One Nation Under-Taught
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STEM can be found in virtually every discipline and in every product. STEM is not exclusive to the subjects of science, technology, engineering, or math. We must continue engaging students in the STEM disciplines and encouraging them to combine technical knowledge and skills with the creativity that leads to innovative ideas—ideas that give the arts new technologies, music new instruments, farmers new machines, and our businesses a competitive advantage. Unless we continue building the STEM pipeline, each profession suffers. We end up encouraging the end product of art and performance while discouraging or neglecting science, technology, engineering, and math.
That is why education reform generally, and STEM education specifically, are the keys to our economic well-being and future.
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Why We Fail & How To Fix It
It has been a full generation—thirty years—since the landmark “Nation at Risk” report was issued by the U.S. Department of Education. That report opened with this ominous warning: “Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.”91 To add to the drama of the problem, the report’s authors continued:
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.92
Since then, there have been any number of citations to the Nation at Risk, there have been any number of education reform proposals, we have overhauled testing regimens, and added billions of dollars into our education system. But the results over the past thirty years have been flat at best, with no appreciable change upward in our scores. I say “at best,” because in many ways we have done worse. This chart of national expenditures and scores from 1970 to 2010 explains just about the whole story:
Spending went up, educational hires from teachers to administrators increased, and scores have flat-lined. The point is, we still do not get it right in American education: not in reading, not in writing, and not in the STEM fields. And, as stated earlier, we are spending more than other countries that do get it right. What is the problem? And why is it so hard to see and overcome?
The answers to these questions are partly pedagogical and partly cultural. Let me start with the pedagogical. In looking at the other countries whose students continually outmatch our students in the STEM fields, there is the answer of time. Other nations, especially the ones that beat us, simply put their students through more schooling. As education reform expert Chester E. Finn, Jr. put it recently:
Schoolchildren in China attend school 41 days a year more than most young Americans—and receive 30% more hours of instruction. Schools in Singapore operate 40 weeks a year. Saturday classes are the norm in Korea and other Asian countries—and Japanese authorities are having second thoughts about their 1998 decision to cease Saturday-morning instruction. This additional time spent learning is one big reason that youngsters from many Asian nations routinely out-score their American counterparts on international tests of science and math.93
Our students’ “summer learning loss” is “no joke,” Finn writes, as our students lose “a full month’s worth [over the summer], by most estimates, adding up to 1.3 school years by the end of high school.”94 And then there is this: “students in other postindustrial countries receive twice as much instruction in core academic areas during high school.”95
Take the issue of summer recess/break and summer learning for a moment. At a time when there is so much focus on American students’ global education competitiveness, students and teachers at all grade levels should find opportunities to keep their minds active and continue learning while enjoying our vaunted and nearly-sacrosanct summer breaks. I am not against them, not at all. Our teachers need them, our principals need them, our parents and children need them.
But, still, summer learning loss is real. It is also counterproductive, requiring teachers to spend considerable time at the beginning of the new school year reviewing before they introduce new material and help students develop new and advanced skills. The National Summer Learning Association reports that students lose an equivalent of two months of their grade-level math computational skills over the summer, and students from low-income families also lose the same equivalency in reading achievement. While summer is a time to relax, it is not a time to stop learning.
The key to education—especially in critical STEM fields—is activity-based learning that makes concepts relevant in real-world, meaningful ways. In Project Lead The Way classroom curriculum, for example, velocity, speed, lift, and drag—concepts often taught in a high school physics class—are applied when building an airfoil that must meet certain constraints. In third grade, students learn about forces, axels and levers, and apply these concepts to design a simple machine to rescue an animal that has fallen into a trench. Lessons like these show students the relevancy of their learning and engage and inspire them to continue learning. But learning like this doesn’t have to be confined to a classroom. Nor should it all be lost over the course of two and a half to three months.
While traditional summer school is beneficial for some students, summer learning does not have to mean spending all day inside a classroom or library. Summer activities are rife with real-world learning experiences that parents and communities can help convey: A swimming pool can teach students about buoyancy. The ocean waves can be a lesson in gravitational forces. A baseball game can teach about velocity and drag. Parents and children who enjoy baking together can turn the measurements into a math lesson on fractions. There are websites and apps, sites like Kahn Academy and PBS’ Design Squad, that provide engaging lessons and activities for kids. Many tools can be accessed at a community library if a computer is not available in the home. Parents can also take time to encourage their child to read, helping build not only reading comprehension and vocabulary skills, but also knowledge on topics that students find interesting.
