Poor Science education is back in the news

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation issued a press release yesterday announcing a 75 page report on the state of math and science education in the US. To the surprise of no one who has been following the topic for the last couple years, the public schools in most states are doing a poor job. This has been picked up by a number of people and organizations. For example the Education Wonks and the New York Times have mentioned the report. Joanne Jacobs (coincidentally?) had a post yesterday about how the United States is losing its technological edge.

This was a fun line in the report:

"Some states—notably A-rated California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Virginia—produced exceptional academic standards documents that, if followed in the classroom, would result in excellent science programs." (The emphasis is mine.)

So some states have high standards, but they don't always result in excellent programs. But at least we have the standards! It seems to me that the focus should be on are the children being taught. If they aren't mastering the basics of math and science then everything else is just noise.

There is a push for high standards with the claim that by having high standards you have a chance of public schools delivering a quality education. It seems to me that standards are only loosely connected to the quality of the education. You could have average standards, and with good teachers have a decent education in science and math.

The report hammers on those who push "discovery learning" a method of trying to get children to discover for themselves what it took years for Newton, Einstein and others to figure out. It would be wonderful if we had a generation of children who could rediscover all the breakthroughs that have been made in science over the last several centuries, but this is an unrealistic expectation. Children need to be taught the laws of motion, not asked to figure them out on their own.

Cheri Prerson Yecke made an interesting point in her book The War Against Excellence: The Rising Tide Of Mediocrity In America's Middle Schools that public schools today put a great deal of emphasis on helping those with mental challenges to do their best, while often ignoring the gifted children, or giving them token support. I think the funding for the bottom 3% was 15 times more than the funding for the top 3%. Cheri Yecke documents how many teachers treat gifted children with contempt. If we are going to produce a generation of competent adults who have a good foundation in math and science, it would help if the teachers would have a better attitude towards those who could be our next generation of scientists.

In some ways this didn't really feel like news, I remember reading about how America responded to the launching of Sputnik by the USSR in 1957 by similar calls to action. Many Americans attacked public education as doing a poor job in preparing students in math and science. During the 1970s in response to Japan's powerhouse economy there was also similar condemnations of the poor job public schools were doing. Public schools have long been doing a poor job; this is not new.

The sad thing is this is not a simple problem. People have been working on it for decades and it hasn't improved. Having a solid background in math and science would help our children to have a better life. Fortunately we as parents can take steps to make sure our children have a solid background. If enough of us homeschool, it will greatly help our nation.