Others regard the problem through the eyes of disadvantaged eighth-grade students in a classroom with no microscopes or lab materials. “To be competitive, I believe in the long run that we need to be equitable,” says Paul Kadri ’87, superintendent of Groton, CT, public schools.
The president of Emory University, James Wagner, MA ’78 (Med), PhD ’84, takes the long view, referring to antiquity, when arithmetic, astronomy, and geometry were required courses for men free to pursue a life of the mind. “For centuries we have understood that someone who received a liberal education would have received it with a heavy, heavy dose of science,” says Wagner, a former Whiting School faculty member.
Anxious STEM stakeholders have a more recent historical touchstone in Sputnik. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Russian satellite program prompted a similar scramble in the United States to improve math and science education. For Americans at the time, winning the space race symbolized triumph over the Soviet Union.
Now another technological defeat looms. But this time around, the American public has lost that sense of urgency, says Soyster. “I went to engineering school in the 1960s as part of the Sputnik group,” he says. “Becoming an engineer was a big deal. There was national focus on the field. Now, that issue doesn’t seem to exist so much in the public mind.”
As the Cold War began to wind down in 1985, engineering degrees in the United States peaked at about 80,000 before a precipitous decline. Meanwhile, the former Soviet Union has been replaced as a threat to American security by G-8 competitors and emerging nations awash with innovation and an increasingly capable workforce. Internationally, competition for young people with a science or engineering background is growing progressively fierce.
A range of concerned organizations has issued reports on the topic, including the influential Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. Published in 2007 by National Academies Press, the 564-page account raised the specter of Sputnik as it outlined the mounting economic risk posed by an American citizenry ill-prepared for the STEM workforce of the future.
Instead of a single, nuclear menace, though, the Gathering Storm report warns that the “inadequacies of our system of research and education pose a greater threat to U.S. national security over the next quarter century than any potential conventional war that we might imagine.”
Without well-paying jobs and ample sources of clean and affordable energy, the United States will not be able to compete against emerging nations such as China and India, where a low wage workforce and hightech ingenuity fuel booming economies, the report cautions. Its authors argue that the nation’s economic supremacy depends on a massive and costly effort to increase the quantity and quality of science and mathematics teachers in grades K-12— necessary for enlarging the pipeline of students prepared to pursue STEM degrees in college.
Policymakers took the report seriously. Congress adopted some of the recommendations in the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act, or the America COMPETES Act, passed in 2007. Private foundations and companies came through with incentives and funding for the National Math and Science Initiative.
But in 2009, a follow-up to the Gathering Storm found little progress in STEM achievement, noting that the America COMPETES Act had not received the funding necessary to realize the report’s suggestions.
This indifferent response to the Gathering Storm compounded a nagging dilemma. Companies in the United States had become reliant on temporary foreign workers to fill the need for technological expertise. Critics viewed this practice as a troubling stopgap. Yet, when fewer engineers and scientists were allowed into the country after 9/11 for security reasons, the nation’s defense contractors were caught short again.
“If you’re comfortable with the fact that a large part of our technical talent comes from overseas, then there’s no problem, that talent is excellent, it helps us,” says Michigan State University professor Percy Pierre, PhD ’67. “If you’re comfortable with the fact that many high-paying jobs that Americans might aspire to are not being achieved by Americans, then there’s no problem.” Pierre hastens to add: “The problem is not with the foreign workers, the problem is with us.”
Last year, President Barack Obama marveled at the reverence for learning he observed on recent visits to Korea and China. “That used to be what we were about,” he said during the launch of a national campaign to boost student achievement in STEM fields. “That’s what we’re going to be about again.”
Obama went on to advocate the truly “liberal education” prized by Wagner. Raising the quality of STEM education is also “about an informed citizenry in an era where many of the problems we face as a nation are, at root, scientific problems,” the president said. “And it’s about the power of science to not only unlock new discoveries, but to unlock in the minds of our young people a sense of promise, a sense that with some hard work—with effort—they have the potential to achieve extraordinary things.”
But translating the president’s vision into an educational framework to address the STEM crisis is a formidable challenge. The process doesn’t begin by issuing ominous warnings about economic and security risks, Wagner says. It begins by placing a premium on the value of learning for the sake of learning across all disciplines. When the sciences are restored to the liberal arts canon, national fortitude will follow, Wagner contends. That’s why he finds the recent trend among universities to split apart colleges of arts and sciences so discouraging. “What message does this send about the completeness of education when we no longer say we are going to teach the arts and the sciences?” Wagner says.
The same faulty reasoning can be found in a popular culture that has produced what Wagner dubs the “Newtonian Physics for Dummies” school of thought. The “dummy” distinction automatically distances untold consumers of such books from the country’s STEM brain trust, he says. “The notion that folks who have interests in areas outside of the sciences need to understand some sort of science at their level serves us poorly,” Wagner says. “The implicit message is that you actually are a dummy and we don’t expect you to understand or to ever contribute to that body of knowledge.”
All citizens deserve access to “the knowledge base that makes us human,” Wagner says. “By extension, if we are failing to fully educate people, or if we’re defining a full education with only a partial deck, we are handicapping American competitiveness and demand in the STEM fields. Narrowing the dimensionality of American society puts the United States at a disadvantage.”
If Wagner is the philosopher king of STEM, K-12 educators are the ground soldiers, attempting to realize his democratic vision within financially strapped school systems serving students from an unprecedented range of cultures and income levels.
Revamp STEM education in the name of American democracy, not geopolitical jitters, says Kadri, who oversees a school system with a vibrant mix of students. In the United States, education is first and foremost a right, not a calculated strategy for global survival, he maintains.
Assessments show that K-12 students are not learning the basic concepts that underpin geology or biology, for example. Just as lacking in the classroom, Kadri and others say, is a spirit of inquiry that spurs students to hands-on exploration to find answers that stress creative thinking rather than rote memory.
Beginning in elementary school, the most important thing is how students think and how they solve problems; not just solve them to be right but to be correct and to see the creative possibilities and implications presented by their solution, Kadri says. “If we can get students to do that, they’re probably well prepared for a future that we can only imagine.”
Under Kadri’s stewardship, Groton’s students are using hands-on science kits to learn about Earth, wind, and space. “You no longer need the traditional model of the teacher being the door through which knowledge exists,” he says. “The teacher is a facilitator who helps students sift through knowledge, organize it, present it, and be able to develop tools for understanding important principles and distinguishing what’s real and what’s not real.”