On November 23, President Obama announced a new initiative called “Educate to Innovate,” which is designed to increase the interest of “young people” in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). The president described his plan to “harness the power of media, interactive games, hands-on learning” and to host high-visibility events, such as a White House science fair. Linked to the “Race to the Top” (RTT) initiative, which is aimed more broadly at improving education, this new initiative creates a two-pronged effort for building the future STEM workforce.
The new initiative is a good idea, and linking it to RTT is essential. To the extent that Educate to Innovate works, more American students will enter the STEM pipeline while RTT seeks to fix the now-broken pipeline. In theory, these two initiatives will work together to ensure that as more students become interested in STEM they can develop the needed skills.
While we can imagine that the high visibility of the Educate to Innovate program might be effective, it is more difficult to imagine that the RTT program, which after all is a short-term infusion of money, will lead to systematic, long-term, and sustained improvements in the STEM pipeline.
There are many reasons for concern:
First, as many have noted, the actual math and science skills of American K-12 students are lower than those of almost all our competitors. This is evident in how poorly our students fare in TIMSS and PISA, the two largest international math and science assessments. While our fourth-grade students have made strong gains over the last 15 years on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), in the most recent assessment, in 2009, scores were flat compared to 2007. Gains by our eighth-grade students have been far slower. On Long Term NAEP, our 17-year-old students score the same as their counterparts of the early and mid-1970s.
The lack of student skills traces back, at least in part, to a uniquely American (and uniquely bad) math curriculum, which differs from the curricula of almost every other country that outperforms us. Our curriculum is “a mile wide and an inch deep”—contributing to our students’ failure to develop cumulative math skills. In addition, math and science teachers in earlier grades far too often have deficient skills and lack the knowledge and love of these subjects.
If we don’t fix the curriculum and upgrade the teacher workforce, any increase in student interest in STEM becomes meaningless. Educate to Innovate could simply produce more students who think they can do STEM and then discover that mastering a video game (“Oh my god, I’m at level 27 of that cool STEM video game, so I must be a scientist!”) does not translate into mastering the universe of calculus or biology.
Finally, both RTT and the Educate to Innovate initiative miss the mark on one basic point: if our goal is to increase the STEM workforce, then we must remember that a STEM worker is not a 17-year-old high-school student who has taken an additional math or science course and professes an interest in science or math.
STEM workers usually hold degrees or certificates in science, technology, engineering, or math from post-secondary institutions. Again the signs portend ill. Large numbers of American students who enter community colleges must take remedial math, and a smaller but not insignificant number of students entering four-year institutions start with similar deficiencies. Many students with these deficiencies never complete their programs.
Further, far too many post-secondary institutions are not in the business of “growing” STEM students, but instead are in the business of “sorting and discarding” students who enter with an interest in STEM. In many institutions, calculus, organic chemistry, and similar courses are designed as “wash courses,” with the explicit task of ending the science or math careers of large numbers of students. These courses are taught in large lecture halls and coupled with recitation sections often lead by foreign graduate students in a system designed to discourage, rather than encourage, students. Many who start off with an interest in STEM get grades of C or below in these courses, effectively ending their STEM studies and careers. Far too many would-be physical scientists end up as political scientists.
Certainly, we don’t want engineers unable to perform calculus, but our colleges and universities have the responsibility to teach students who are interested in STEM, using better teaching techniques. If Educate to Innovate works as intended and more students actually start college interested in STEM, colleges and universities must be ready to properly educate them.
The administration’s new initiative may fatten the STEM pipeline, but today that pipe is broken in many places. The Race to the Top initiative is a short-term funding stream that is likely to be forgotten before today’s young people who may be exposed to the new Educate to Innovate initiative have completed the five, ten, or more years it takes to turn a young student into a STEM worker. We need more consistent long-term commitment to improving the quality of America’s teachers and curriculum rather than new flashy initiatives.