Reinventing STEM: A Renewed Focus
CAN A RENEWED FOCUS ON STEM DISCIPLINES IN TODAY’S EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM MAKE THE UNITED STATES MORE ECONOMICALLY COMPETITIVE AND BRING US THE TECHNOLOGICAL UTOPIA WE BELIEVE IT CAN?
It’s a sunny morning in 2112.
You are sipping a cafe macchiato in the breakfast nook of your home, newly refurbished with building materials made out of re-engineered garbage. Before driving your driverless Google car downtown, you check your mail on the LED iTable to look over the latest iteration of a video game you and your three colleagues—in Shanghai, Haifa and Rio—are working on. Better jot down your to-do’s before the four of you meet next week in Vancouver: Take digital x-ray of teeth and forward scan to dentist. Clean house with virus-operated home cleaning system. Set aside a few hours to visit grandmother in Chicago to see how she is recuperating from a titanium jaw implant.
Only a digital optimist who rarely questions the limits of technology would have total faith in this Jetsons-like portrait of life a hundred years hence. Most of us understand that the road to tomorrow is littered with unforeseen obstacles: Disease. Economic downturns. Magical thinking. Political and social polarization. Yet most of us would travel down that path rather than remain in “simpler” times of inevitable crop failures and untreatable pandemics.
It goes without saying that the developed world has embraced the benefits of an economy driven by science, technology, engineering and mathematics—the STEM disciplines. That bond will only grow tighter as forces align to create a truly global economy dependent on such issues as infrastructure development and energy production.
It’s the world American children will largely help to create, and future generations will inhabit. Yet every-day media and think tank experts tell us that as the workplace becomes even more high-tech, we are in danger of losing our jobs to higher skilled workers, especially in Asia. Indeed, media reports inform us that as many as 3.2 million jobs have gone unfilled for lack of qualified applicants. Has the United States really reached the point where its workers do not have the education and training to do the work of a high-tech society?
Are we in fact hamstringing our citizens with schools incapable of educating us for a new tomorrow?
Are we in the United States, along with a foundering Europe, becoming, as essayist Gore Vidal once wrote, “irrelevant to the world that matters”?
The answers may surprise you.
Illustrations by Jack Hudson
WE’VE HEARD THIS ALL BEFORE AND LIVED TO TELL ABOUT IT
Richard Rothstein, who studies educational policy at the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, has suggested that panicking over dismal school performance is an American pastime.
In 1896, for example, the Harvard Board of Overseers “published samples of freshman writing to embarrass secondary schools” and complained that there was “no conceivable justification for using the revenues of Harvard College” to instruct undergraduates who were unprepared for college work. And political theorist Hannah Arendt complained in 1954 that “the recurring crisis in [American] education…during the last decade at least, has become a political problem of the first magnitude, reported on almost daily in the newspapers.”
The most serious warning about American education came in 1983 when the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform. Former U.S. Secretary of Education T.H. Bell created the commission in response to the “widespread perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” Pause to consider that A Nation at Risk came out 25 years after the National Defense Education Act of 1958 poured millions of dollars into education, especially in mathematics, largely in response to the Soviets’ lead in the space race.
By the early 1980s, the nascent computing industry was hiring computer programmers, database specialists, mathematicians, artificial intelligence logicians and software engineers, many of whom had benefited from the government’s commitment to math and science education. Despite the resulting influx of trained workers into the Internet economy, however, many well-meaning pundits reminded us again with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top that the U.S. had to redouble its efforts to improve schools.
Critics have argued rightly that the genius who invents the light bulb or the personal computer is not proof of a superior educational system. Such individuals will always find a way to work with like-minded talents. The problem, they say, is that American students today are performing worse on math and science tests than their counterparts around the world. Just as problematic is the purported decrease in interest in the STEM subjects. All this despite the many education initiatives, academic studies and government reports detailing the system’s flaws and offering up fixes.
“These sorts of assertions about American education are not new. They’re not unique to this particular economy or geopolitical mess,” says Alex Wiseman, an associate professor of comparative and international education at Lehigh University’s College of Education. “They are actually pretty stable characteristics of educational reform and educational commentary for the past 100 years.”