Summer camps are another great way to continue student learning. Organizations like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, 4H, and local zoos or museums offer exciting and engaging opportunities for students. Project Lead The Way partners with the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Education Foundation to support Gateway Academy camps across the United States. This past summer, nearly 5,000 middle school students spent a week immersed in hands-on activities building knowledge on topics like programming, alternative energy, flight and space, fluid power, and the engineering design process.
Summer is also a terrific time for teachers to improve their craft by engaging in professional development—not the kind of professional development that teaches the latest fads in education, but rather the kind that focuses on how teachers can engage students in relevant learning. Continuous teacher training and learning is vital to student success. A number of universities offer formal summer courses. Nonprofit organizations like Project Lead The Way offer rigorous, in-depth resident training programs. And while Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have their supporters and opponents, a MOOC could be a great option for continuous teacher learning over the summer months.
Learning does not have to cease for the summer when the last class bell rings. Students, teachers and parents can have an enjoyable and relaxing summer, all while continuing the education process. The responsibility to continue learning during the summer rests with each one of us. When it comes to summer learning loss, we can change course. We can continuously improve, learn and engage, and have a great summer in the process.
We also must address the growing concern—more and more appreciated over the past few years—emphasizing teacher quality an
d compensation. As Michael Milken put it:
Once upon a time, U.S. college graduates near the top of their classes routinely entered the teaching profession. In fact, 90 percent of new American teachers in the early to mid-20th century came from the upper third of their classes. Today, it’s just 23 percent. Meanwhile, virtually 100 percent of teachers in Singapore, South Korea and Finland come from the top third of their graduating classes.96
And we now know that teacher quality is, after parent involvement, the single greatest factor in a child’s education. As Microsoft Founder Bill Gates has said, “the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. It is astonishing what great teachers can do for their students.”97 William Bennett cites two graphic studies that tell the whole tale:
[I]f you take an 8-year-old student performing at the 50th percentile and give him a low-performing teacher, he will regress to the 37th percentile in three years. Give him a high-performing teacher, and he will succeed to the 90th percentile in the same amount of time—a swing of 53 percentage points.98
And,
According to an analysis by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, if you replaced the lowest-performing teachers in our country (roughly 5% to 10% of the teaching work force) with just average performing teachers, America’s students as a whole would rise from the bottom of the performance ladder on international tests to a Top 10 ranking. What would this mean for our GDP, by the way? Tens of trillions of dollars.99
A recent McKinsey study backs up an important element of this as well: the professionalism and skills of our teacher workforce. Comparing us to countries like Finland, Singapore, and South Korea—countries that continually beat us—McKinsey has found: “The U.S. does not take a strategic or systematic approach to nurturing teaching talent. Buffeted by a chaotic mix of labor market trends, university economics, and local school district and budget dynamics, we have failed to attract, develop, reward or retain outstanding professional teaching talent on a consistent basis.”100 Those countries, “recruit, develop and retain…’top third’ students as one of their central education strategies, and they’ve achieved extraordinary results. These systems recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort, and then screen for other important qualities as well. In the U.S., by contrast, 23% of new teachers come from the top third and just 14% in high poverty schools.”101
Can we pay our good teachers more? Can we, once again, recruit from the top talent pool of college graduates to encourage and inspire entry into the teacher profession? Yes, we must—outside of the homeschooling community, we give our children to our nation’s teachers for large parts of nearly every weekday and we invest in our teachers a similar trust to take care of our children. Teachers should be treated as professionals, respected as such, and rewarded as such. Many teachers I know deserve and get that respect, but they do not get the reward. I can think of no greater priority for our country than to turn around the national, cultural, and economical view of what good and great teachers should be paid—not only presently but for purposes of recruitment into the field.
