If we're going to keep America competitive on a global scale, today’s students need to be tomorrow’s innovators.

For decades, the US has invested billions of dollars in our education system, but when it comes to math and science, we are ranked at an unimpressive 38th and 24th, respectively, among the 72 countries that participated in the 2015 PISA exams. 

Our nation needs more quality STEM educators to reverse this trend and ensure the success of our students.

100Kin10 is on track to recruit, train and retain 100,000 new STEM teachers by 2021.

But this is not enough.

In order to make this a sustainable effort beyond 2021, we need to tackle the fundamental challenges preventing us from having the excellent educators our nation's students need to succeed.

What are the challenges standing in the way of quality STEM education for all students?

We brought together our network of 300 partners as well as thousands of education leaders, teachers and practitioners to help us answer this question.

They helped us identify over 100 challenges spanning a broad range of issues.

We then asked our community of partners and educators to vote on how each challenge influences other challenges.

Which challenges, if solved, would have the greatest potential influence on others?

After mapping over 10,000 responses, it became clear that each challenge is an important strand in an intricate web. No single challenge exists in isolation. Solving one is often necessary to solving others.

Eight challenges surfaced as the greatest catalysts for change.

Working on any of the 100+ challenges is important, valuable work. But solving these catalyst challenges could prove to be the fastest route to ensuring we have the high-quality STEM educators we so desperately need.