Corporate Funding of Physical Science Teacher Preparation Programs
John Stewart
The total National Science Foundation budget for Education and Human Services in 2007 was 797 million dollars. This money was spread among a wide variety of important programs to improve science education. For example, 9.77 million dollars was requested for the Robert Noyce scholarship program for future science teachers. Since most of the funding for physics research comes from the United States government, it is natural for scientists seeking to improve teacher preparation to look to federal programs to fund teacher preparation programs. In this section of the newsletter, we examine three programs that use another source of funding. In 2006, U.S. corporations donated money and services that totaled 13.77 billion dollars to various charities. Teacher recruitment and preparation are an important public issue. Corporations that direct some of their charitable giving toward teacher preparation not only do good work, but are also rewarded with positive media coverage.
Our first article discusses the role of private funding in the founding and growth of the very successful UTeach program at the University of Texas . More information on UTeach can be found in the Fall 2005 edition of this newsletter and in a recent article in Science (Science 316(5829): 1270-1277, 1 June, 2007). The second article is written from the corporate viewpoint and discusses IBM's extensive Transition to Teaching Program. The final article discusses the experiences of the Physics Department at Seattle Pacific University in working with the Boeing Corporation.
John Stewart is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Arkansas . He has a long association with Arkansas ' PhysTEC project and is currently editor of the ComPADRE PTEC collection.
|