"I think they're understanding that if we put good people in the classroom, we're going to end up with better students at the university," Spence said.
Given that shift, she has noticed a slow but steady increase in interest from top-notch math and science students.
Spence also believes that many STEM teachers will have to come from other fields or teaching disciplines. She recently supervised a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation that helped turn 60 career changers into STEM teachers for Baltimore County.
Chris Buckler was an indifferent student who joined the Marines out of Patuxent High School in Calvert County. He left the military after five years and found his way into a college physics class with a charismatic professor. "All of a sudden, that obscure math and science from high school started making sense," he said.
He became an engineering major at UMBC and when Spence suggested teaching as a career, another light bulb flashed in Buckler's mind. There had to be lots of kids like him. Maybe he could do for them what that physics professor did for him.
"People just get so freaked when you talk about math, like you've handed them a fistful of spiders," he said. "Maybe it's because they hear a lot about theory and not about how to apply it."
Buckler, 28, will attempt to change that as an engineering teacher at Chesapeake High School in Essex this fall.
"We need to make sure there are easy pathways for people like that," Spence said. "A lot of these people will have to come from outside of the traditional pipeline."
Wiseman agrees. Her school offers a paid internship that allows career-changers to become science and math teachers in the course of a summer. Another program targets laboratory workers from around Washington who might be willing to shift their expertise from research to high school classrooms.
As at UMBC, College Park administrators are recruiting potential math and science teachers much earlier in college. "We used to stand back and wait for them to come to us," Wiseman said. "But we're being much more aggressive."
College Park's School of Education produced 32 STEM teachers last year, but Wiseman projects an increase to 40 next year and hopes the annual total will reach 65 or 70 in a few years.
Towson University, the state's leading producer of teachers, is also focused on STEM. Last week, the university announced a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that will allow it to offer scholarships to potential STEM teachers.
