The STEM education initiative is long overdue-thank God it is here at last! The questions that arise are:
Are we doing enough?
Should we adopt a more multi-faceted approach to dealing with the situation?
In the middle of the financial crisis that the country is facing, is there enough funding in the budget for STEM education?
STEM is the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Among the disciplines that the National Science Foundation includes under STEM are engineering, mathematics, agricultural sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences, psychology, economics and other natural and social/behavioral sciences, computer science, earth, atmospheric and ocean sciences.
If you are an educator in science like me, brace yourself for what you will find if you look for data on science education in America collected during the past few years. By the time U.S. students reach their senior year of high school, they rank below their counterparts in 17 other countries in math and science literacy, according to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, the largest international study of scientific achievement ever conducted. In physics, U.S. high school seniors scored last among 16 countries tested. The depressing reality is that when it comes to educating the next generation in these subjects, America is no longer a world contender. In fact, U.S. students have fallen far behind their competitiors in much of Western Europe and in advanced Asian nations like Japan, India, China and South Korea. Most high school graduates are not adequately prepared for college-level science courses. It is reported that just 26% of the 2003 high school graduates scored high enough on the ACT science test to have a good chance of completing a first-year college science course. That's one reason why enrollments of U.S. students in science and engineering majors have been flat or declining-even as the demand for these skills increases. The U.S. now ranks below 13 other countries in the percentage of 24-year olds with a college degree in these subjects, down from third place 25 years ago. You don't have to be a scientist to recognize that the status quo is a recipe for big trouble.
This trend has disturbing implications, not just for the future of American technological leadership, but for the broader economy. Already, there is a shortage of highly-skilled workers and a surplus of lesser-skilled workers. This is creating an imbalance between the supply of such workers and the burgeoning demand for them, placing the future of the U.S. science and engineering workforce in peril. Until recently, America has compensated for its failure to adequately educate the next generation by importing brainpower. In 2000, a stunning 38% of U.S. jobs requiring a PhD in science and technology were filled by people who were born abroad, up from 24% in 1990. Similarly, doctoral positions and graduate programs in science at the nation's leading universities are often filled with foreign students. However, as the global competition for science and engineering talent is intensifying, the United States may not be able to rely on the international market to meet its needs. As globalization accelerates, bright young Indian or Chinese scientists may well have better opportunities at home than in the U.S. The consequences of this could be enormous. Because the quality of a nation's workforce has such a huge influence on productivity, effective school reform could easily stimulate the economy more than conventional strategies, such as Bush tax cuts. Consider what would happen if the U.S. could raise the performance of its high school students in math and science to the levels of Western Europe within a decade. According to the Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford University, U.S. gross domestic product would then be 4% higher than otherwise by 2025 and 10% higher in 30 years. That may not sound like much. But Hanushek figures that the 4% annual increase alone would be enough to offset the entire cost of America's public K-12 school system for the same year. Improving the teaching and learning of mathematics and science in U.S. schools is vital to maimtaining America's global leadership.
What is the problem with science education? How did science get left behind? Ironically, President Bush's education-reform initiative, No Child Left behind, may have exacerbated the problem because in its intial years, NCLB required that students be tested only in reading and math. This caused the focus of teaching to shift to reading and math. Some of the problem lies with teachers and some with students. One cause of the problem: the severe shortage of science teachers. Its shocking! 28% of the teachers who teach at least one science class in the 7th to 12th grades do not have a major in science. Teachers are recruited to teach in areas that they are not specialized in; thus they teach subjects in which they lack expertise. A teacher who is not at ease with the subject material often walks into a class and addresses the students in a manner that verbally or non-verbally conveys to them that this is extremely hard material to learn. One suggestion to recruit better trained science teachers was to pay them more than their counterparts in the non-science areas simply because science graduates have more lucrative alternatives to teaching. Furthermore, teachers in general face inequity issues in pay and seniority that does not encourage them to work on any lacunae in their knowledge of science or motivate them to keep abreast of the ever-growing field of science. On a closer look, teachers also opt for unhealthy shortcuts in their teaching and the term "academic freedom" covers many shortcuts that teachers employ that do not promote student learning. Academic freedom permits a teacher to exclude subject areas that they are not familiar with, reuse tests year after year and teach at a level that they choose , depending on how they interpret the curricuclum guidelines. With freedom comes responsibility and there are several excellent teachers who take their responsibility seriously and strive to make science students into student scientists.
Students in high school need to be more accountable for their grades and the concept of "social promotion" should be revisited. This is a very competitive world and the times when we could afford to worry about bruising egos are gone. Why is there only one gold medal given to the best athlete in a competition at the Olympics? Do we consider the feelings of dissappointment and rejection that the other comnpetitiors feel? If we do not, then why do we mollycoddle our high school students when the world that they will soon be entering into will not care about bruised egos or social rejection? Furthermore, society unconsciously puts greater value on the winning of a gold medal in sport than on receiving the highest science score in the nation. When students are recognized for their accomplishments in science and math like athletes are felicitated for their expertise in a sport, then students will automatically strive to be the very best that they can be in science and in math and in their overall education.
Other nations that have long since recognized the crucial importance of science and math education to their futures are moving ahead. The U.S. has grasped this lesson in many Olympic sports, where strong national programs have been established to ensure that America has world-class athletes. Unless the nation applies the same approach to science education, it stands to lose more than a few gold medals; it could ultimately squander its leadership of the world economy.