Washington

The United States is suffering a shortage of mathematics, science, bilingual, and special-education teachers because it lacks faculty members in those fields, higher-education officials said on Tuesday in testimony before a Congressional subcommittee.

"The pipeline for producing highly qualified classroom teachers" in those areas "will remain grossly inadequate for as along as the pipeline for producing faculty in these fields remains unattended," said Blandina Cardenas, dean of the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Congress should increase financial support to doctoral students in those areas, she said, as part of its extension of the Higher Education Act, the law that governs most federal student-aid programs. Lawmakers are in the process of renewing the law.

"It's really a wake-up call," said Rep. Susan Davis, a Democrat from California and one of only a handful of lawmakers who attended the hearing, which was held by the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Select Education.

Graduate-fellowship programs under Title VII of the act are "chronically underfunded," said Earl Lewis, dean of the graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The Higher Education Act has the right priorities for postsecondary education, he said, but lawmakers should make the federal programs more known to minority students.

Daniel Hall, vice president for external affairs at the University of Lousiville, said legislators should allow the Council on Legal Education Opportunity to begin "pre-college programs" and summer institutes. That, combined with additional money from Congress, he said, would enable more students to apply for federal financial aid and pursue postsecondary degrees.

Mr. Hall also urged lawmakers to transfer the Thurgood Marshall Legal Educational Opportunity Program to Title IV, the part of the act that governs student grant and loan programs. They should take that step, he said, because the program is more closely akin to the federal TRIO programs" and the Gear-Up program -- which help disadvantaged students prepare for college -- than traditional graduate fellowships. When pressed by representatives, he did not elaborate on how that shift could affect the Marshall program's operation.