In the hope of enticing more middle- and high-school students into science, local companies are giving schoolteachers a taste of research.

Constanza Villalba

Patrick Rafter started work last week in the cancer chemistry division of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in Waltham, MA. He’ll be characterizing, synthesizing, and purifying small molecules that have potential as cancer drugs. That’s standard work for a researcher, but Rafter doesn’t do research for a living. He’s a biotechnology teacher at Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, MA.

Rafter is one of 21 local middle- and high-school science teachers participating in the Leadership Initiatives for Teaching in Technology (LIFT^2^) program. The four-year-old program, run by a nonprofit organization called the Metro South/West Regional Employment Board, places teachers at local science and engineering-based companies for the summer. Participating companies, which include Intel, Raytheon, and MITRE, pay the teachers an $800-a-week stipend, subsidize LIFT^2^-required teacher course work, and pay an administrative fee to the nonprofit group. The group also receives funding from the state and national education departments.

Universities and research-intensive companies have long been running continuing education programs for schoolteachers, but it’s rare for them to actually hire teachers to do research. For these companies, participating in the LIFT^2^ program is a way of “reaching further back into the education pipeline,” says Dave Cedrone, director of the LIFT^2^ program.

“The number of high-school graduates pursuing a career in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines has been flat for the last 20 years, even though demand has been increasing,” says Cedrone.

Expose science teachers to industry research, the reasoning goes, and more of their students will eventually end up wanting to work for companies like the ones participating in the program.

There’s no evidence that practical lab experience for teachers leads to more interested or qualified science and technology workers, but Natick High School biology teacher Dan Hinnenkamp, a LIFT^2^ alumnus, says he sees his students perk up when he talks about his stint at Biogen Idec.

“The first thing they want to know is if I found a cure to cancer,” says Hinnenkamp. “I have to explain that I was just a peon in the research, and that the work we do takes years and years.”

He enrolled in LIFT^2^ because he had no hands-on experience with the material he was teaching. Now he tells his students that the techniques they learn in his classroom are precisely the ones he used in his research.

Those types of real-world connections are invaluable, according to Marilyn Decker, director of science programs for Boston Public Schools. In fact, Decker did an externship of her own at IBM Research several years ago.

Students are not very interested in science in a theoretical realm, she says. They want to know how and why the science they are learning is useful—now.

Christopher Dede, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says that these externships are valuable for a different reason. “Teachers in general have very little idea of what workplaces are like in the 21st century,” says Dede. “Their experience is more like that of the 19th century.”

Working at a place like AstraZeneca or Raytheon gives teachers a feel for the skills their students will need to succeed in a modern economy, says Dede. In fact, he says that the experiences teachers get in industry are probably more pertinent than those they might get in an academic research setting. Academia represents only a narrow slice of the 21st-century research economy, he says, because it is not as directly affected by the market forces that shape the rest of the world.

While Dede and Decker are supporters of such programs, they say that hosting teachers in corporate labs may have an unintended effect: teachers leaving the classroom for a career in industry. Indeed, Cedrone says he’s seen one LIFT^2^ participant, out of the 60 that have gone through the program, leave teaching. But he tells companies that courting teachers as potential employees is not appropriate. “Hacking holes into the side of the pipeline doesn’t help fill the pipeline,” he says.