Science Education: Cassandra's Prophecy

Abstract

AFTER A Nation at Risk was released, the state of American education was widely discussed, and not just by educators. The 1980s produced a number of reports on the status of science education that complained of declining science and mathematics achievement, falling enrollment in the subjects, and a shortage of qualified teachers. All the attention sparked renewed federal interest in science and mathematics education, school/industry coalitions were established, and a call for help was issued to all interested parties. Business and industry, concerned about the scientific literacy of their current and future employees, offered to assist with money, training, equipment, support for competitions, and other cooperative efforts. While the new reports were troubling in their own right, in light of the Sputnik-associated science education reforms of a generation earlier, they were downright disturbing. We had all been warned that our system of science education wasn't working well, but, in spite of a national effort, it seemed that the message--like Cassandra's prophecy of the fate of Troy--was going unheeded. Concern about science education and science standards has usually been driven by worries that American students are falling behind their international peers in achievement. In the case of Sputnik, the international touchstones were students in the Soviet Union. In the years immediately following A Nation at Risk, students in Japan and Germany were the comparison groups. Test scores, as always, were the comparative measure. And the concerns seemed at least partly justified by scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Eighty-two percent of the nation's 12th-graders performed below the proficient level on the 2000 NAEP science test. Moreover, in recent years, business leaders such as Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, have called for more emphasis on science education, arguing that the U.S. risks losing its economic edge if it does not change. Public opinion surveys, on the other hand, indicate most U.S. parents are satisfied with science education. Their level of concern has actually declined in recent years. (1) The current emphasis on content standards, which has its roots in the years immediately following the release of A Nation at Risk, was strengthened with the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Among its many mandates, NCLB required that, beginning in the 2007-08 school year, schools must administer annual tests in science achievement at least once during three grade spans: 3-5, 6-9, and 10-12. Yet despite its own requirement, the law has succeeded in pushing science to the back burner. Schools now focus on reading and mathematics, with little time left for science in the rush to prepare teachers and students for high-stakes standardized tests. In April 2002, shortly after NCLB was passed but before any of its mandates had taken effect, Olaf Jorgenson and Rick Vanosdall explained in these pages that some districts were already so fixated on basic-skills preparation that students were spending 20% of total class time on test preparation. When NCLB took effect, they speculated, things would only intensify. (2) Yet the predicted failure of science education to meet the demands of the modern world seems to continue to be ignored. In spite of efforts to keep science from becoming a second-class discipline, the science scores on the most recent NAEP indicate that science achievement in the U.S. is at best in a holding pattern. Scores were up slightly in 2005 over both 1996 and 2000 at the fourth-grade level; they held steady for both comparison years at the eighth-grade level; and they showed a slight decline from 1996 at the 12th-grade level, but not from 2000. GATHERING THE WHOLE VILLAGE The continued reports of the unsatisfactory state of U.S. science education and the predicted consequences for our nation's economic and intellectual vitality attracted the attention not only of educators and politicians but also of an increasing number of professional scientists and engineers. …