that’s not the point. the point is that it rids these schools of the burden of mandatory, unionized equal pay for english teachers as math teachers, decried by Phil. $18K (now mostly $25K, BTW) is chump change to google employees yes, but goes a LONG way towards legitimizing the value of these math teachers in the high school millieu. also of course THE BEST math students will go into research but the second tier students won’t/can’t/shouldn’t especially when they have a _desire_ to teach.

http://www.mathforamerica.org/index.php

It currently exists in the NYC area and San Diego… Easily the best program yet devised to meet the astounding shortage of non-gym teacher math teachers.

students should be reevaluated and reshuffled every 4-8 weeks

That sounds like a fascinating idea, and worthy of experiment at one of these charter schools that districts keep sending up the flagpole rather than try to run the schools they already have. It can’t waste any more time than other education fads, nor more than the traditional approach.

And come to think of it.. a public school quarter is nine weeks. If you have a week in there for evaluation and bureaucratic overhead, that works out to eight weeks between shuffles. Food for thought, at least.

(That’s a nit, of course. I think the main reason for not wanting to teach in public schools was articulated by one of my flight instructors, who had been an excellent English teacher. His reason for quitting was that he found that keeping students together for one-year blocks resulted in some students falling hopelessly behind and learning nothing. He thought that students should be reevaluated and reshuffled every 4-8 weeks, as they are at many adult language schools, so that a student was always in a class appropriate to his or her level. This mirrors my experience in tutoring at the local high school. I am amazed at how little math some students know and it is painfully obvious that they are getting nothing out of their hour every day sitting in a lecture that is way over their heads.)

I know your stance on people going into academics, but compare even that to public school teaching.

The path to tenure (for those districts that offer it) is shorter at a university. Job security is something nobody my age (late ’20s) expects outside of academics.
The pay is usually comparable in a given region. Sure I’m making less next year than a teacher in Greenwich, CT, but I’m only paying to live in Bowling Green, KY
The hours are far shorter. It’s extremely heavy for me to teach four courses in a given semester, which translates to 20 hours a week of having to be in one particular place at one particular time. Beyond that I can do most of my research in my own head, on my own terms, where and when I choose.

So why would I take my ivy league Ph.D. down the road to teach a bunch of kids who don’t even want to be there, and who I can’t tell to just leave (and squander daddy’s money).

Now, add to this the fact that you can get your foot in the door at an engineering firm with just a bachelor’s in math, work on a decent master’s on the company’s dime, and get paid far more without all the extra headache of getting a doctorate… Why would anyone majoring in mathematics go to public school?

Oh, unless you’re talking about the people who major in a math-ed program, which is usually run through the department of education instead of mathematics, and which usually doesn’t require nearly the same level of work as a straight math major.