Vernon Ehlers: “it is a pleasure to rise and speak about a bill we will be discussing today, H.R. 438, the Teacher Recruitment and…”

“it is a pleasure to rise and speak about a bill we will be discussing today, H.R. 438, the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Act of 2003. This bill recognizes a major problem we are having in our K-12 educational system, that is, the shortage of qualified teachers in special education, math, and science. This bill addresses that by offering incentives to teachers to enter these fields and also to remain in these fields, primarily incentives through loan forgiveness of their student loans which they take out in order to obtain the proper training. To show my colleagues how serious this situation is, note that in: science, in American junior and high schools, 57 percent of the teachers do not have either a major or a minor in the subject that they are teaching. In high school physics, it is even worse: a significant percentage of teachers have not even taken one course in college physics. Those teachers who are highly qualified in science are tempted to leave teaching because they can double their salary in industry, and so this bill is a good effort to maintain our teaching staff and retain them in the positions where we desperately need them. I urge its passage.”