Posted on 01/20/2009 7:55:40 PM PST by neverdem
The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, an international test of fourth- and eighth-grade student achievement, recently released its latest results. As in prior years, the mean U.S. scores were roughly on par with those in most developed nations in Europe, though well below those in Asia. But students in other developed nations far outpaced U.S. students in top-level science scores. For instance, only 10 percent of American eighth-graders performed at the highest level in science, placing the U.S. 11th among the tested nations and well behind countries such as England (17 percent), Japan (17 percent), and Singapore (an astounding 32 percent).
It’s no surprise, then, that the U.S. also lags the world in the proportion of students earning a college degree in technical fields. According to the National Science Foundation, only about 17 percent of U.S. college graduates earned a degree in subjects related to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM for short). That’s well below the world average of 26 percent. We trail not only economic competitors such as China (52 percent), India (24 percent), Japan (64 percent), and Russia (33 percent), but even Mexico (25 percent) and the nations of the Middle East (24 percent). These figures become even more disturbing when we consider that American colleges grant many of their STEM-related degrees to foreign students, the majority of whom go back home.
American schools simply don’t produce the scientists and engineers whom we need to remain competitive in a technology-driven world. In their excellent recent book The Race Between Education and Technology, Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz convincingly show that the economic and political dominance of the U.S. throughout the twentieth century was based on its better-educated workforce, which could create and swiftly adapt to new technologies. But we’ve been losing that edge since our educational attainment began to stagnate in the mid-1970s—and as more nations surpass us in education, they also chip away at our economic dominance.
The troubles in STEM education mirror the broader problems of American K–12 education. The primary issue—and our best chance to make improvements—concerns teacher quality. A wide body of research has consistently identified teacher quality as the most important means within a school’s control to improve student learning. That likely goes double for STEM subjects, which require instructors not only to be knowledgeable but also to be able to convey difficult technical information in a graspable way. Attracting such people to STEM teaching requires a compensation system that recognizes their talents. Unfortunately, though, the way we pay public-school teachers today—based exclusively on seniority and number of advanced degrees held—doesn’t work.
Research consistently finds that these two attributes have little or nothing to do with teachers’ actual ability to improve student learning. Paying the same salaries to teachers of widely varying effectiveness is inefficient, to say the least. But another big problem with the current pay system, especially when it comes to STEM teaching, is that it compensates teachers in different subjects equally, too, and this ignores labor-market realities. With the same number of years in the classroom and the same number of advanced degrees, a high school gym teacher earns the same salary as a high school chemistry teacher.
A better system would pay STEM teachers more than their counterparts. After all, the skills required to teach STEM subjects are often more valuable in the broader labor market than those required to teach most other subjects. Of course, not every good math teacher would make a good engineer, and vice versa. But an individual with math and technology skills has more attractive job opportunities than, say, someone with the skills to teach elementary-level reading. The bottom line: public schools must dig deeper into the labor skill pool, hiring STEM teachers of lower quality than teachers in other subjects.
A system of differential teacher pay, on the other hand, could not only attract new teachers from the outside labor market, but also encourage the current crop of teacher talent to move into STEM subjects, which they’re currently shunning for understandable reasons—the coursework required to become a teacher in a non-technical subject is much less demanding than what’s necessary for STEM subjects. We need to give these people a financial motive to take the more difficult STEM path. Teachers’ unions support increasing the pay of STEM teachers—so long as the pay of all other teachers goes up as well. But spreading dollars around equally means giving small increases to all teachers instead of large pay increases to those we most need.
We can still ensure that this century will be as much an American Century as the last—but only if we address our students’ performance gap in math and science. And the best way to do that is to incentivize more teachers to master the hard stuff.
Marcus A. Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Calling me anti-science is a lie, plain and simple. It is not true and will never be no matter how often you repeat it and how much you wish it were so.
Your first paragraph belies your second. You make my case for me.
I’m not going to advert to one of your favorite putdowns and suggest that you need to read for comprehension. Instead, I’ll simply observe that my question went to a great deal more substance than simply the name of a textbook. Your answer responds to none of the specs detailed in my query and ducks the issue entirely. The answer was unpalatable, so in the typical fashion of politics you rattled the keys on your board, but produced only noise. You and Senator Schumer could change places without a noticeable drop off in the quantity of bovine excrement on either side.