“I think one of Rothstein’s big arguments is, there never was the golden era of American education that people now seem to say we’ve lost, or that we’re entering into some sort of new crisis,” adds Wiseman. “We seem to exist in a media state of crisis about our education system, and that’s very unfortunate.”
The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce set out to analyze what was diverting students from the STEM path. It wrote in a 2011 report that even students enrolled in STEM majors tend to steer away from related careers. For one, those majors can earn more over their lifetimes in some non-STEM occupations. And STEM workers with bachelor and master’s degrees may start out with high-wage STEM jobs after college, but often leave for more lucrative managerial and professional occupations. The Center’s authors wonder who will fill the 1.1 million net new STEM jobs and the 1.3 million STEM job openings to replace workers who permanently leave the workforce between 2008 and 2018.
An examination of U.S. Census Bureau statistics on the number of students graduating with science and engineering degrees, however, tells a somewhat different story.
According to U.S. Census Bureau tabulations, 502,561 students in 2009 received a bachelor’s degree in science and engineering. This number was up from 399,686 in 2000. Female recipients outnumbered male recipients by 3,071 and 4,032, respectively.
The same holds true for advanced degrees. In 2009, almost 40,000 more master’s degrees—and nearly 7,500 more doctoral degrees—were conferred in STEM fields than in 2000.
When the definition of “science and engineering” degrees included physics, earth sciences, mathematics, computer sciences, biological sciences, agricultural sciences, social sciences and psychology, the numbers are even stronger. So why are observers of the U.S. educational system worried that we are falling behind in the STEM subjects?
Perhaps they don’t see just how diverse our educational pipeline is. “There is a tremendous amount of variation here. A lot of that is a product of the fact that we have the most decentralized education system in the world—almost 14,000 independent school districts,” says Wiseman. “And by independent, I truly mean that we tend to think that there is a national education system—and there really isn’t.”
Renewing the Focus on STEM
COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING, WE’RE DOING JUST FINE
Their concern comes from apparently poor scores in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which measures fourth- and eighth-grade math and science knowledge. Thirty-six countries are included in the fourth-grade rankings, while 48 countries are included in the eighth-grade rankings. In 2007, the American math scores for Grades 4 and 8 were above average (529, 508), but students elsewhere in the world scored higher: Fourth-grade students in Hong Kong scored 607, while eighth-grade students in Chinese Taipei scored 598.
Another test, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), measures the “literacy” of 15-year-old students in mathematics, reading and science. The most recent data is from 2009, when 65 education systems participated. Our Asian counter.parts again routinely scored above the average 500 in math and science.
The United States? A 502 in science. A shocking 487 in math.
“If you looked at these numbers out of context, you would have to conclude that the U.S. is falling behind,” says Wiseman. “But many educators are looking at the same data sources—TIMSS and PISA—and observing that we have students performing at the highest levels in the world.”
It may appear that countries with high-stakes testing, such as Japan, Singapore, South Korean and China, are faring far better than American students. But Wiseman says that’s not the whole story.
“We don’t have the kind of system where only students who test well on standardized tests get to participate in TIMSS and PISA,” Wiseman says. “Students across our entire educational spectrum, from suburban high schools to inner city schools, take these tests.
“The real question is, would we want to live in a country that focuses on the academic skills only of the top scorers on standardized tests?” Wiseman asks. “The argument that I’m making is that other countries are producing students that are very good at taking tests. They’re very good at it. Because they have to be.”
“Our students do not have to be good at taking tests,” he says. “We don’t have a system that is like that. We have a system that is full of second chances.”
The TIMSS and PISA test designers themselves offer up a caveat that points to at least one inherent problem in the tests: “The content represented by the scale scores is not the same across different ages within a subject domain.” In other words, a test given in Singapore may be significantly different from a test given in the United States.
Even if we take international rankings with a grain of salt, what should we conclude about test scores inside the United States that have fallen over time?
David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, educators who have studied the drop in Graduate Record Exam (GRE) scores from 1965 to the early 1970s, note that the percentage of students who took the test during that period actually doubled. “Since 1971 the percentage of students taking the GRE has not varied greatly, but average GRE scores have gradually risen,” they write in The Manufactured Crisis, Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. “What this means is that average total GRE scores are now roughly the same as they were in the 1960s—despite the fact that the percentage of students taking the GRE now is more than twice it was a generation ago.”
