Where's the money for science education?

We have heard a lot of talk about funding for public education and the efforts by state lawmakers to turn the school funding restructuring into a broader effort to reorganize public education in Texas. What we have not heard is how any of the proposals will impact the State Board of Education mandate for four years of high school science instruction - a much needed shot in the arm for a state (and a nation) that is scoring at the very bottom of the barrel in math and science achievement among developed nations.

As we survey the education funding debate, we see few heroes and a lot of posturers. First, there are those posturing over issues of tax burden. Second, there are those posturing over flat-scale teacher salaries. Third, there are those posturing over the divine right of local school boards to demand that all children residing within their boundaries sign up and show up at the local public school so that they can get their hands on a larger quantity of state and federal education dollars. Whether Texas children are learning what they need to know to function well in tomorrow's society seems far down the list of priorities - unless one counts those pushing for charter schools and/or vouchers as believing that the current system is unsalvageable and that the only hope lies in promoting alternative education providers.

Has even one lawmaker made a single speech this session regarding how we are to fulfill the SBOE mandate to provide resources for science classrooms, including huge increases in teachers with adequate training in the sciences (and the math that science relies upon)? Major corporations with facilities in Texas are crying out for even well-educated high school graduates with basic science skills and the critical thinking skills taught in math courses - jobs are going unfilled because they cannot find enough young people who can enter these fields.

How long - if we continue our current trends in education - will it be before the United States is a third-world nation? Before American children are relegated to low-paying service jobs because of their lack of even an average first-world education? How long before we are unable to find qualified people to fix our electric generators, repair our aging sewer lines, operate our sophisticated mechanical equipment, and so on and so forth?

We have already figured out that some believe the solution to our impending social security and Medicare funding crises is simply to assist people in dying earlier. But even that "final solution" will not be sufficient to provide even the healthier senior citizens and others dependent upon the largesse of our society from the shortfall in revenues to these systems once our ability to create and innovate is lost. The sad truth is that failing to feed the engine of human progress will guarantee its demise.

Let's take a look at some numbers that ought to be shocking but have generally been ignored by the press, academia, lawmakers, and almost certainly by professional educators and their supporters. They are even largely ignored by the American public. Who cares?

To start with, the National Science Foundation has demonstrated that only 5% of U.S. college graduates are getting engineering degrees - far fewer than those in Asian nations and well below even Western Europe. Taken together, only 17% of U.S. college graduates are earning engineering or science degrees. The end result of this is that, by 2010, about 90% of all Ph.D. physical scientists and engineers in the world will be Asians living in Asia. Where will we find people to teach future scientists and engineers, let alone work in the private sector?

We wonder if our colleges and universities - and other higher learning centers - will be able to find faculty to teach the science and math courses needed by those who would become proficient in medical, engineering, scientific, and technical fields tomorrow. Even today we have shortfalls in many teaching areas - notably, nursing - and many of our best teachers are nearing retirement.

Of equal or greater concern is the status of science and math in K-12 education. If we do not train our young people to care about and do well in math and science, they will hardly be prepared to seek science and/or engineering degrees in college. Based on reports from national research groups, the future is bleak.

Take, for example, the warning of former Microsoft chief operating officer Robert Herbold, who now servEs on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In a speech at Hillsdale College a year ago, Herbold said "there are some very worrisome trends in the United States with respect to our global share of science, technology, engineering and mathematics expertise.... Failure to address our immense shortcomings in science and math education is unacceptable and will inevitably lead to the weakening of our nation."

The National Assessment of Educational Progress will be conducting a brand new survey of science skill levels in American classrooms this year. Their last survey, done in 2000, produced abysmal results - including the startling conclusion that 47% - nearly half - of our 12th graders were below even partial proficiency in science, and another 34% were only partially proficient. In short, we are failing to adequately teach five out of six high school graduates, let alone the huge numbers of children who drop out of high school.

Scores in math were equally dismal. Just 16% of high school seniors were ranked proficient or advanced, while 48% were partly proficient and another 35% were below even partial proficiency. Worldwide, U.S. math students ranked at the 10th percentile - that is, 90% of the countries in the developed world are better than our kids in math. Similarly, 76% of the world's nations do better in teaching science than we do to high school seniors. [Of course, our very best students are still more than competitive with their foreign counterparts, partly because many are the children of Asian and other immigrants who still have an education ethic ingrained into their belief system.]

There was some good news in this survey. The U.S. ranked at the 88th percentile in science for fourth graders. But our fourth graders ranked only at the 54th percentile in math. Put another way, the longer our kids stay in school, the dumber they get in science and math. There can be only one conclusion from these statistics: Something is dreadfully wrong with the way we teach our children.

Just what is so wrong? The answers are only too obvious. We totally fail to invest in our children's knowledge of science and mathematics. In September 2000, the National Commission on Math and Science Teaching for the 21st Century found that 56% of high school students taking physical science were being taught by "out of field" teachers - those who neither majored nor minored in science. Three years later, the Committee for Economic Development found that 93% of middle school science students and 70% of middle school math students were being taught by people who had inadequate knowledge of the subject matter based on their college studies. In short, we just do not value math and science very highly as a society.

Why, though, would anyone want to teach math or science in today's schools, when they can earn two or three - or more - times the money elsewhere? They are not allowed to be part-time teachers earning higher pay at their other jobs. Schools are allowed to hire unqualified personnel and pronounce them "fit" rather than pay real science and math teachers a market wage.

The results are predictable. My own daughter (now a geology student at a Texas university) finished her high school career in Austin, taking an Honors Physics course taught by someone who was certified in chemistry but knew very little physics and brought almost nothing to the class discussions.

