Effective state and federal long-term planning is challenging, particularly for the policy framework and partnerships responsible for supporting the high technology industry and employment that make up such an important part of California's economy.

At the request of the Governor's Secretary for Education, CCST is completing a report analyzing the production and retention of K-12 science and math teachers, scheduled for publication later in 2006.

Accurately describing the true supply and demand of science and math teachers in California is a challenging task. To help understand the scope of the problem and provide background for California policymakers, the California Council on Science and Technology, in collaboration with the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning (the Center), set out to conduct a "critical path analysis" of science and math teacher production in California.

A critical path analysis (CPA) is a tool often used in industry to plan complicated projects and analyze complex business processes. It shows diagrammatically the interrelations in sequence of all the activities in a project in such a way as to highlight those that are critical for the performance of the overall work. For this report, CCST used some of the techniques of a formal CPA to perform a comprehensive examination of each component of the preparation system for science and math teachers in California.

The scale of the gap between production and demand is significant. California hires over 4,000 science and math teachers per year; its teacher preparation programs graduate no more than half this amount. While the state has turned to developing new pathways for producing teachers (primarily university internships, in which prospective teachers begin teaching while earning their credentials), there are questions as to the quality and consistency of these programs, and over a third of incoming science and math teachers are using either emergency credentials or waivers. Just over half of incoming science and math teachers hold a preliminary or clear credential, compared to 75% of the overall new teacher hires.

This project is a confluence of many years of independent research efforts by CCST and the Center. CCST has been considering science and technology education as a means of understanding S&T workforce production and, by extension, the health of California's vital S&T economic sector. In its 2002 Critical Path Analysis of California's Science and Technology Education System, CCST examined the entire education system as a single process, from kindergarten through postsecondary. That report analyzed science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degree production in detail in order to determine which points in the education system were impeding success. The Center, in turn, has been documenting the status of the teaching profession in California through a series of annual reports beginning in 1999.