Lessons Learned: The Teacher Academy for Mathematics and Science.

The author describe a program based on the tenet that high-quality teaching is absolutely essential for successful reform. This is a good news story about an intervention into a large urban public school system. The Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science (TAMS) was chartered in 1990 by a consortium of 14 universities and colleges in the Chicago area. The academy had as its mission the inservice training and professional development of K-8 teachers of mathematics and science. The national picture of science education at the precollege level is a dismal one indeed, documented by countless commissions, panels, and national and state assessments. International tests such as the Third International Mathematics and Science Study suggest that our students are inherently as bright as other students around the globe but that our schools are progressively, grade by grade, failing to educate them well in math and science. Nowhere is our failure in this area more glaring than in large urban school systems. Here, the mostly poor, largely minority student population continues to lag academically far behind its more affluent, more advantaged suburban counterpart. This issue of low achievement has severe ramifications. Acute and chronic underemployment and the attendant income problems of a low-skilled population perpetuate an underclass that denies society the productivity of an increasing proportion of our citizens. The crisis of the American city is the entrapment of its young people in cycles of dropping out, unemployment, teenage pregnancy, crime, and despair. That schools can offer a way out of this cycle is well documented and widely recognized. Thus inner-city schools are a critical proving ground of education reform and urban survival. We chose to focus on science and mathematics for several reasons. First, elementary school teachers are victims of a system that places them in front of their classes with virtually no training in these subjects and with low expectations of what their students can do. Also, we are aware of many truncated efforts in the Sixties to bring science and mathematics to children in grades K-4; these experiments showed (and it has since been confirmed) that, taught in the right way, science and mathematics engage children, resonate with their own natural curiosity, and open the door to the joy of all learning. Children exposed to such teaching also develop their communication skills - a key to future learning. A positive introduction to the study of science and mathematics. serves as a foundation for an interest in these topics throughout life. Such experience is the key not only to future employment but also to admission to college and all that this opportunity can bring. The university instigators of TAMS assembled a board of trustees consisting of teachers, principals, scientists, university presidents, leaders of community groups, and representatives of business and industry. A series of early meetings and retreats resulted in a conceptual framework for an intervention. From the very beginning it was clear that any intervention had to be sustainable - a change in classroom culture would require support from non-teaching staff, parents, local school officials, and community groups in addition to all the teachers and the principal. The hands-on, inquiry-based science and mathematics teaching techniques introduced in the Sixties and refined in the Eighties were particularly relevant, especially since the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago, were leading producers of new curricula in math and science respectively. The initial attitude was that we knew what to do. The novelty was in the required scale: some 17,000 primary and middle school teachers in some 490 schools had to be reached. We opted to forgo a pilot stage, to start at a large scale, and to learn how to manage the logistics of such a massive effort as we went along. Support was obtained from the state of Illinois, the U. …