by Judy Frank
posted October 16, 2009
One thing he won't do if Tennessee voters choose him to be their next governor, Sen. Roy Herron said Friday in Chattanooga, is waste a lot of their money.
"You're looking at the tightest man you ever saw," the Democratic gubernatorial candidate told members of SETPAC. ''I drive a truck with 360,000 miles on it . . . As my wife can tell you, I'm not much on spending money you don't have to spend."
But he does believe in wise investing, he said, where the money you spend is repaid many times over.
That's why he'd like to see Tennessee invest wisely in public education and spend available dollars in ways designed to get the most bang for the buck.
If politicians and school officials here don't stop trying to economize by using outdated mid-20th Century approaches to educating children, Sen. Herron warned, there's no way those young people can acquire the strong math and science skills they will need to succeed in the highly competitive 21st Century economy.
Back when his sons were in seventh grade they wanted laptops, he said, and he and his wife promised the boys they'd get the computers - just as soon as they learned to type at least 25 words per minute.
Both sons mastered the skill and were soon proud computer owners, he said, and yet neither one ever took his laptop to school with him.
There was no point. The school wasn't set up to require or even encourage students to become computer-savvy.
In some way the school excelled, he recalled. For example, one of his sons used to come home bragging about what a great math teacher he had.
Any math teacher worth bragging on is worth seeing, Sen. Herron said, so he went to the school and sat in one of her classes. Sure enough, the young woman teaching the class was doing an excellent job making sure her students learned math and enjoyed the process.
But even in that classroom, he said, he noticed things that could have been improved.
For example, he recalled, the desks were all slanted; even if computers had been available for students, there wouldn't have been any flat surfaces on which to place them. And the teacher was using an overhead projector virtually identical to the ones his teachers used when he was in school many years ago, Sen. Herron said.
You can't learn to use a computer if there isn't one available, he said, and that kind of shortage in Tennessee schools is going to come back to haunt the state.
That's why, if he's elected governor, one of his goals will be to find a way to provide every student in the state with a laptop computer by the time he or she is in high school, he promised.
Another thing he’d like to change, he said, is the dearth of quality math and science teachers available to work in Tennessee schools.
A large part of the problem, he explained, is that not many Volunteer State students are choosing math- or science-related career goals. At Tennessee Tech, for example, only 20 percent of the graduate students in engineering are U.S. citizens; a whopping 80 percent came here from other nations.
“We’re lagging behind,” he said flatly.
One way to try to change that, he said, is to find ways to encourage students to choose math and science majors and some state and local governments already are doing so.
In New York City, for example, free housing is offered to qualified applicants who sign up to teach math in public schools.
In other locales, qualified math and science teachers – who are far more difficult to recruit and retain that English or social studies teachers – receive higher salaries that teachers in other disciplines.
That way when somebody from private industry comes along and tries to lure then away, the math and science teachers are far less tempted to leave their classrooms, he said.
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