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In the neoliberal economy, workers are seen as commodities and are expected to be trained and “work-ready” before they are hired. The cost and responsibility for job-training fall predominantly on individual workers rather than on employers. This is evident in the expectation that work experience should be a condition of hiring. This is true of the academic hiring process, which no longer involves hiring those who show promise in their field and can be apprenticed on the tenure track, but rather those with the means, privilege, and grit to assemble a tenurable CV on their own dime and arrive to the tenure track work-ready.

The assumption that faculty are pre-trained, or able to train themselves without additional time and support, underpins university directives that faculty move classes online without investing in training to support faculty in this shift. For context, at the University of Waterloo, the normal supports for developing an online course include one to two course releases, 12-18 months of preparation time, and the help of three staff members—one of whom is an online learning consultant, and each of whom supports only about two other courses. Instead, at universities across Canada, the move online under COVID-19 is not called “online teaching” but “remote teaching”, which universities seem to think absolves them of the responsibility to give faculty sufficient technological training, pedagogical consultation, and preparation time.

faculty are encouraged to strip away the transformative pedagogical work that has long been part of their profession and to merely administer a course or deliver course material

Some education experts and policymakers argue that if the U.S. does not boost the number of workers in those jobs, that America will lose its competitive edge as a global innovator. But others say that there is no STEM crisis at all, that this is actually a myth and that colleges should integrate STEM and the humanities into a broader education.

You have to remember that STEM makes up only about 7 percent of the jobs in the American economy. On the other hand, we know that anybody who majors in STEM often doesn't stay in STEM. For instance, by the time most STEM majors are 35 years old, they're in management. They leave. They no longer work on the bench in the lab. So we need to produce a lot more STEM workers than we actually use initially because we lose so many of them along the way because their careers are relatively successful.

That is, a technical education now allows you to do anything. And anything, for most workers, means having a job that's fairly focused as a STEM worker, but then moving on to management or into a regulatory roll or into a government job. So STEM has become the place where you go if you want to have a lot of alternatives 10 years down the road.

To make this transition, states, districts, and schools should do as much as possible to provide teachers with support for professional learning tied to the new standards. It’s also critical for teachers to connect with and learn from each other.

But many educators aren’t “connected” yet because they haven’t taken advantage of opportunities for professional learning online or they aren’t realizing the full benefits. Many districts and states also haven’t done enough to recognize this essential learning as legitimate professional development.

The nonprofit Academy for Urban School Leadership in Chicago provides a great “alternative” route to the classroom, in which participants complete a yearlong residency working with effective mentor teachers.