A Remedy For Science Education Crisis Is Long Overdue

Science and mathematics education in the United States is desperately in need of reform, and any substantial remedy will demand not only the financial support of the federal government, but also a concerted effort by scientists, lawmakers, and educators. Although the current crisis has been in the making for decades, efforts at corrective action have been stymied by a fundamental and disastrous misunderstanding. In December 1981, James Shymansky, a science education professor at the University of Iowa, and I surveyed 450 teacher placement offices at U.S. colleges and universities. We also polled 1,000 high school principals to determine the qualifications and teaching assignments of science and math teachers. The results were startling: Half of the classes of newly employed science and math teachers and one-third of all science and math classrooms in the U.S. were, according to the school principals, staffed by teachers who were unqualified in those subjects. The number of men and women who had received teaching degrees and were qualified to teach science and math had dropped by a factor of four in only 10 years. These results, which were incorporated into testimony presented by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) to committees of Congress, received widespread media attention. Almost immediately, a flurry of other studies and commissions was created to further analyze what appeared to be an emerging crisis in science and math education. One such effort--the National Science Board Commission on Precollege Education in Mathematics, Science, and Technology-- documented defects in science and math education and showed the relationship of this emerging crisis to the nation's needs, including its ability to compete in a global economy. The fundamental finding was that the U.S. was failing to educate both its general population and its needed specialists in science, math, engineering, and technical fields--the very areas most needed for commercial innovation and efficacy. The NSB report also showed that the U.S. population was going through revolutionary changes in its makeup, with minority populations--largely underrepresented in science and technical fields--soon to become a majority. According to the report, the general level of scientific and technical literacy had to be raised in order to place a larger number of qualified people into the science and engineering job pool, while simultaneously addressing the problem of science and technology literacy for the general population. However, not to be outdone by NSB, the U.S. Department of Education, under T.H. Bell, then Secretary of Education, created a commission on excellence in education. And an April 1983 report by this commission, titled A Nation at Risk, was the spark that ignited a broad-based call for reform not just in science and math education, but in all areas of education. In doing so, the report cited dismal statistics on U.S. student achievement compared with that of students of other nations--including sharp declines in U.S. students' Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and American Council on Testing (ACT) scores. However, unlike the NSB report, the Department of Education report, proclaimed a crisis in all areas of education. But it failed to provide evidence linking the statistics it cited and the reforms it recommended. Indeed, A Nation at Risk had no bibliography or citation of sources for its data. Instead, a list was provided of authors of commissioned papers--papers that were unchecked by peer reviewers and were often presented in the form of opinion. As for the lower test scores reported, they were a function not of diminished capability or quality of education, but of the significant rise during the two decades prior to the study in the number of students entering and completing high `school, and thus taking the tests. It is a simple statistical fact that when larger numbers are involved, lower average scores will result. Moreover, most of the test results cited in A Nation at Risk either were irrelevant or could be accounted for quite easily by demographic changes that had occurred in the schools studied. The truth is, except in science and math, there never was a documented crisis in education. Nevertheless, as the various reports appeared, and were picked up by the media, the documented crisis in science and math education was erroneously broadened into something quite unreal. What resulted were mainly solutions to nonexistent problems. For example, at the federal level, support for foreign language instruction was increased. At the state and local levels, specialized high schools were created, in which the top (usually the most advantaged) students were skimmed from other schools and excessive resources provided to prepare even more specialists, while further impoverishing the schools from which these resources had to be drawn. Although requirements for more science and math courses for graduation were imposed by some states, they were imposed without improving inappropriate courses and content. And they were imposed without providing the additional funds for teacher training, laboratories, or supplies that would make science experiences in the schools truly meaningful. Needed were incentives for more young people to go into science and math teaching; needed were massive retraining programs for current teachers of science and math. And curricula needed to be revised to make it possible for all students to learn science and math. The massive support required for dealing with the crisis in science and math education would have had to come from the federal government, since states did not have the resources. But Congress is so constituted that it cannot seem to target any problem. The only way to get votes is to provide general support. It is the shotgun approach: Throw money at every geographical area and every possible constituency. Thus, from Congress' point of view, our whole educational system had to be regarded as flawed and, therefore, the entire system had to be reformed. The right-wing conservatives in the government of the 1980s, meanwhile, saw the situation as an opportunity to dump public education. They were opposed not just to federal government involvement in education, but to any government involvement--even that of local governments and their school boards. They wanted schooling to be entirely separate from government, with the task of improving education entrusted either to private schools or profit-making companies. As a result, then, of Congress' inability to target a single area of concern, compounded by the disinclination of the Reagan and Bush administrations to get government involved in addressing the concern, we find the U.S. suffering today from a crisis in science and math education that is harsher than ever. In our efforts to resolve the crisis, we must be careful not to place blame on either our teachers or our schools. Teachers are doing as well as they can with the resources provided. The so- called unqualified teachers are, more often than not, teachers who are fully qualified in one field, but are being required to teach in several fields, irrespective of their credentials. They are therefore not unqualified teachers; they are misassigned teachers. Nor can our schools and teachers be accused justly of being uncooperative, resistant to change, or hostile to the use of new and expensive technologies. What, after all, can they do to innovate or become responsive when the nation has cut its federal support for schools in half over the past 12 years, and when states are unable to provide even baseline support, having had dumped on them the financial responsibilities previously assumed by the federal government? How do teachers teach meaningful science with no labs or no money for supplies or equipment? How do we reform our schools with $5 per year per student (the national average) for educational materials for an entire course? And how do we inspire teachers who are burdened by misassignment to subjects for which they have no preparation, who are still paid far less than they would earn in similar positions in the private sector, and when they no longer enjoy even the respect and admiration that once substituted for salary? It is possible for us to leverage the problem in science and math education, but this will require a concerted effort by lawmakers, scientists, and educators. Lawmakers will have to respond to the fact that we must dedicate a disproportionate amount of federal education support to science and math. Educators, for their part, should seriously question the notion, common among them in the U.S., that most young people cannot learn real science, and that, therefore, we should focus science education on personal and societal problems and teach students only methods of science as applied to decision-making that they will need in their daily lives. But this is without learning the underlying science, if any, and it assumes that the methods of science are appropriate for making decisions in a wide range of areas where emotion, belief, political preference, and aesthetics often dominate. And what can scientists do? Well, there is a desperate need, for example, for university scientists to work with their colleagues in science education and with high school science teachers to address the serious problems we have. Science teachers need greater depth of understanding of the various subjects they are expected to teach, and all teachers need to pay more attention to research on how people learn. All scientists should work at the local, state, and federal levels to secure support to address the problems. There currently are serious efforts being undertaken to create national standards and to pursue reforms in science and math education. Almost all of these efforts have as a component prestigious panels of expert advisers. In addition to scientists, science educators, and science teachers, some panels include people from the social sciences or from political office. It is my observation that scientist panel members rarely attend meetings, much less offer substantive advice. As a consequence, unsupported positions, some of which I have already described, go unchallenged. When called upon to serve on these panels, scientists should lend more than their names. The need for revolutionary reform in science and math education is real. If scientists do not take this very seriously and lend their expertise as well as their names, the reform will fail miserably. Bill G. Aldridge is executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, Washington, D.C.

A Remedy For Science Education Crisis Is Long Overdue

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