”that peer review process creationists hate so much . . .”
Who is it that objects to ‘peer review’? I’ve read objections to the abusive uses that ‘peer review’ has been put to, those abuses perhaps being rightly understood or wrongly understood (surely there are examples of both), but that’s another issue. And oh, how you do love to scramble your issues, thereby, we observe, utilizing another common political tactic.
Everyone in this forum recognizes the value of the peer review process. Everyone also understands that Liberals will abuse any process, subverting it to their own purposes (all the while blaming everything on their intended victims). They often claim as their motive that they are “doing it for the children.” In the same fashion, you claim that you are “doing it for science.” Do you not understand that no one is fooled by your ‘St. Joan at the stake’ schtick? We all recognize the Liberal bada-bing you practice. We see it every day, in a hundred ways. We all know who it is that has a strangle hold on academia and, growingly, on every aspect of our lives. It is not Christians and it is not Conservatives.
When you report to your masters, what is it you hope to get from them? A share in the power, or merely to be left alone to do your work? You had better hope it is the former, because the latter will never happen. It turns out to be the case, indeed, that Ayn Rand accurately prophesized the ultimate plight of America’s science community in her philosophical work Atlas Shrugged. So tell us, Dr. Stadler, how does it feel to be the lackey of Marxist/Socialist zealots?
That’s not a bad idea:
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/aug/15/opinion/oe-feldmann15
Purely a rhetorical question, mom. Yes? I won't insult you by acting as though you don't know the answers to your question. Sadly, the very ones who most desperately need to ask themselves the questions and to seek the answers are too bedazzled to think at all.
It has nothing to do with pay. It has everything to do with the curriculum pushed down from state bureaucrats, and local teachers unions on schools.
Everyone in this forum recognizes the value of the peer review process. Everyone also understands that Liberals will abuse any process, subverting it to their own purposes (all the while blaming everything on their intended victims). They often claim as their motive that they are “doing it for the children.” In the same fashion, you claim that you are “doing it for science.” Do you not understand that no one is fooled by your ‘St. Joan at the stake’ schtick? We all recognize the Liberal bada-bing you practice. We see it every day, in a hundred ways. We all know who it is that has a strangle hold on academia and, growingly, on every aspect of our lives. It is not Christians and it is not Conservatives.
When you report to your masters, what is it you hope to get from them? A share in the power, or merely to be left alone to do your work? You had better hope it is the former, because the latter will never happen. It turns out to be the case, indeed, that Ayn Rand accurately prophesized the ultimate plight of America’s science community in her philosophical work Atlas Shrugged. So tell us, Dr. Stadler, how does it feel to be the lackey of Marxist/Socialist zealots?
MOST EXCELLENT observations of the empirical evidence!
Yes, rhetorical. But I think the questions need to be given some consideration so that the agenda of those who would ban instead of co-operate can be exposed.
Or more realistically, if it doesn't pass peer review, it isn't science.
That sounds like a raw deal. Fight it.
Thanks for sharing and of course you’re right; anyone that thinks science is somehow immune to ideology and politics is generally a left wing liberal lunatic themselves trying to undermine science to fit their agenda in the first place.
In science evidence wins out. Fight it.
That's what this whole thing is all about--evidence wins out. But sometimes it requires a bit of persistence to overcome human foibles.
If you got bad reviews from just one reviewer--get a couple of good reviews from recognized experts on your own and resubmit the article with those reviews attached. Have those positive reviewers contact the editor. There are a lot of ways to get around a single bad review. Go for it!
It was that publishing our paper would mean that Nature would have to admit that they had peer-reviewed and published a paper that was based on a seriously defective set of experiments.
Sounds like there's more ego involved than anything.
I've noticed that there's a tendency when some change coming down the pike in scientific thinking, that one never hears the words, *We were wrong about _______*.
Usually what seems to happen is that the issue is dropped for an appropriate amount of time and then the new proclamations are made without reference to the older ones as if the new ones had been what scientists had believed all along.
I've noticed it to be especially prevalent in the medical community and in regards to global warming/cooling, but maybe that's only because they are so prominent.
It sure rots that you got such a raw deal on all your work for what probably amounts to politics.
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