Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Program Officer, Senior Manager

How to Count to 100,000 STEM Teachers in 10 Years

100kin10 Summit Science Fair Student

Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Program Officer, Senior Manager STEM Teacher Initiatives, is building a coalition of the willing, an army devoted to bringing thousands of educators to the classroom

On January 25, 2011, President Obama set a clear goal in his State of the Union Address regarding STEM education. “Over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms,” he said, “we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.”

One group was already in the process of delivering on the president’s call to action. By June of that year, representatives from 28 organizations—including corporations, foundations, museums, school districts, universities and nonprofits—took to the stage at a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Chicago. There, the group of partners officially kicked off 100Kin10, a movement to meet the ambitious challenge, with an initial pledge of $20 million.

Talia Milgrom-Elcott, a program officer in urban education at Carnegie Corporation of New York, where 100Kin10 is housed, is co-leader of the project, which has since grown to include more than 150 partners, ranging from Sesame Street to NASA, and the Girl Scouts to Google. She believes that the key to training and retaining superb STEM teachers is to have organizations, in a wide range of fields, contribute to the cause in ways that they are uniquely suited to do so. For a company like Intel, that means developing online instruction for teachers. And, for GOOD magazine, it is committing to featuring bi-weekly stories on its website about the efforts of 100Kin10 partners.

Read the full Q&A in smithsonian.com