Welcome! This is a pretty exciting time at the National Math and Science Initiative. Just 18 months ago, NMSI was 17 people working hard with a program in 8 states. Today NMSI is the combined strength of Laying the Foundation, AP Strategies, AP Teacher Training and Incentive Program, UTeach and the Initiative for Military Families. Each of the programs had an acronym and each the 6 different programs became confusing.
So the website you see today is really who we are. We are one organization focused on transforming education in American. In order to accomplish that transformation we are focused on:
- Transforming schools through our AP Program that results in a 79% increase in college readiness in just the first year. As a part of this program we work with schools that have a large population of students from military families
- Transforming teaching through our teacher training programs in math, science and English in grades 3-12 that ensures more students have access to rigorous content
- Transforming teacher preparation through the UTeach program that recruits math and science majors to complete the STEM study but also earn a teaching certificate with a retention rate of 88% after 5 years for STEM teachers!
We are now operating in 18 states, 462 high schools, 33 universities, have trained over 60,000 teachers and we are working with PARCC to ensure that more teachers are ready for Common Core State Standard implementation.
That's a lot. This blog will keep you current on the good and not so good things we are learning as we focus on improving education. We have an incredible team of experts who will contribute to the blog from the teachers who implement these programs to the former teachers who developed it. Our team is all over this country and what we learn, we will share with you as we bring these incredibly successful programs to all schools.
As our founding CEO Tom Luce often says: "We have got to stop piloting and start moving to scale with programs that truly show dramatic improvement" |