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When the Russians launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, in 1957, an alarmed America got off its keister and set about becoming the world leader in math and science education.

A half-century later, experts say we’ve fallen so far behind compared to other countries, there’s no time to fool around with pilot programs that might or might not address the problem, so we’d better go with what we’ve got.

Such is the thinking behind the National Math and Science Initiative, a well-funded effort whose immediate focus is helping 13 universities across the country replicate UTeach, a program developed at the University of Texas-Austin and designed to draw talented math and science college majors into careers in secondary education.

LSU is among the 13 institutions receiving $2.4 million to replicate UTeach, which appears to show solid results. LSU is in the midst of a year-long planning process. Southern University and Southeastern Louisiana University will also participate.

John Winn, NMSI’s chief program officer, says roughly 80% of secondary education teachers who’ve gone through the UTeach program are still teaching after four years, compared to only 50% or 60% of teachers who matriculated through traditional college of education teaching programs.

“It’s been very successful,” he says. “UTeach provides about 70 teachers a year. That’s probably as much as an average state would produce out of all its universities.”

NMSI’s money comes from an initial $125 million in ExxonMobil Foundation funding and donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Dell Foundation. The initiative was created in response to a rousing wake-up call in the form of a 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences titled Rising Above the Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. It warned the United States had slipped to 15th place, give or take, among countries in terms of math and science education.

Winn says LSU was chosen to be among the first wave of UTeach replicator schools in large part because of Geaux Teach, a program similar to UTeach that was set up eight years ago involving collaboration among LSU’s colleges of arts and sciences, basic sciences and education. Geaux Teach also covers English, French, Spanish and history. Whether LSU’s version of UTeach will cover disciplines other than math and science remains to be seen.

That LSU was already exploring a new way of preparing teachers—via Geaux Teach—made the university a good candidate for NMSI, Winn says, noting that inclusion in the initiative was very competitive, with 52 universities submitting applications.

Sharon Besson, director of Geaux Teach, says there’s not time to waste.

“Our math and science teacher pool is declining,” she says. “Our teachers are getting older and closer to retirement, and we don’t have a big influx of new teachers. If a student doesn’t have a good math or science teacher, it’s not likely they’re going to be good math or science students.”

That’s bad news for big companies facing a shrinking skilled work force. The difference between UTeach and Geaux Teach versus traditional college of education teacher training is that the former produces graduates with a primary concentration in math or science and a secondary concentration in education. In traditional colleges of education it’s the other way around: a primary concentration in teaching with much less study devoted to specific subject areas. The result: math and science teachers who understand much of education but little of math and science—or English and history for that matter.

Another difference is that UTeach/Geaux Teach introduces its students to a live classroom their freshman year, as opposed to education majors who don’t see the inside of a classroom from the teacher’s perspective until they’re seniors. Too bad if you don’t like teaching.

Another plus to exposing college students to middle or high school classrooms early on is they’re more comfortable and confident once they graduate and leave the nest, Besson says.

“We desperately want to recruit and retain as many teachers as we can,” she says. “At the same time, we want to make sure that’s what they want to do. With this apprenticeship program, spending as much time as they are out in the schools, they learn right away if it’s really for them.”

Micah Davies’ father wasn’t about to pay for his daughter to get a degree in education at LSU. Davies herself didn’t want to put all her eggs in that basket since she wasn’t sure she’d like teaching—even though everybody always said she’d be a natural. A compromise was found: Davies earned a chemistry degree and, through Geaux Teach, a secondary concentration in education and certification to be a teacher.

She says having a firm grasp of her subject—like what holds atoms together—makes it easier to engage students in her sixth-grade physical science class at Woodlawn Middle School. They also seem impressed that she knows her stuff.

“It’s probably because they’re used to their parents having all the answers, but to see somebody understands something they know is difficult and can explain it to them—maybe they’re impressed not so much that I know it but that I can make them understand it,” Davies says.

Davies, incidentally, has discovered that she loves teaching after all.

Daniel Hotard, who teaches math at CAN Academy Glen Oaks Middle School, knew he wanted to be a teacher a long time ago, he just wasn’t sure what subject. He chose math. Through Geaux Teach, he got certified. Hotard’s original plan was to finish graduate school first, then teach. Pure math proved to be too much, however, so he dropped out of grad school.

No problem. Hotard had a degree in math, a teaching certificate and—within a week of dropping out of grad school—a teaching job. He likes teaching and intends to keep doing it, while working on a master’s degree in natural science, with a concentration on math, at LSU. Hotard says the early classroom experience he got through Geaux Teach was useful. His teaching, meanwhile, tends to be very hands-on, real-world stuff.

“The theory is good, but a lot of it kind of goes out the window when you’re working in the real world,” he says.

Winn says teachers weak in their own subject areas don’t get kids excited about math and science. Without that excitement, this country’s ability to compete with the rest of the world will continue to erode.

“You have to have a deep understanding of the scientific concepts in order to apply them,” Winn says. “If you have a cursory understanding of science, sometimes you have to tendency to teach it as a series of facts as opposed to the inquiry method.”

Besson says spoon-feeding information in the classroom is the surest way to shut down learning, and robs students of the chance to develop the critical-thinking skills and creativity essential to excelling later in life.

“I always used to tell my students: ‘Whatever you want to be when you grow up is perfectly fine with me,’” she says. “I’m going to give you the option to have choices in that so you’re not stuck having to do this or having to do that because you don’t know how to think.’”