What would recruiting more good and great teachers cost us? Let me be clear: it would be a net gain to our state budgets and economy. As the McKinsey study found, if you took a large school district with half of its schools serving a high poverty population, to attract and then double the portion of “top third” new hires in the teaching profession, it would cost half of one percent of the state’s current K-12 spending.102 If you took the nation’s lowest-performing schools and applied the same recommended scenario “teachers would not pay for their initial training; high-needs schools would have effective principals and offer ongoing training comparable to the best professional institutions; districts would improve shabby and sometimes unsafe working conditions; the highest-performing teachers would receive performance bonuses of 20%; and the district or state would benefit from a marketing campaign promoting teaching as a profession,” it would cost even less, two-tenths of one percent of K-12 spending.103
And, as we have seen from programs like Teach for America, at least in the short term, top college students, with ongoing professional training, respect, and a clear mission, even with entry-level teaching salaries, can be recruited to go into our nation’s highest poverty schools. In fact, Teach for America rejects about 85 percent of its applicants.104
Compensation reform is not, of course, the panacea for teachers and satisfaction in their profession. As the annual MetLife survey of our nation’s teachers’ concerns shows, pay and salary are certainly important, but, as we know, most teachers do not go into the profession thinking about getting wealthy. Of equal or more importance to our nations’ teachers are factors such as “opportunities for professional development,” “time to collaborate with other teachers,” “reduction in resources,” and “concerns about job security.”105 I will talk more about this later with regard to PLTW’s practice and experience in these factors. In sum, they are critical.
Still, there can be no question: if we want a teaching workforce that is regarded as professional, we must commit to improving compensation—not only to retain our best but to recruit our best. And while most teachers today are highly committed to their profession, there is—as with any profession—a stratum of ineffective teachers that must be removed from the classroom. The net cost and pay off? As Erik Hanushek of Stanford has found, a replacement of just five to seven percent of our least effective teachers could yield a net result of “an increase in total U.S. economic output of $112 trillion in present value.”106 As Dr. Hanushek points out in his research, and, I think bears repeating, $112 trillion is not a typo.
At the same time, not all of our problems are in the classroom. There is a cultural and familial dimension as well. Our national household spending priorities simply do not match the countries we are up against. As Michael Milken has pointed out, using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, the average Asian family spends about 15 percent of its disposable income on education while the average American family spends just two percent.107 We beat Asia in disposable income spending on other things, of course, like transportation, entertainment, and housing—we tend to spend more on those, but not education. As Thomas Friedman once put it: “In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears, in America Britney Spears is Britney Spears.”108 The point is, we get what we honor and esteem, and in Asia education is simply more honored and esteemed than in America.
And, of course, difficult family structures in America do not help. In fact, they not only compete with what we increasingly expect of teachers in the classroom but reams of social science research back up the predictability of educational attainment based on those structures. One study put it this way: “Compared with peers in intact families, children in single-parent families, stepparent families, or non-parent guardian families scored, on average, lower on math and science achievement tests, according to a large international survey. Family resources (e.g., number of books in the home, number of possessions, immigrant status, and household size) only partially explained the relationship between family structure and math and science achievement.”109 If the teacher is the second greatest influence on a child’s learning, second to a parent, it only makes sense that children with both parents at home, engaged in their children’s learning, will make a dramatic difference compared to children without those advantages and support structures.
Unfortunately, we cannot easily or immediately change family structure or several other cultural factors that lead to our STEM and other educational challenges. But we can change our national educational priorities, thinking, and structures. And, we can trade in what does not work for what does. What does not work? Let us start with persistence of students in STEM majors in U.S. colleges and universities. Recall that shrinking number of students that do go on to STEM-related coursework at the post-secondary level, that enter STEM-related fields of study as college freshman? Some forty to sixty percent of those students transition to othe
r fields in what has been called the “math-science death march;” and, yes, this even takes place at some of our nation’s most selective colleges and universities.110
The reasons for the “death march” are many, starting with students’ lack of preparation and ability. Other experts—and students—report on the dry nature of the field of study while still others point to the comparative ease in the liberal arts and humanities: “the proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, which provides another incentive for students to leave STEM majors. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair,”111 is how one education reporter puts it. One student profiled recently had an 800 score on the math portion of his SAT and over 700 on the reading and writing portions. He was heavily recruited in engineering. By his sophomore year he left the field: “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well… It was just like, ‘Do these practice problems, and then you’re on your own.’”112 A fan of poetry and of a psychology course he took his freshman year, he switched to a double major in psychology and English. Those classes, he said, “were a lot more discussion based.”113
I see this phenomenon repeatedly. Part of the problem is grade inflation and the relative ease of the soft or softer sciences. And a large part of the problem is the dryness of the coursework—not enough design and interactive projects and simulations. But another large part of the problem was captured well by a psychology professor, Steven Pinker at Harvard—pointing to the lack of interdisciplinary connectedness between the sciences and liberal arts. “The great thinkers of the age of reason and the Enlightenment were scientists,” Pinker writes, pointing to such intellectual giants as Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others:114