For the last several years, there’s been a push to interest more students in what are known as STEM subjects. That’s Science, Technology Engineering and Math. But when it comes to that last one, the numbers don’t quite add up. That’s because fewer people who earn college degrees in math, go on to become math teachers.
Get ready, because there will be math. But just how much is uncertain, because the number of math grads who become high school or middle school math teachers is shrinking. That’s true for all teachers, in Virginia and across the country, but even more so in math.
So, we warned you there’d be numbers. Here’s some more:
In 2015, close to 40,000 graduates earned math degrees in this country and that number has been growing about 5 percent a year. Their average starting pay, in jobs like computer software engineering or data science is around $90,000. But for those who become high school math teachers, it’s about half that. So, you do math.
Fourth year senior Kelsey Mack noticed a change. “There’s less and less people in my major, the math education major," she said.
Mack is planning to become a high school math teacher and in Virginia that requires a five-year degree.
She says that with the small class size “you get great one on one time. But it is strange to have conversations with only 12 people during class period and I wish I had more people to bounce ideas off of.”
Their numbers began dwindling just after the great recession when employment and salaries in certain fields began going up. Andy Norton graduated with a math degree and initially took one of those high paying jobs right out of college. But it wasn’t what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Now, he’s a Math Professor at Virginia Tech training the next generation. He says, beyond the money, there’s another reason fewer people are choosing teaching careers: A perceived lack of respect for the profession.
“We need to be elevating the profession of teaching, like they do in southeast Asian countries,” Norton believes. “Teachers are revered in South Korea, for example and South Koreans, we know, score among the top countries every year on international math and science assessments.”
Norton points to a long-held prejudice in our society when it comes to our high school and middle school teachers. “People say, “Oh they teach six hours a day. They have the summers off. Neither of those things is true because teachers are taking all kinds of work home, they have all kinds of meetings, they have all kinds of professional development expectations.”
Norton isn’t saying math teachers need to earn the same money as software engineers, but he crunched some numbers and found that the economic recovery that began in 2012 lifted a lot of salary boats.
“But in mathematics teaching, the raises were .93, .89, 1.03, 1.96, recently, 2.29, which is pretty good. But, you look across those years, it’s about 1.5 percent raise per year. You look at principals’ salaries, they’ve gone up about 3 percent per year. So, who are we saying are the professionals here? I mean, these are just little signs of disrespect, some of them financial, some of them political, and they just add up.”
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s budget includes a 2% raise for teachers on December first 2019. According to a spokeswoman at Virginia’s Department of Education, house amendments would move the raise up to July of next year. Senate amendments would eliminate it altogether, the outcome, yet to be determined.
But that's not stopping people like Kelsey Mack. “Well for me, in high school I kind of realized that math is the only sure subject. Like you can always do an answer and go aback and check your work.”
She says there’s truth in math, and beauty too. “You see math everywhere in the world. You see it in patterns, and if you look closely at leaves you see the Fibonacci numbers, you know, and there’s beauty in it."
And then there’s being in the classroom, something she’s always known she wanted to do. "Because if you think about it, you’re always talking to people. You’re working through the problems with people and that creates community. You you create relationships in that math class just because you’re talking about math, which is kind of neat.”
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