Her prior experiences in junior high and high school science were equally unrewarding - yet she (thankfully) persevered and has finally found qualified instructors to help her learn her craft. But how many others who might become tomorrow's scientists and critical thinkers have been dissuaded from their true calling because we care so little about providing qualified instructors (or even facilities)?

Instead, our public schools rarely recruit good math and science teachers, often leaving those classrooms to coaches or others without the knowledge or even the motivation to inspire young people to learn to explore the universe and seek out its secrets. Moreover, they require all teachers to be full-timers with education degrees. A few systems do hire traveling teachers to enhance the quality of classroom instruction in certain fields, but others find this disrupts the system and may even embarrass the "real" professionals who monitor the classrooms. If hospitals were run the way schools are run, surgeons and other specialist physicians would earn the same money as janitors with the same number of years on the job (not including adjustments based on education level).

We could make great strides toward fixing this problem simply by hiring master science and math teachers to work with those now holding down the forts, lecturing in different classrooms on a rotating basis or even lecturing via closed circuit television or via the Internet. Unqualified teachers would thus have the opportunity to increase their own knowledge or transfer to other teaching jobs for which they are more qualified. This cannot happen, however, without major structural changes to our system of education which focuses more on job security than on academic success. Even leading scientists could not teach in high schools (even on a part-time basis) because they lack "credentials."

The second reason behind our national failure to teach science and math, according to Herbold, is the abysmal quality of our textbooks. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, through its Project 2061 outreach, rated fewer than 10% of middle school math books to be acceptable and NONE of the middle school science textbooks. Indeed, the Summer 2003 issue of 2061 Today reported that:

study after study has shown that most science materials available today fail to serve the needs of students or teachers. Decades of research have yielded insights on all aspects of science teaching and learning, including which instructional strategies are most effective and which ideas are vital for understanding basic science concepts. Yet, too often, instructional materials neglect to take advantage of these research findings. Instead, materials are full of unrelated facts, lists of terms to memorize, and colorful but uninformative illustrations.

Sadly, this study came too late for the 2001 science textbook adoption cycle. Perhaps our Texas Education Agency employees did not know of the ongoing study. Admittedly, the AAAS may not have reviewed the "improved" Texas versions of these textbooks, but Project 2061 gave markedly unsatisfactory grades to middle school science textbooks published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall, and Holt, Rinehart & Winston as to their treatment of life science, earth science, and physical science. Hopefully, our slightly newer, and Texas-specific, editions might have gotten somewhat higher rankings, but all of these (and every other publisher's textbooks) were so far below satisfactory that there is little chance we have purchased quality textbooks with our millions of education dollars.

Are our professional educators even on the same pages as these professional science reviewers? Or are they so focused on our vaguely written "Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills" criteria, which determine the acceptability of textbooks and often wholly miss the larger picture? At any rate, we are being told that our textbooks are huge contributors to our education failures.

This may come as a shock to those at the Texas Freedom Network and others who have insisted that no one outside the Texas Education Agency has any right to make any criticism of any textbook paid for by our tax dollars or out of the Permanent School Fund. Perhaps, armed with this new information, they will now join us at the table demanding better work from publishers - and earlier input with publishers as to what we really need in textbooks we are paying for that are children are relying upon to help them learn.

It would be very instructive to have the Project 2061 team come to Texas well in advance of the next textbook adoption cycle (if we still have them after the current education bill is enacted into law) and sit down with professional educators, education enthusiasts, and concerned citizens to hash out what we can all agree might be standards for ensuring at least satisfactory textbooks for children who will be taking science courses in coming years.

In the meantime, though, are our lawmakers even hearing about these massive twin problems - poorly trained teachers and substandard textbooks - as they wrestle to come up with education dollars and a supposed restructuring of our education delivery system? The only "helpful" solution I have seen in this year's education bills is a proposal to adopt end-of-course assessment instruments for secondary level courses in algebra I and II and geometry and in biology, chemistry, physics, and integrated physics and chemistry. But if our children fall short of the mark in these examinations, how much of the blame is on them and how much is on our failure to provide proper instructors and materials? And what real solutions - if any - are being offered up to resolve these twin terrors?

Texas industrial corporations already know that we are producing high school graduates, even college graduates, who are virtually illiterate in math and science and unable to enter professions requiring that knowledge. This is a nationwide blight on our future that professions like nursing, engineering, and others have good jobs that go unfilled for lack of qualified applicants.

Apparently, our political leaders - whether in Texas or Washington, D.C., or any other state capital - neither know nor care that our education system is an abject failure in these fields. Nor is anyone in politics (it appears) willing to tell us the truth and to demand real reform from the ground up to save our nation from an undignified future.

There is one notable exception. Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley on January 31 told the House Appropriations Committee that more money needs to be funneled into math and science teacher training programs. [Several SBOE members are also preaching this gospel, but have gone largely unheard.] But otherwise, it's up to us - ordinary citizens - to take up the fight. And we have not yet done a very good job.

P.S. - Another new report says that textbook distributors are gouging college students by issuing new editions unnecessarily and adding bonus materials (like CD-ROM's) to boost prices without boosting the quality of the textbook or its usefulness to the students. This report, by the Public Interest Research Group, has called on the textbook industry to put in place a set of guidelines and has encouraged college professors to take better notice of what books they order and the cost to students.

The report found that the price of schoolbooks for all grade levels is rising at 4 times the rate of inflation between editions and has jumped 62% since 1994. College students today shell out an average of $900 or more a year for textbooks - though a few innovative schools have gone to renting textbooks to students so they do not have to pay full price. Admittedly, in some fields, the state of the art is advancing rapidly, and older editions just do not fill the bill. But the higher the cost for textbooks, the deeper in debt students have to go to finish school - and that's not good for our economy.

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