50 years since Sputnik, who cares?

By Ellen Ratner
Last week I wrote about the "No Child Left Behind" bill, which is currently up for reauthorization in Congress. I received several e-mails asking me, "Where in the Constitution does it say that education is a responsibility of the federal government?" I replied that in the Constitution’s first paragraph mandates that the federal government "promote the general welfare." That constitutional phrase would be enough to have a federal role in education. However, the Constitution also requires the federal government to "provide for the common defense." My column this week connects the two, education and defense. They have a symbiotic relationship.

Fifty years ago this week, the old Soviet Union launched Sputnik. A panic came over our families, teachers and schools. The United States public schools turned on a dime. I was in first grade, and within two years, everything about the way we learned math and science changed overnight. By the end of third grade, "the new math" was arriving in our classrooms. Flash cards still existed, but so did hastily made "workbooks" that taught the "rule of order," prime numbers and unusual word problems. By fifth grade, we attended "extra credit" sessions that consisted of learning about base numbers and how computers thought in 1s and 0s.

Americans felt threatened by the Soviet Union’s demonstrated excellence in science. We were convinced they could dominate in science, math and the space program. We were determined to not allow this to happen. In the past 50 years, we’ve seen quite a shift. We’ve forfeited our midcentury zeal. Reflecting this concern, the National Science Foundation issued a report this week titled, "A National Action Plan for Addressing the Critical Needs of the U.S. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education System." The document outlines what we must do to stay competitive.

The facts leading up to the preparation of this report are sobering. Of the students graduating with PhDs in physical sciences in 1980, 22 percent were foreign students and 76 percent were American. By 1997, 36.6 percent of doctoral degrees in physical sciences were held by foreign students. Only about half of those foreign students remained in the United States. Today, in some fields such as Aerospace Engineering, less than half of graduate students are from the United States. Seventy percent of all Texas Tech master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science are earned by students who do not hold a U.S. passport.

These statistics reflect a major problem in our precollegiate and pregraduate math and science education. Students don’t have preparation to enter math and science fields, and as a result, our own citizens cannot populate the graduate programs in this country. According to the National Science Foundation, almost 30 percent of high school graduates enter college unprepared for first year coursework or arrive at the workplace without the mathematical, scientific and technical skills that employers require. College is too late to do basic education, and it is not getting accomplished in grades K-12.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what is wrong with our rocket science in this country. First, we need to reprioritize focus and resources just as we did in the 1950s. We will need real federal coordination and real federal money. No one at the Department of Education coordinates these efforts. It is amazing in the 21st century, but the United States of America has no agreement on what key concepts should be taught at what grade level. A student who moves from middle school in one state to another might miss all science education.

School boards are more concerned with politics than they are educational outcomes. They would rather engage in debates about issues like "intelligent design" education than spend time coordinating with the business community to find out what students need to do to be prepared to work in a competitive world.

Even the most anti-government Libertarian would agree that for our "common defense" we must remain competitive, but we have done little to keep the competitive Sputnik spirit alive that we had midcentury. Actually, forget about competitive spirit, it’s really more a matter of economic survival. We are told not to worry about our manufacturing base going offshore because we will be the technology nation. Excuse me, but the only technology our K-12 and college students are engaged in right now is downloading pirated music and movies and "texting" their little hearts out. There is still time to reverse this trend with enough bipartisan political will.