It takes a village to raise an idiot: fixing US science education.

Abstract

For years, tests and surveys have highlighted a paradox in American science education: the nation that leads the world in research brings up the rear in public understanding of science. How can this be? The Third International Mathematics and Science Study, begun in 1995, yielded an important insight. Comparing the educational systems of 50 countries, the study found that US students scored near the top of the group at the fourth-grade level. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill after that. By the eighth grade, the American students drop into the average group, and they almost reach the global bottom by the time they finish high school. The US research enterprise compensates for this nosedive by focusing on undergraduate and graduate student training. This approach explains the paradox in which an ample pool of highly qualified scientists drives competitive research while the general public remains largely ignorant. Still, the kindergarten-through-12th grade (K–12) educational decline has far-reaching implications for research, none of which are positive. As Costello Brown, Director of Educational System Reform at the National Science Foundation (NSF; Arlington, Virginia, USA) puts it, “We are not even going to have the people who can vote responsibly as Americans on issues surrounding global warming, the environment, and whatever else if they don’t know the difference between a pound and a millimeter.” Education experts like Brown often speak in the future tense, but current policy debates on issues like stem-cell research, cloning, and the teaching of evolution (see “In the beginning, there was darkness”) show the legacy of this ongoing problem. Now professional organizations and some individual researchers are coming to appreciate the volatility of a system in which a benighted public underwrites ground-breaking science. The problem can no longer be ignored, and the scientif-ic community needs to become part of the solution.