Arts & Letters Daily sent me to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the headline How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science. “Hey,” I thought, “Good to see this issue getting some more attention.” And, indeed, the article starts off well enough, with a decent statement of the problems in science education:
Back in 2003, the National Science Board issued a report that noted steep declines in “graduate enrollments of U.S. citizens and permanent residents” in the sciences. The explanation? “Declining federal support for research sends negative signals to interested students.” That seems unlikely, in that the alleged decline hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of students from all around the world for our country’s graduate programs.
The precipitous drop in American science students has been visible for years. In 1998 the House released a national science-policy report, “Unlocking Our Future,” that fussily described “a serious incongruity between the perceived utility of a degree in science and engineering by potential students and the present and future need for those with training.”
Sadly, though, the author is from the right-wing National Association of Scholars, so the article goes completely off the rails soon after that. The problem, you see, is that math and science are hard, and our students are coddled from an early age, and thus don’t have the old-fashioned gumption to tackle math and science:
The antiscience agenda is visible as early as kindergarten, with its infantile versions of the diversity agenda and its early budding of self-esteem lessons. But it complicates and propagates all the way up through grade school and high school. In college it often drops the mask of diffuse benevolence and hardens into a fascination with “identity.”
You know what would really help science education? If quasi-official academic journals like the Chronicle would start thinking about it as more than another venue for warmed-over culture-wars horseshit. That’d be an excellent start.
Of course, that might require people to engage with the actual problems of science education. The solution is straightforward, but unpopular.
I agree that students are being turned off from science, but the problem isn’t “self-esteem” or “identity”– the problem is bad teaching at the early levels. And that comes about because many of the people who go into teaching are not comfortable with math and science, and that discomfort comes through. They do a lousy job presenting math and science to students, and it turns those students off.
The problem is, people who are actually good with math and science can make five times the money with one fifth the hassle by doing something other than teaching science to kids. If we want to improve the quality of science students in this country, we need to improve the quality of science teachers, and that’s going to cost money– money for training better teachers, and money to make teaching a more attractive option to them.
Of course, any solution that costs money is Right Out, especially for jackass right-wing pundits, so instead we get this twaddle about character and attitude and spiritual renewal. Which, coincidentally, just happens to involve discarding a bunch of progressive concerns about race and gender that conservatives find distasteful.
(Which is not to say that jackass liberal pundits have vastly better ideas– it’s just that they haven’t written any stupid columns in the Chronicle that caught my attention recently.)
There are a few things that could be done to improve the situation without a huge infusion of cash, though, mostly having to do with working conditions. As regular readers of this blog have heard a zillion times, my father taught sixth grade for thirty-odd years in a public school, and his experience has shaped a lot of my opinions about education issues. It also kept me from even considering the idea of teaching below the college level.
It’s not just the money– my salary as a first-year assistant professor was not vastly better than what they pay high school physics teachers in this state. There’s all the other stuff that goes along with public school teaching. There is no campus committee assignment I could draw that is anywhere near as unpleasant as having to ride herd over a cafeteria full of hormonal teenagers. Especially given the way discipline issues tend to be handled (or, rather, not handled) these days.
There are things that could be done to improve the working environment to make things more pleasant for teachers, starting on the discipline side. A depressing amount of bullying and harassment are tolerated because it’s easier to slap the kids on the wrist and send them back to class than to remove them from the classroom and deal with their parents. Get the worst of the kids out of the schools, and things will improve for students and teachers alike.
But, in the end, it comes down to money, even on the working-conditions side (reducing class sizes is another big issue): teachers are not paid enough for the education they require. Particularly in the sciences– if you’re good at science, and interested in teaching, you’re better off going to a Ph.D. program than an MAT program. It won’t cost you anything, and even if you don’t make it in the academic job market, you’ll be qualified for jobs that pay a whole lot better than teaching.
That’s the core of the problem. We’re raising students who are bad at science because we have teachers who are bad at science, because we aren’t willing to do what it takes to get people with strong science backgrounds into education. And, of course, we tolerate this because of the “math is hard” culture of innumeracy that I ranted about last week.
