I am on the phone with my
younger daughter. She says she does not
want to talk about school today. After
much prodding I discover the source of her discontent; it is a math assessment
test given that morning. She couldn’t do
many of the division problems. The ones
she did were mostly wrong.
She was
disappointed. Having made it halfway
through a
fourth grade workbook over the summer, she was
confident. She expected to be ahead of
her third grade class, not behind in the third week. The new boy sitting next to her not only
finished on time, he also got all of the right answers. This was easy for him, unfamiliar for her. He learned to do divisions in first grade, in
his school in Japan.
*****
I am at a Brookings event
on Science and Technology Education: Preparing and Inspiring America’s Next
Generation. I am handed a chart
that ranks countries by their latest Program for International Student
Assessment (PISA) scores. PISA measures
scholastic performance of 15-year-olds across the globe. Japan is listed in the above average
group. The United States is listed in
the below average group. “The U.S. falls
behind almost every major competitor country in mathematics at the secondary
level,” annunciates the highlighted text.
The presentations start. Eric Lander
is up first
with a preview of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology
(PCAST) report that is due to be released that week. The report is intended to advise the Obama
administration on ways to improve science, technology, engineering and
mathematics (STEM) education. Landers
talks about a two-pronged strategy: preparation and inspiration – more content
expertise and pedagogical trainings for math and science teachers and more real
life inspiration for students to study math and science.
All panelists – MIT President
Hockfield, UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau, Columbia Professor Greene and
Congressman Gordon – agree with the prognosis.
They chronicle the initiatives of their respective institutions: MIT’s open course ware, Berkeley’s CalTeach, and Congress’ America Competes Act reauthorization.
They also provide personal anecdotes, like the letter Greene received
from a soldier on active duty, who got excited and inspired reading a book
about quantum physics and relativity in the dusty environment of Greater
Baghdad.
Q&A starts. The moderator turns to former Intel CEO Craig Barrett. Barrett wants
to know why university administrators are remarkably absent from the dialogue. The dialogue he is talking about is the
output/input problem between K-12 and Higher Education. He wants to know why universities are accepting
a 33% remediation rate in math and English for their incoming students.
Hockfield is first to
respond. MIT does not seem to have this
problem. “Students who come to MIT are
getting better and better.” A small
percentage of the U.S. students have figured out how to compete “head-to-head,
toe-to-toe with the rest of the world.” It
is therefore the “90, 95 percent who are, you know, getting further and further
behind,” she observed.
Hockfield has an
answer. “Based on the MIT experience, we
know what works,” she assures the standing room only audience. A huge fraction of the students coming to MIT
are from science and math magnet schools.
There aren’t enough of them. She
therefore is very much in favor of the PCAST report’s recommendation to amplify
the number of these schools ten, twenty or one hundred fold so that more of the
extraordinarily talented students in America can find their way into the very
best universities.
Eric Lander graduated from Stuyvesant High School, a STEM magnet High
School in NYC.
*****
I am reading e-mails from
a parents’ Yahoo Group for a STEM magnet high school in Fairfax County, Virginia. An Arlington parent is concerned. Schools in her district did not have enough
candidates to fill this year’s admission quota for the magnet program. The cause, she believed, was the growing gap in
math preparation. I am intrigued to read
further.
Arlington County,
Virginia, has a historic commitment to in-class differentiated instruction. Many of the gifted and talented programs in
Fairfax County are pushing their students to a higher level of math from the
early grades. A pool of students with
advanced math preparation is created in the Fairfax County schools. They are raising the entry bar for all schools
in the adjoining counties feeding the magnet program.
Underclassmen at the
feeder STEM schools are getting better and better; so are the underclassmen at the
finer institutions of higher learning, like MIT.
I begin to wonder. Which is the cause and which is the effect? Is it the supply from the K-12 STEM magnet
schools or the demand from the finer institutions of higher learning? Or does it even matter? Will raising the bar in math and science at
the top raise the bottom, or will it leave more children behind? Is the problem in math and science education one
of differentiation or one of integration? Are they different problems than, say,
language or humanities education? Will
the solution from the 5% of the student population address the problems for the
remaining 95%?
I don’t know the
answers. All I know is that to save my
younger daughter from disappointment next summer, I need to buy her a math workbook
that is at least two grades ahead of the level she will be entering.
About the Author: Mahmud Farooque is
the associate director in CSPO’s office in Washington, D.C.
