In May 1990, Old Town High School chemistry teacher George Powers described to Education Commissioner Eve Bither an imminent shortage of science teachers in Maine, based on conclusions from a recent meeting of the Maine Science Teachers Association.

Mr. Powers said the reasons for the shortage included a lack of early-science education, a failure to make science education and educators a priority and an absence of coordination among science teachers. He suggested that elementary and secondary schools needed to work more closely with the University of Maine System. Commissioner Bither said she was well aware of the problem and would be talking the next day with university officials to further address the problem.

The University of Maine board of visitors this week formally approved a task force report, “K-12 Teacher Preparation at the University of Maine,” which recommends, among other things, improving partnerships with public schools, expanding the availability of subject-area masters programs statewide and appointing teacher-preparation liaisons within academic departments. It also wants to identify and reduce the reasons that discourage students from becoming teachers and find alternate paths into the teaching field. All excellent ideas, and they beat the typical state turnaround time between identifying a problem and trying to solve it by a decade or so.

The task force sums up the problem neatly: “[I]n Maine there is currently a severe shortage of teachers in several critical disciplines, teacher recruitment is low, teacher retention is low, teacher retirement is premature…” There is also the question of whether new teachers are prepared to teach

the subjects to which that have been assigned and the conclusion by task force chairman, Patricia Riley, that “Maine’s teachers are not sufficiently equipped for new challenges and students are not meeting the expectations of the Learning Results.”

Actually, UMaine has been working on this problem for several years within departments, but this report is important because it addresses changes across all departments. Or it will if the recommendations in the report are put into practice, which includes finding some money and, more difficult even in these cash-straitened times, changing teaching habits campus-wide.

If these problems are to be solved, a large part of the solution must emerge from the University of Maine, which is easily the major producer of this state’s teachers. The task force wisely wants to give its solution visibility and authority, so has proposed and had accepted a university office above the college level that is also able to work directly with

K-12 systems to strongly encourage the broadest participation possible. President Peter Hoff says university departments will recruit some of their students for teaching careers, with introductory courses revised to help the process of preparing teachers and advanced courses including new teacher-preparation components.

The task-force report, most of all, demands a cultural change at the university so that a teaching career becomes more highly valued, measured both by what potential teachers know and are able to do and by the levels of respect and interest each university department provides it. This is an necessary and, some would say, overdue improvement.