A couple of thoughts:
1) Producing science PhDs and broadly educating everyone in science are two completely different issues, and shouldn’t be jumbled together.
2) If there was a steep decline in science and engineering PhDs in the late 90’s, the likeliest explanation seems to me to be that people lost interest in working their brains out for a graduate stipend when anyone who could type “#!/usr/bin/perl” could get a high-paying job, with the chance of an enormous payoff to come.
Not that that worked out so well for the people who went that route in 2001, but it seems like a much more plausible explanation than self-esteem, creationism, War On Science!!!, or whatever other bogeyman people wish to flog.
I agree with your main points. I worry that the lack of respect commanded by teachers (and the resulting lack of pay, so that the best-and-brightest have much less incentive to go into science teaching) is a symptom, though, of the larger lack of respect for science overall in the US. It’s not hard to convince an eight year old that science is cool and fun. Try convincing a 16 year old of that, though, when any interest in science or math is seen as nerdy and a massive social detriment. I wish I had suggestions for how to fix this.
Several years ago, one of our geology majors switched to primary education. She couldn’t convince the education department to count any upper-level geology classes as electives. She was frustrated, and I was annoyed.
I guess that means that I need to do a better job of making my intro students think like scientists.
I have to say that while what you said does make some sense, I don’t think that’s really it. It does seem that especially east-asian countries (i.e. china, korea, etc.) have far more people interested in doing physics let’s say (not per capita, but per graduate-level student). And I’ve certainly never had any of my friends from those places claim that good high-school and below teachers had anything to do with it. I’d be amazed if their teachers were any better then the ones here.
There is simply a somewhat different emphasis in the culture, like Doug was alluding to – which leads to science both not being cool, and nobody understanding the huge value of it in this country. While I don’t think science is cool pretty much anywhere, the fact that it’s important seems to be alot clearer in some other countries. Whereas in the US, like you pointed out “math is hard we can’t do it” is apparently an OK attitude to have.
WWII soldiers had little need to shave. Puberty is now 12 years of age and younger. Put a brothel on every high school and college campus plus a barrel of free condoms by every exit. With that out of the way… Detect, select, and cherish the top 1% Gifted. They are the future. Pouring $6+ billion/year into Head Start buys reproductive appetites. Why purchase when the product imports itself gratis?
Ignore Enviro-whiners, social advocates, and political operatives when making important decisions. There are no Christian Rydberg atoms. Never vote with the stupid – an idiot is not half way to being an idiot-savant.
Was that so hard?
While I completely agree that something needs to be done to attract better science teachers, I also think that it isn’t the whole (or even the main) problem.
I attend science teacher association conferences, and a large number of the sessions I attend (and exhibits I see in the exhibit hall) seem to be focused on how to “engage” and “entertain” students.
Since when is it the teacher’s job to make school easy? In my opinion, a much bigger problem is that kids in this country are taught (directly and indirectly) that they are ENTITLED to whatever they want; that if something is hard or they don’t get it right away, it’s someone else’s fault.
I think the #1 thing we can do to improve the state of science education in this country is teach kids to take responsibility for their own learning. Of course, having a good teacher helps. But a student who is responsible for his or her own learning will succeed even with a poor teacher.
I think you have a very valid point regarding working conditions. To be honest, the primary thing that makes me hesitant to consider teaching anywhere pre-college is how awful school was for me. As passionate as I am about science, I fear the problems in our educational system run much, much deeper than not being having enough well-prepared students taking physics.
Also, Peter Wood… has an appropriate name (well, “Pricky McPrickster” would work too).
The article says ‘oh noes! Poor Wittle Larry Summers got kicked out of Harvard for having the audacity to suggest innate differences might play a role in disparities women in science face’- an idea with “a great deal of neurological evidence” supporting it… but when someone says “Asian students are just better at science and math”, they are putting forth a cop-out. That’s just “a comfort zone of rationalizations”.
