Monthly Archive for November, 2011

Quinn O’Neill, 3 Quarks Daily

There’s been a lot of talk about reforming American K-12 science education and it’s getting difficult to take it seriously. Educators, scientists, and politicians have been sounding alarm bells over the state of American science education for decades. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education revealed the US to be trailing most other industrialized nations in science performance. The commission’s report began: “Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. [...] What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.” It almost sounds as if the level of educational attainment isn’t as important as the rest of the world being below it.

Following the 1983 report, most states responded by revising their curriculum content standards.¹ In 1990, the president and state governors adopted a new national goal: “By the year 2000, United States students will be the first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.”¹ The statement proved about as genuine as Obama’s promise to close Gitmo. In 2000, a new national commission conducted an investigation and concluded that the performance of U.S. students at the 12th-grade level, compared to their peers in other countries, was “disappointingly unchanged,” with the US placing 19th out of twenty-one countries studied.¹

Similar calls for reform were made in 2005 with the publication of the National Academy of Science’s report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm”, which made a number of promising recommendations. Those anticipating improvement were to be disappointed. A follow up report in 2010 stated that “In spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.” It found little improvement and noted that US K-12 math and science was ranked 48th worldwide.

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Alice Rawsthorn, The New York Times

LONDON — On her first day as a teacher at the Bertie Early College High School in Windsor, North Carolina, Emily Pilloton asked the students to name the last thing they had made themselves. “It could have been something as simple as cookies for their moms, but some of the students couldn’t remember ever making anything,” she recalled. “They’d never held a hammer or taken an art class. Half of them didn’t even know how to read a ruler.”

There were 13 students in the class, all 11th graders. Some came from middle-class families, and others lived in poverty, including a 17-year-old who was struggling to raise a 4-year-old child. They had all signed up to spend three hours a day on Studio H, an experimental design course run from a converted car body shop near the school. The course started in August last year and ended this month with the opening of the Windsor Super Market, a farmers’ market housed in a wooden pavilion that the students had designed and built themselves. As a thank you for their efforts, the Mayor of Windsor presented a key to the city to the entire Studio H team.

“We saw the students change from a complete lack of understanding and, in some cases, a complete lack of interest on the first day into amazingly well-rounded creative thinkers and communicators,” said Ms. Pilloton, a humanitarian designer, who conceived and now runs Studio H with the architect Matthew Miller. “They’d each come such a long way and felt much more invested in their local community, having built something permanent that they could be really proud of.”

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