Desperately seeking teachers: throw a dart at a map of the United States and you'll likely hit a district that is having trouble finding qualified math and science teachers.

Less than a month before school was due to start this year, Edward Mackniak, assistant superintendent of personnel and administration in Hamden, Conn., still had to find four high school science teachers and a high school math teacher.

His district had explored all the usual means of finding qualified teachers. No luck. Eventually Mackniak turned to an Internet hiring site to try to fill the vacancies.

If none could be found that way, Mackniak would seek special temporary certification from Connecticut's department of education to allow otherwise unqualified applicants to take the jobs. The temporary licenses are called durational shortage permits, and unfortunately they're a way of life when it comes to filling science and math jobs in his state. This is true even though Connecticut pays its teachers well above the national highest average salary ($61,918 versus $48,728).

"The people just aren't there, we can't find the candidates," Mackniak says. "It's a product of the number of vacancies, and I see an upward trend in the sciences."

The chronic shortage produces two kinds of alarming statistics: First, the National Research Council (www.nas.edu/nrc) reports that U.S. students continue to perform among the worst of all industrialized countries when it comes to math and science; 82 percent of all 12th graders are not proficient in science and 72 percent of all eighth graders are not proficient in math. Second, the National Center for Education Statistics (www.nces.ed.gov) found in school year 1999-200, that 26 percent of math students and 16 percent of science students in grades K-12 were being taught by teachers who had neither a major or minor in the subject they were teaching.

Districts bemoaning the shortage now can confidently anticipate that it'll soon get worse. NCES statistics say as many as 2.7 million new teachers will be needed by 2008. And this figure doesn't take into account some of the more revolutionary aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law promises to dramatically improve the quality of education in the U.S., but the responsibility for meeting that goal trickles down to each school district, its superintendent, board of education and teachers. Of come, every political faction and interest group has its own take on how districts can truly ensure that no child is left behind given K-12's economic realities.

Defining the Shortage

The idea that there aren't enough qualified math and science teachers has been an accepted fact for some time. It was reinforced in 2000 with a report from the National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century, chaired by former Senator John Glenn. The report found that two of every three teachers would be retiring in the next decade.

This ever-present shortage doesn't mean kids are cutting back on taking science and math classes though.

"There definitely is a crisis in the supply of high-qualified science teachers," says Gerald Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association (www.nsta.org). "That said, there's no doubt in my mind that there will always be some warm body in front of the kids."

That warm body is often a teacher who's certified, and well qualified, to teach something else. Assigning teachers out of their fields has been the predominant way that many districts have coped with the shortage of math and science teachers.

"In some urban districts it sounds like the percentage of certified math teachers is less than 50 percent, which is really scary," says Robert Reys, professor of mathematics education at the University of Missouri.

The practice of assigning teachers out of field for one or two classes each day, like the larger problem of the chronic shortage, is one that is largely hidden from students and parents.

"If your child is in a classroom with a teacher who isn't qualified to teach math, and they're getting a year or two of math from this person, to me that's a real crisis," Reys says. "Some of the problem is covered up by the fact that it's not always clear that schools are hiring people on temporary certificates."

NCLB Steps In

The practice of filling holes in a master schedule with out-of-field placements will theoretically come to a halt at the beginning of the 2005 school year when the "highly qualified" provisions of NCLB go into effect. Summed up, the law requires that teachers in core academic areas, including math, science, English, history, foreign language and arts, not only have a four-year degree, but are also certified by their state as having demonstrated competence in the subjects they are teaching.

New elementary school teachers will have to take a test to demonstrate competence, but each state may determine its own standards for existing elementary teachers as well as new and existing high school teachers, says Cheri P. Yecke, director of the Teacher Quality Program at the federal Department of Education.

While setting up the nationwide requirement for highly qualified teachers, NCLB leaves much of the definition of the term to the states.

"The long and short of it is that it provides a great deal of flexibility to states and localities" to address quality issues, Yecke says.

What some call flexibility, others call unfounded mandates or passing the buck. However it's viewed though, the NCLB Act will force districts to change some or many aspects of their approach to human resources as they look for creative solutions to the teacher shortage.

"The change has been profound by shifting the decisions all the way down to the local level with very little constraints," Wheeler says. "We're going to see a wide variety of responses."

Just about everyone agrees that the No. 1 reason behind the shortage of math and science teachers is low teaching salaries. The students with an aptitude for math or science who would have become teachers 30 years ago are now becoming computer programmers, scientists or engineers. So why not do what the marketplace does to attract these brains: pay them.

"Affluent districts don't have salary schedules, consequently they're able to engage in that kind of recruitment," says Reys. "They know they have to pay more for a math teacher than a social studies teacher."

