Answering Obama's call to action with STEM 100Kin10

10/07/2011 01:08:00 PM

Last January, U.S. President Obama challenged the nation to train 100,000 high-quality science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers in 10 years. Google in Educationdecided to answer his call to action and became one of the founding members of a community of action called 100Kin10.

We shared our plan with U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and his staff in April, who gave us their full support. With this backing, we were able to announce 100Kin10 in June at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) America meeting in Chicago. CGI also identified STEM education as one of its focus areas for its new branch of U.S. Initiatives.

This past week, 100Kin10 officially kicked off with 80 partner organizations, all contributing to a threefold mission: to reverse the United States’ decades-long decline in STEM subjects, to ensure that all children have the basic STEM literacy to be full participants in our economy and democracy and to enable U.S. students to address the most pressing national and global challenges.

Google has made commitments to increase the supply of high quality teachers and retain excellent STEM teachers. Specifically:

• Working with The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT to create a high-profile recognition program for the top 5% of STEM teachers nationwide and are well on our way to this.
• Inviting districts nationwide to join us at Google for talent academies that will facilitate and fund HR pilot strategies for education.
• Working with university faculty training future teachers throughout California to integrate educational technology across curriculum and scale the practice by funding research on the topic. To that end, we established the Google Faculty Institute this August and have already funded nine pilots across the state.

We believe every student should have access to high quality teaching and educational opportunity. We also recognize that as a collective, we can better measure our progress and take significant strides toward fulfilling the commitments the Department of Education has made around STEM teaching.

We welcome big challenges and look forward to helping achieve great success with 100kin10 in the months and years to come. For more information on Google’s efforts in education, please visit our education website.