The same story applies for the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), and the Medical College Admission Test (GMAT). This discrepancy between perception and truth is being debated in smaller education circles.
Concerned about an unscientific comparison between the U.S. and high-stakes educational systems in the Far East, for example, a group of superintendents in Chicago formed a consortium of districts “committed to providing a world-class education for their students.”
In the 1990s, the First in the World (FiW) Consortium consisted of a relatively homogeneous group of students—comparable to the test groups in Shanghai, Korea and Japan. Nearly four out of five students (78 percent) were white, non-Hispanic.
Using TIMSS testing as a baseline measure, FiW students did “exceptionally well” in fourth- and eighth-grade math tests and the twelfth-grade advanced math and physics tests. In fact, only Singapore scored higher than FiW in fourth- and eighth-grade math. Only South Korea scored as well as FiW in fourth-grade science.
Only in twelfth-grade advanced math physics did a significant number of countries score higher than FiW students.
Michael Lach, former special assistant for STEM education in the U.S. Department of Education, suggests that, “FiW results indicate that our most advantaged kids are absolutely competitive. But the kids on the South Side and the West Side of Chicago are not competitive because of the social and economic inequalities that frame their educational experience.”
Lach’s explanation may strike some observers of American education as an excuse for low test scores. But educators point to more than anecdotal evidence in the success of various inner city schools—schools that have strengthened their entire curriculum for the purpose of enhancing the students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills, not for the purpose of taking international tests.
“If you looked at these numbers out of context, you would have to conclude that the U.S. is falling behind but many educators are looking at the same data sources and observing that we have students performing at the highest levels in the world."
Dr. Alexander Wiseman
IT’S TIME TO INFUSE STEM WITH A GEOPOLITICAL CURRICULUM
While the American education system is not experiencing the crisis that critics allege, educators and policymakers do need to acknowledge the need for a sensible emphasis on STEM education. “The fact is that other countries, like China, like India, wanted to understand how the U.S. became an economic powerhouse, and they concluded that science and math were responsible,” says Linda Rosen, CEO of Change the Equation, a non-profit organization that is mobilizing the business community to improve STEM education.
“They focused on the K-12 pipeline to produce a population of their own citizens that was strong in these subjects,” she says. Understanding the needs of the business community is critical, says Lynn Columba, an associate professor of teaching, learning and technology at College of Education at Lehigh.
“It’s important for those of us in the classroom to know what companies are looking for. There’s something called the SCANS Report. It’s from employers and what characteristics they want in their employees. The top two things they want are problem solving and communication skills. Right up there is being a team player,” says Columba. “All these skills are things we can teach in the math classroom.”
In keeping with the conviction that one size does not fit all, educators, corporate CEOs and researchers in every academic discipline are proposing technology tools, curricula and even public boarding schools to help students acquire the critical thinking and problem-solving skills they will need to compete in a globally integrated economy. And while people can only guess at the type of jobs that might exist a hundred years from now, the future workplace will require workers and entrepreneurs whose greatest asset is the critical thinking skills they learned not only in their STEM classes, but also in their social studies, foreign language, philosophy and English classes.
The curriculum in a math and science-focused educational system has not neglected reading —largely because of No Child Left Behind testing requirements— but educators say it should be about much more than basic literacy.
“We’ve gotten where we are today due to our applications of math and science education,” says Thomas Hammond, an assistant professor of teaching, learning and technology at Lehigh’s College of Education, who has focused much of his research on the use of technology in social studies instruction. “Most of our big societal problems come out of our lack of social studies knowledge."
“For example, I wouldn’t say we have a healthcare crisis on our hands because we have insufficiently well-trained doctors, technicians and researchers. We have a crisis of rising costs and access because we do not have a political system to effectively deal with it.”
And that draws attention to the inherent flaws in such a highly focused, STEM-driven curriculum. “A concern is that STEM is giving us a false sense of security,” says Hammond. “It crowds out the other competing goods. Every good economist will tell you, there’s an opportunity cost to everything. As we focus more and more on STEM, what is the opportunity cost? What are we crowding out by focusing more on those disciplines?”