So, acording to Wood, it would appear that women’s lack of success at the highest levels of math and science is obviously because they are neurologically deficient, but relatively successful Asians are attributable to apathy of (white) “homegrown American students”, who aren’t trying hard enough because they’ve been whimpified by the New Educational Order!11eleventy!!
It’s one thing to be wrong, another thing to be hypocritical, still enough to do both simultaneously while contradicting your own arguments. FAIL!
I was lucky, I had great science teachers who had the right materials to work with in order to teach. It still was not ideal. Class sizes were always larger for the science courses than say English or Social Studies. That is a problem. You also have the fact two years of science courses were required compared to 4 years of English LIt. and 3.5 of Social Studies. It sends a message as to what is important in our society. You expect less and give worse conditions to learn in, guess what you are going to favor people not staying interested in science. As pointed out, salary is not enough. Teaching conditions have to be right as well.
Top public schools attract great teachers but until science education is still valued to the same level as other disciplines there is going to be an inequality. In poorer districts this gets even worse as there aren’t the resources to teach science properly. You then get into the really poor districts and you are dealing with the full effects of poverty (poor nutrition, lead exposure, and the like) and you have many students who are not into the right frame of mind to really learn (and understandably so) let alone schools with the resources to teach science & retain top teachers. To deal with that you have to actually address poverty in this nation (which I am afraid to say neither major party seems really interested in doing that).
Yes, that exactly. I wanted to teach from the age of 7 or so, wanted to teach kids science from high school until the summer before my senior year, when I did some undergraduate research at a big university. There I discovered that grad students in the sciences get paid to go to school, and that being good at science meant I could get paid a heck of a lot more without babysitting nearly as often.
I still love teaching, but now I get to do it for fun while also having a nice stable well-paying job.
You are 100% right about working conditions. Just look at how many ed grads never teach after one stint at student teaching. Ditto for differential pay. Anathema from both political wings.
Science teaching has little to do with it, at least not science teaching below the HS level. I can’t think of anything positive or negative about science that came from my K-8 curriculum, nor from what I see today.
Math, on the other hand …
Math is a disaster and the cause is that so many el-ed majors hate math and can’t do it, coupled with the awful curriculum and teaching that got them to hate it in the first place. The difference in Asia is that they teach math, including problem solving.
As one who fought through the advice of countless people who advised me that there were few actual jobs available for people with bachelor’s degrees in physics, I graduated and found that there were few actual jobs available for people with degrees in physics. It appears that the AIP statistics must include those who get dual-degrees (physics+engineering, physics+xyz), although they haven’t said one way or the other.
Vanishingly few hiring companies respond with “Oh, good, a physics degree. That is exactly what we’re looking for!” Rather than being an asset, it is a liability to be explained away in cover letters and interviews. “Yes, I earned a physics degree–let me show you how that is applicable to ACTUAL work.” When in competition for an engineering-related position, it doesn’t matter if you are flexible and well-educated as a physics major, if you are competing against people with directly applicable engineering and technology degrees.
Maybe it would be better if we would work from the top down–what physics-related jobs exist, and what credentials and degrees are required to get there? Don’t just offer them a list of majors. Choose a career path, not a major.
Yes, this goes against the traditional model of university education, but the fact is that even the universities insist that you have a good job right out of college–else they wouldn’t be demanding their loans be repaid at the end of a short grace.
“… found that there were few actual jobs available for people with degrees in physics…” An acquaintance recently graduated from UCI with a PhD in astrophysics. He has yet to land a job.
“The antiscience agenda is visible as early as kindergarten…”. Isn’t that the case? I’ve read more than a few articles on how math is taught by the “discovery method”; where a student comes in with a better solution to a problem, and perhaps the teacher hasn’t seen it, and the student gets marked down for not “following the book”; how the “self-esteem” thing seems to say that it doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, just as long as you feel good about it. Admittedly, these are all second-hand reports, but it does seem to be a good explanation of why our students do so badly in science and math, and why math seems to have a cultural connotation of being “hard” – something only nerds can understand.