Lawmakers met this week as a joint committee to discuss the future of our school systems.

They listened to representatives of the METS (Math, Engineering, Technology and Science) coalition speak about the state’s failing education system.

The METS coalition formed eight months ago at a roundtable discussion with Gov. Matt Blunt.

Its focus is to incorporate better teaching systems of math, engineering, technology and science into the school system.

During the joint meeting, the coalition showed a 10-minute clip of the roundtable meeting in which one of the members spoke about the problems with the school system.

He said by eighth grade American students are two years behind standards in other countries.

And the problem is that our teaching systems go over the same subject matter year after year.

Other countries are teaching their sixth, seventh and eighth graders higher math that won’t be seen by our student until their junior or senior years in high school.

“As a nation we are underperforming in these academic areas and it’s going to hurt us economically down the road and it’s going to hurt us right now,” said Dan P. Mehan, president and CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “There are these opportunities that will go overseas not just because it’s cheap labor but because there’s the ability and know how to deal with technological advances in this economy and we’ve got to turn that around in Missouri.”

The vice president of Boeing is also on the Missouri METS coalition and he told the other members of the committee that approximately 49 percent of their engineers from St. Louis could retire within the next two years.

Not only can Boeing not find any qualified workers in Missouri, it can’t find qualified workers anywhere in the U.S. So the corporation is thinking about outsourcing those jobs.

With the advances in engineering, quite frequently an engineer can do their job from a laptop computer or just move to the U.S.

This is why the coalition wants to incorporate more industry-driven curriculums into our schools at an early age.

“As a teacher I may be teaching my students, but I may not be preparing them for what the business in my community or in my state wants unless they share with me what they’re looking for in my students,” said Russell Grammer, fourth grade teacher at Jefferson Elementary School in Cape Giradeau.

Mehan said the first step to fixing the problem is public awareness.

“The second step is taking the necessary steps to either perform our curriculum or reform our grade-level expectations,” Mehan said. “And encouraging more people to come into the fields of teaching math, engineering and science.”

Blunt spoke about some of these changes in the technology in classrooms portion of his State of the State Address at the beginning of the legislative session. But the coalition doesn’t believe the effort should stop there.

“We need families, we need schools, we need business, as well as the legislature to come together to support education,” Mehan said. “We want to expand the pool of students going into these fields, we want to increase the number of teachers that teach in these fields.

“We also want more resources in the classroom. And we want the public to be aware of what’s happening. Unless everyone’s involved in this it’s not going to go very far.”