes for the children that we have.

Andrew 20:18

Since we're in California, I'm going to use a California native analogy. And I think we could agree that COVID would have been like an earthquake. And it sounds like there are a lot of afterquakes that are still prevalent and happening that we tried as a society to get back to normal as quickly as possible, but there was still a lot of like collateral damage that took place that we're still feeling after this. So I'd imagine that all of our listeners are listening to this and they're like, Yep, I'm on board. I believe everything. I'm I'm 100% in. What can we do to help slingshot this? Like, is there is there something that we as individuals can do to help advocate for science education funding? Or are there ways that we can get back to that? Because as you said, this was happening, COVID happened, and it kind of this gathering stopped. Are there things that we can advocate for as individuals or look at and that could help impact that?

SPEAKER_03 21:10

So I lived in DC in 2013, I think it was, when we had our first earthquake in like a hundred years. Could see the windows shaking, and you're like, what is this? Right. I feel like people in California would recognize it faster. But every time I come out here, I find myself wondering like, how will I know if there's an earthquake thing? Oh, you will know. But to your point, though, the technology, the means of for dealing in advocacy have changed a lot in the last six or seven years. One of the things NSTA has done that's very forward is if you look around the show, you might see a QR code for something called voter voice. It's a tool that NSTA has now put out on their website. There's a legislative action center on the NSTA website that allows anybody who's an NSTA member, any member of the public, actually, in about three clicks, they can send a message to their members of Congress, allows them to tailor what they're going to say. There's an Blurred up there right now talking about prioritizing science in the budgets that Congress is starting to consider for the next year. That's up there. We've already gotten several thousand responses to that just during the show. Great. Because people at this conference do show up. They do advocate for this. That's one tool that we can do. But the other thing NSTA is in the early stages of doing is getting more teachers in front, face to face with their representatives in government. That you can send letters, you can do things, that is essential. But what's critical is getting people face to face, having conversations about science education and getting in people's faces about the need to make it a priority.

SPEAKER_04 22:38

Yeah, it's easy to ignore an email. It's not easy to ignore someone stopping in your office. That's a very good point.

SPEAKER_02 22:44

One thing that I think is important for us to work on is in communication.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

I think people in the education community speak one language. People in the business community speak a different language. Yes. And also we are talking the same thing. We are not communicating. There is a realization that yes, we need a better and trained workforce.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

And I think that's critical. And if we are going to move forward with funding and education, that connection needs to be made by both areas. There is a bridge in there, but I don't think that we are crossing the bridge. We are on one side screaming to the other side and saying the same thing, but we don't hear each other. I think we need to improve that way of communication. We have to learn how to interpret what business community is saying to improve the instruction that we are giving these students. What is what we have to focus on as the fundamental skills, not just personal skills, but also the content skills that are necessary in order to do the job that we want. I mean, we want to go to Mars, we need to develop that new workforce that really will understand all the things that need to happen in order to get us there. That is what you were saying about the spuknate and the 50s and 60s movement.

SPEAKER_03 23:59

I'm glad you you talked about space exploration because I'll tell a story about something I had a chance to do with NSTA many years ago that still made a great impression for me. So I've been working with NSTA for 21 years now. And around 2009, I had a chance to do something that I still talk about to this day, which was John Glenn was a big advocate for science education. He was a United States Senator from Ohio for a while, you know, the first person to orbit the Earth. One of the greatest experiences I ever had was NSTA had a reception on Capitol Hill in 2008 or 2009. And my job for the evening was to introduce people to John Glenn.

SPEAKER_04 24:36

What a fun job.

SPEAKER_03 24:37

And he's about six foot four. So you're looking up at John Glenn, literally. But what a great job that was to introduce, you know, people from Capitol Hill. There were senators who walked in this room who just turned into goo in front of John Glenn, right? Because people still associate astronauts with like that's the image that gets people excited. And you know, I have a 16-year-old daughter, and and we were on spring break when the Artemis launch happened.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:02

And we were following it in the sky. She is somebody who is definitely interested in math and science, but I didn't have, if you know teens, I didn't have to say anything. She found this herself. She found an app where you can track the, you know, in the sky and see where it was. It's fantastic. But, you know, those images are still what inspires people. And kids do get the signals, right? If we don't invest in science and technology, we don't launch astronauts into other planets, right? They get that. You have the same thing with the human genome. You have the same thing with artificial intelligence now. Like they can see where the dollars are going. And, you know, one of the roles that science education plays that we have to be nimble is making sure people understand John Glenn had a great science teacher.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:43

Those people don't become who they are without having, you know, having gone the way of finding people who inspired them to study a lot harder in math and science because you don't become an astronaut just because you're good at being a pilot. You have to be a great technologist, an engineer, somebody else, and then you learn how to fly a plane.

SPEAKER_04 26:01

It was interesting because last year we interviewed Ricky Arnold, and he is a former astronaut who was also for that science teacher. And I remember him saying it is so much harder to be a science teacher than it was to like get into the astronaut side of things. Like it was hard, but it was much bigger job than I think people realize. But he said it was much more rewarding because he was able to impact the lives of kids.

Andrew 26:26

And thanks to a science educator who fostered that in that individual, they were able to become something different than even maybe they had imagined. There are lots of ways to get involved and really promote our vocation for the better of education, but also support our students. So thank you. And for all of our listeners, be on the lookout for James and Juan Carlos. They are around and they are mighty. And I've seen them a lot already, just in this one day out on the floor. So make sure you you look for them and connect with them and certainly introduce yourself and ask them less of questions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:58

This was fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, Kiff.

SPEAKER_03 27:01

Thank you.