Giving Compass' Take:

• Talia Milgrom-Elcott explains why 100Kin10 is working to improve school culture for students and teachers to address the STEM teacher shortage. 

• How can funders better understand the way that education issues are interconnected? 

• Learn how to support STEM education.  

Reimagine Learning's Managing Partner, Shruti Sehra (SS), sat down with Talia Milgrom-Elcott (TME), Co-founder and Executive Director of 100Kin10, to connect the dots between the insights 100Kin10 has learned in their work to solve the nation's STEM teacher shortage and the work the Reimagine Learning community is doing to meet the needs of ALL students.

SS: Reimagine Learning is made of up different organizations that came together to focus on serving students that have historically been known to be underserved, particularly students from low-income families who either have learning and attention issues or who have had high exposure to trauma, so much so that its affecting their ability to learn. Could you help us translate what you learned through the process that 100Kin10 took as a part of the 2+ year "Grand Challenge" analysis to identify and map the core issues facing STEM teacher recruitment, preparation, and retention?

TME: The reason 100Kin10 did the Grand Challenge mapping work was to understand the full system in order to understand and find the highest places of leverage where we could take action. In practice, we first needed to hear from all perspectives about how the system was working: what was working and what wasn’t working. When we see any issue from only our perspective, we so often miss what’s really happening, especially with the learning differences (LD) community. The risk is that we miss the most important stuff, the stuff that is hidden from us that is crucial to understanding and solving the issue.

Among more than 100 root causes behind the STEM teacher shortage that we identified, the most important ones had to do with school culture. This is relevant to all these communities—it cuts across every community in education. What’s happening in the schools for adults matters deeply to what happens to kids. This is like business management 101, but it’s truly radical in the school context. Companies are coming up with innovative ways to ensure that their employees are well cared and happy. They know they can’t provide excellence if they don’t have employees who are happy. We somehow got to thinking that we can create great human beings, citizens, leaders, and thinkers even if the employees weren’t happy. This is not true. For a long time in education reform, we thought that teacher happiness and efficacy and student happiness and efficacy were in conflict of each other. They are tightly, tightly connected. It’s not children first, it’s not adults first. It’s how we can create places where children and adults can both be learning and thriving.

Read the full interview with Talia Milgrom-Elcott about recruiting STEM teachers by Shruti Sehra at New Profit.