rsday, December 1, 2011
Blog
Mediocrity, ignorance impeding U.S. STEM education
By Gary Beach, publisher emeritus of CIO Magazine and founder, Tech Corps
According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, it was a foggy, still morning in November 1936 when Sir Winston Churchill walked into the House of Commons to warn its members about the perils of Adolf Hitler’s three-year rearmament program. Known later as his “Locust Years” speech, Churchill shared this advice with the members: England’s “era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, are coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”
I am writing a book on the history of K-12 math and science education in America (1950-present), and Churchill’s “Locust Years” speech sadly describes how America has approached STEM education for the past half century. During those 61 years, there have been numerous warnings that our nation’s math/science education efforts are inadequate. Here’s my favorite:
“Our Nation is at risk. Our once-unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur--others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
“Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them. This report, the result of 18 months of study, seeks to generate reform of our educational system in fundamental ways and to renew the Nation’s commitment to schools and colleges of high quality throughout the length and breadth of our land.”
Here’s a brain teaser for you. Name the year those opening paragraphs to a government report were written.
Drumroll please: April 1983 — where they appeared as the introduction to a report delivered to President Ronald Reagan by Education Secretary Terrence Bell. The antagonist for the report? Japan’s incredible manufacturing revival in the 1970s.
Research for my book has unearthed other remarkable facts about the American education process. For instance, from 1962 to 1976 the SAT math scores for American high school students fell every year. What did the College Board, the governing body for the SAT, do? They issued a report called “On Further Examination” headed by Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, who chalked up the 14 years of decline to a “decade of national distraction caused by television, Vietnam, Watergate and family breakups … and changes in the demographics of test takers.”
Not exactly a proactive solution to the problem. Nor does it seem that Secretary Wirtz is aware that 14 years is more than a decade.
It’s a problem that has grown worse over the years, as American students since 1995 place in the middle of the pack, or lower, in nine international math and science assessment examinations. And an avalanche of industry reports (“America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages,” 1990; “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing America for a Brighter Economic Future, 2005) have warned our business leaders and politicians that America is off course.
Thomas L. Friedman in his 2004 bestseller “The World Is Flat” interviewed the mayor of one of China’s 20 cities that have over 1 million residents (the U.S. has nine such cities) about this view of the future. Here’s what he shared with Friedman: “Today, the United States, you are the designers, the architects, and the developing countries are the bricklayers. One day I hope we will be the architects.”
No nation rules supreme forever. Here’s another brain teaser to underscore the point. Name this country: Richest in the world, largest military, the center of world business and finance, strongest education system, world center of innovation and invention, currency is the world standard of value, highest standard of living.”
Courtesy of a 10th grade social studies class outside Denver, Colo., the answer is … England in 1900.
America’s response to improving its overall education system in general, and how we teach math and science in specific, needs a dramatic restructuring. Now.
We are like the frog in the pot of water. Content as the temperature rises slowly degree by degree until it reaches 212 degrees, when the frog is incapable of escaping and dies.
America’s temperature, in my opinion, based on my book research, is 200 degrees. We still have choices and options to improve how we educate our children. If we continue, however, to simply issue or ignore reports, and every four years have another president layer his bold new ideas on the state and local school systems, our nation is destined to become a nation of bricklayers in the 2020 decade. Or worse.
America once again needs to “do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Our era of national consequence is at hand. Hard decisions await us. How do you think we should respond?
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