Sustaining a Strong STEM Teacher Pipeline in New Jersey

As the New Jersey State Legislature considers its FY2017 budget, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation urges the body to consider sustaining the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship which identifies, recruits, prepares, and supports high-quality STEM educators in New Jersey’s high-need schools.

Effective teacher preparation is a critical challenge, for both the state and our nation. High-quality teacher preparation not only affects student learning outcomes, but it also has direct impact on our economy, our community, and our citizenry as a whole.

The Woodrow Wilson Foundation has spent the last 70 years identifying and developing the nation’s best minds to meet its most critical challenges. This work began in 1945, as the Foundation helped recruit and prepare college professors to meet post-war higher education needs. Today, the nation’s greatest need for education leaders is at the secondary level, and particularly in the urban and rural schools that serve so many of America’s low-income young people.

Increasing STEM achievement across the country and across the state is critical in order to improve competitiveness and to lift families out of poverty. The Governor’s Task Force on Higher Education found that New Jersey will have to fill 269,000 STEM-related jobs by 2018. New Jersey cannot fill these vacancies unless it takes seriously the responsibility of improving STEM achievement. To help address this need, the Woodrow Wilson New Jersey Teaching Fellowship was launched in 2012.

New Jersey is home to 24 traditional teacher education programs, housed in the state’s colleges and universities. In recent years, across all of those programs, the state has produced as few as 9 physics teachers and 16 chemistry teachers annually. These numbers are hardly enough to fill all of the STEM hiring needs in the state’s 600+ school districts. The problems of filling these teaching positions are even greater in high-need districts.

With programs currently in five states, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation partners with colleges and universities to create a more effective teacher education program focused on a yearlong classroom experience, rigorous academic work, and ongoing mentoring.

In Woodrow Wilson’s past seven years of work, we have been helping states like New Jersey strengthen the pipeline to provide excellent teachers for high-need schools.

In New Jersey, we have raised $13.4 million from over two dozen private individuals, corporations, and foundations. This funding has enabled us to create world-class, clinically based master’s programs at TCNJ, Montclair State, Rowan, Rutgers-Camden, and William Paterson. To encourage outstanding STEM students and professionals to consider teaching and enroll in these programs, we offer a $30,000 Fellowship plus tuition assistance during the year of their academic work. From 2014 to April of this year, we will have awarded 180 Fellowships to high-achieving STEM students to become science, technology, engineering and math teachers in the New Jersey schools and districts that need them most.

These numbers are enough to fill the STEM vacancies in the state’s highest-need school districts. Among the people who received these Fellowships are a Ph.D. cancer researcher who has taught at Princeton University, and a geologist and veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, now teaching in Orange. The Fellowship draws on in-state talent: 82 percent of our Fellows are New Jersey residents.

Each Fellow is committed to teaching for at least three years in New Jersey’s urban and rural schools ̶ in cities and towns such as Bridgeton, Camden, Newark, New Brunswick, Orange, Passaic, Paterson, Trenton, and dozens more. We know from other states where we have been doing this work longer, that roughly 80 percent of Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows remain in teaching after finishing their three-year commitment, far surpassing national trends that show rates of teacher attrition as high as 40–60 percent in the first three years on the job.

A coalition of support for the Woodrow Wilson New Jersey Teaching Fellowship program has also been developed, which (as in other states) includes the Governor, key legislators on both sides of the aisle, the Commissioner of Education, the Secretary of Higher Education, school districts, universities, the NJEA, the business community, and philanthropy.

Today, we ask the Assembly Budget Committee to consider formally sustaining the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship program with an appropriation of $2.9 million. This would allow us to recruit and prepare 60 more Fellows to teach in the state’s high-need urban and rural school districts. It would also allow our institutions to provide these new teachers with three years of mentoring, which will help keep them in the classroom.

In Indiana, the legislature chose to appropriate funding to sustain the Teaching Fellowship there. By doing the same in New Jersey, our legislature can preserve the momentum and support for this initiative that has been created statewide.

The Woodrow Wilson Foundation looks forward to continuing to work with New Jersey, its universities, and school districts to ensure the preparation of high-quality teachers for all of our schools.

(The above testimony was provided to the New Jersey Assembly Budget Committee on March 21, 2016 by Stephanie Hull, executive vice president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Brian Hayes, director of the Woodrow Wilson New Jersey Teaching Fellowship program.)