The National Science Board has released a draft report for public comment titled "A National Action Plan for Addressing the Critical Needs of the U.S. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education System." You can dowload the PDF of the report from that page, and email any comments to: NSB_STEMaction@nsf.gov.
I've only skimmed the report, so I won't be sending comments in any time soon, but if I were to make a snap suggestion, it would be that they re-order their suggestions to reflect the usefulness of the recommendations.
They have a helpful one-sentence summary of their two "priority recommendations to the Nation" (apparently, they're sometimes the German at the National Science Board):
First, ensure coherence in the nations STEM education system, and second, ensure that students are taught by well-qualified and highly effective teachers.
These seem to be backwards to me, at least priority-wise-- I realize that they're probably correctly ordered if the goal is to put them in order of likelihood. But really, I think that the teacher issue is the more important one, by far. If you make sure that students are being taught by teachers who are both "well-qualified" and "highly effective," then the coherence issues will take care of themselves.
And yet, we get 11 pages of the report detailing new bureaucratic structures and initiative for "coordination" of science standards, compared to only 4 pages suggesting ideas to improve the quality of teachers. And really, the only suggestions that really matter are numbers 1) and 2) under section B.1 of the report, on page 19 in the Recommendations section:
1. Provide Resources to Increase STEM Teacher Compensation
2. Provide Resources for Future STEM Teacher Preparation
Of course, I suppose it doesn't take a great deal of ink and paper to explain those-- if you put more money into science teaching, you will get better science teachers. It's as simple as that.
But doesn't that deserve to be placed somewhere more prominent than page 19?
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That would make an outstanding comment, one that all of us might echo. Need to put that on my "to do" list.
My personal interest in the politics of K-12 education has increased as I have learned how "standards based" programs in math can still adopt a well marketed textbook that fails to even come close to helping students reach those standards. One text is even reputed to work only when parents hire tutors in desperation. The first question to be asked of any K-8 school is what math curriculum they use to teach (or not teach) fractions. Some do not teach long division, or even multiplication, the way we learned it.
Those 11 pages will morph into 11 volumes of regulations and a narrow set of standards covered on the science part of a high-stakes test with each topic assigned to a specific grade level ... and hence no coherence in actual learning.
When I was teaching college and University Astronomy and Math, in California, I was appalled by how underprepared many students were.
Tracing towards the roots of the problem, I've now taught 6 weeks of Summer School in a poor high school in urban California.
In California, there is a statewide exam that students MUST pass to graduate high school. In the Pasadena Unified School District, 25% of high school seniors have not passed the math part of the CAHSEE (California High School Exit Exam).
I had a cross-section of those failures.
Many could not speak English well enough. Many had learned to hate the subject. Many of those wrote that they'd loved it until ... and could name where and with which teacher they went off the tracks.
Many had trouble with fractions and decimals which stopped them from moving forward.
Most had problem with estimation, and common sense applied thereto.
Most hated "word problems."
The one who cheated on exams cheated badly.
The most important rules in Algebra 1 are not associative, commutative, and distributive. The important rules are:
Quiet. No cellphones. No skateboards. No playstations. No gameboys. No ipods. First time, I confiscate them until end of class. Second time, they shall be locked in the Principal's safe, and your parent is required to get them back.
Some students were homeless. Some lived in group homes. Some did not know who their father fathers were. Many did not see their fathers often enough to know a man's role in society.
"Turn your desk around and face me when I'm speaking to you, please. Look me in the eyes when I address you."
"But, Professor Post, in the Hood you always have to watch your back."
"True, but we're not in the Hood. We're in my classroom."
As a presidential commission reported several presidents ago:
"If a foreign power had done to our educational system what we've done to ourselves, it would be an act of war."
Jonathan, I about fell out of my chair laughing as I considered your summer teaching experience against the NSB recommendations for STEM. The disconnect looks like the Grand Canyon from here. It'd reasonably be called theater of the absurd pointed at anything else.
Thank you, MaryKaye. I expanded that comment, since you liked it, into an 8-page essay, for the principal of the high school where I taught this summer. The essay is far too long to post here, but I'll mention that Chad's original writing at the top of this thread was paper-clipped to my essay as an appendix.
If I'm offered a full-time position beginning 4 Sep 2007, I have your kind comment and encouragement, and Chad's cogent analysis, are parts of the reason why I get the job.