Hammond argues that, if it is implemented properly, STEM could open up opportunities to study the history of industrialism and new technologies, and the shift away from imperialism and the economic ascendance of the developing world. He sees a chance to truly study how influential writers such as Henry David Thoreau, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, Ayn Rand, Arthur Miller and David Mamet can lend credence to a critique or affirmation of American business principles. (See article on page 9.)
Lach agrees. “Educators have been saying for years that No Child Left Behind promoted a narrowing of the curriculum. We want to push for a well-rounded education that combines STEM and the humanities.”
Time to Infuse STEM with a Geopolitical Curriculum
WHEN SUCCESS IS CONTINGENT ON TEACHER TRAINING
Is American education in need of reform? Yes—but not because the whole system is broken.
The separation of knowledge into distinct disciplines—mathematics, chemistry, social studies, English—might have made sense before the advent of predictive analytics, which requires a deep understanding of statistics and data mining. It may have also made sense before the study of economics required as much intimate knowledge of household buying habits, global warming, game theory and many other phenomena that have an impact on poverty and wealth.
Columba, author of The Power of Picture Books in Teaching Math and Science: Grades PreK-8, says that the most effective STEM education will be cross-disciplinary. “Students learn math and science by making connections and by integrating concepts and procedures. Outside of school, we do not compartmentalize thinking as just math or science. Problems in the real world are always multidimensional—historical, cultural, sociological, economical, political, technological and anthropological.”
Restructuring education so that it looks more like an interdisciplinary high-tech workplace must be high on the reform agenda. Columba insists teachers can lead that charge.
“Today, teachers are preparing students for jobs that have yet to be created,” she says. “The proliferation of information has created an information-knowledge gap. No one person can know everything about a particular content area.”
Columba believes teachers need to guide their students so that they’re better equipped to solve tomorrow’s challenges. “Since information and knowledge are significantly different, teachers today have to rethink what it means ‘to know’ so that new ideas will emerge. The best teachers are lifelong learners who are willing to explore innovative teaching strategies and methods in addition to acting on current research in the classroom.”
This problem is that school districts across America, regardless of their demographics, are having a very difficult time recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers. The problem is exacerbated by a changing workforce: Since there are fewer STEM teachers in the pipeline, schools are often under pressure to replace mathematics and science teachers.
“Significant professional development that is sustained over time, addresses specific needs, and is part of a supportive work environment in which teachers feel valued, will result in meaningful outcomes and a positive effect on retention of STEM teachers,” Columba argues.
Rethinking the obsession with testing must be part of that agenda too. As Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, and many others discovered in studying the effects of the Blueprint initiative, a school day full of reading and math drills is a joyless affair—for teachers and students alike.
Blueprint was an educational reform plan originally implemented in New York City’s District 2 system and later adapted by the San Diego Unified School District. Two years into San Diego’s reform program, mathematics was added along with reading as a core subject. Teachers who objected to the Blueprint methodology were fired. More than a third of the district’s teachers left between 1998 and 2005, and some 90 percent of the district’s principals were replaced. Ravitch has said she was surprised to learn that curriculum never even entered into the Blueprint plan.
Blueprint did not result in any long-lasting or favorable educational outcomes. And it’s unlikely that the command and control managerial style that imposed the plan on unwilling principals, teachers and students is one that would have inspired the creative risk-taking that brought an Apple or an Amazon to life.
Finally, looking at American schools in isolation—without acknowledging the impact of the current recession, the $1 trillion in student loans and especially the shifting labor and resource requirements of a behemoth we now call the globally integrated enterprise—unreasonably asks schools to shoulder the burden of an educational system in need of sensitively wrought change. The many business-education partnerships throughout the U.S. attest to the anxiety that educators and business have over what the future holds for the American workforce. But it also expresses their determination to help us prepare for the best of what our idealized future has to offer.
The changes American education is undergoing as it struggles to incorporate intelligent problem-solving and critical thinking into the curriculum will not come over night. “This notion that we have to be poised and ready to continue learning in any way that we can means that the unknown future is not scary but rather exhilarating,” says Change the Equation’s Linda Rosen.
It takes courage to look ahead and not know exactly what’s coming, but keep learning just the same. This is what American education does—and always has done.