Health Care Reform: Start With Educating Teachers

The seductive term, these days, is "health care reform." As with all seductions,there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. So let's look at the "reform" process from its beginning.

The first step in health care reform starts in our schools. Not medical schools, but the schools that train our kids' elementary and high school teachers' teachers. Before you conclude that my last sentence contained a "typo" read on. Once upon a time, elementary and high school teachers were trained in teachers' colleges by experts devoted to educating educators. Now, trainees attend community colleges and universities and take a smattering of courses in the liberal arts which give them no depth or real skill in any subject, and when they do get teaching jobs (some times choosing to teach as an afterthought), they bring no real teaching or deep academic subject skills to their classrooms. We need to improve the teaching and academic skill-sets of our elementary and high school teachers by providing intensive professional training by expert instructors in teaching and academic subjects.

Someone who does not love and have a firm understanding of math, algebra, calculus, biology, chemistry and physics cannot communicate a love for, or intellectual excitement about, these and other scientific subjects. Students decipher the real message: "I teach here because it's a way to make a living."

If teachers are not well-trained, skilled and committed, their students won't be either. And America won't turn out the "turned-on" mathematicians, physicists, biologists, chemists, physicians and other scientists it needs. We will churn-out minimally competent health care providers who want 9 to 5 jobs to make a "living."

America needs to pay close attention, not just to the end product of our science education process, but to its entirety. Begin health care reform with educational reform.