And while the practice is generally frowned upon by teaching unions, some superintendents have a little leeway. In Hamden, administrators can determine which step on the salary scale a teacher starts. But after that step is determined, no out-of-schedule increases are allowed.

What's at Issue?

After salary issues, solving the teacher shortage hinges on working conditions, says education researcher Richard Ingersoll, who has testified before Congress on the issue.

"The solution really isn't bringing in new blood. Rather if we can improve some of these school conditions we could dramatically decrease the high turnover rates and do a lot to diminishing these so-called short

Among the improvements he calls for are giving teachers more say in their schedules, along with more administrative support (everything from enough chalk to support on discipline issues). The 40 percent attrition rate in the first five years of teaching could be significantly reduced with solid mentoring for new teachers, particularly in their subject area. Student discipline is another important factor, Ingersoll says.

Others say bringing in new blood is the best solution. Seemingly in contradiction to its requirement that teachers be highly qualified, the U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige has come out in favor of requiring fewer education pedagogy courses of new teachers. The department is instead pushing for mid-career professionals to pursue alternative routes to certification.

"We are very supportive of high-quality alternative routes to certification because we think this will open up the doors, especially in science and math," says Yecke of the DOE. "The face of new teachers in America is changing. It's no longer kids right out of college."

This move is opposed by many education non-profits, saying it will decrease teacher quality.

"In order to be qualified you'd need both the content knowledge and some of the education pedagogy," says Johnny W. Lott, president of the 100,000- member National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (www.nctm.org).

Raising the esteem of teaching math and science could help the cause. The University of Missouri mathematics department recently asked high school teachers to give them the names of any students they think might have an aptitude for teaching. The school sent letters to these 700 or so math-oriented high schoolers, intending to "plant the seed" of becoming a math teacher, Reys says.

Boston-based teacher advocacy group Recruiting New Teachers suggests that high schools set up teaching cadet academies for middle and high school students.

"The idea is to open the pipeline. To begin introducing younger generations to teaching as one possible career choice," says Mildred Hudson, executive director.

RELATED ARTICLE: Reasons behind the shortages.

The commonly recited reasons behind the shortage of math and science teachers, along with other specialty areas like English as a second language and foreign languages, is the ballooning student population, the steady retirement of the experienced teaching population and, of course, low salaries. While these are all true to some extent, education researcher Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania says non-retention is by far the primary cause of the shortage.

"The whole shortage discussion to me is out of whack," Ingersoll says. "The problem isn't shortages created by a lack of able bodies, but too many able bodies are prematurely exiting.... This is an occupation that loses as much as 40 percent of its new members in the first five years."

Ingersoll's survey found that half of teacher turnover takes place when employees leave for a different school, half is teachers who leave the field altogether. The surveys of departing teachers found some surprising trends. When asked to list their top three reasons for leaving the field, 66 percent of math and science teachers cited poor salary; 32 percent listed poor student motivation; and 22 percent says poor administrative support. Student discipline problems were cited by 21 percent of those surveyed. When it came to math and science teachers moving from one school to another the primary reason was poor administrative support, followed by low salary and student discipline problems.

Ingersoll contends that the term shortage actually wrongly identifies the problem many districts are facing, using urban Philadelphia schools as an example.

"The city of Philadelphia is claiming shortages, but schools 25 minutes away have waiting lists of people who want to teach there," he says. "From an economist's point of view, they're sharing the same labor pool. You cannot have a surplus and a shortage at the same time."

RELATED ARTICLE: Other NCLB effects on math & science.

Wrangling the new resources created by the NCLB act into math and science programs will be a major challenge for districts. The act, while increasing overall education funding, eliminates set-asides for math and science. The only part of NCLB specifically directed at math and science education is the Mathematics and Science Partnerships, merit-based monies meant to foster relationships between school districts and university science and math departments. And while the act calls for as much as $450 million per year in funding for the partnerships, early indicators are that as little as $25 million will actually be awarded in 2003. Members of the math and science lobby, the Math/Science Partnership Coalition, have called this funding level "unacceptable."

Some science teachers also see a warning flag in President Bush's proud pronouncements that the NCLB Act provides accountability for measurable education results. This accountability comes in part through the creation of new standardized tests in reading and math that will be given to "every child, every year" in grades three through eight. And while many educators and parents applaud this approach, some fear this test preparation will come at the expense of classes like science.

"We have teachers reporting that principals are coming into the classroom saying, `Stop teaching science, we need to more on the reading,'" says Gerald Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association.

Rebecca Sausner, [e-mail], is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.