Last Sunday, Jo O’Brien was reading a story in The Denver Post and something in it hit her like a fist to the jaw. “I literally let out a gasp,” she said.
It was a statement by a principal about how her rural Colorado elementary school was spending five hours a day teaching reading and math to get its CSAP scores up. As a result, only 22 percent of fifth-graders had scored proficient in science. “There’s only so much time in a day,” the principal said.
For O’Brien, assistant commissioner for assessment in the state Department of Education, this was cause for alarm. If in 2007 educators still don’t realize that teaching science is teaching reading and math, well, maybe the U.S. really is doomed to look to India, China and Europe for innovation in the 21st century.
Sure, O’Brien has seen the numbers that show the poor performance by students on tests of basic skills. “The state is not doing well in reading and math,” she said. “But that’s not because we’re giving too much attention to science.”
Quite the contrary, with no statewide high school graduation requirements, historically weak science admission requirements to state universities, and no statewide assessments in science until a couple of years ago, science instruction is on the verge of collapse.
Schools districts have slashed budgets for textbooks, labs and specialists, neglected science curricula and, for a lot of kids, science became an elective.
Like beading.
O’Brien said that many Colorado kids had little or no science instruction in elementary or middle school, “so it was no surprise when they would sit down with a high-school counselor and say, ‘No, I don’t want to be doing science.”‘
We let 14-year-olds determine our future and created an epidemic of scientific illiteracy in the process.
Now some of those once science-challenged 14-year-olds are teachers, so it’s no surprise that many educators believe science can’t be integrated into reading and math instruction.
“If the teachers are feeling allergic or uncomfortable or unsettled about their own scientific knowledge, sure they will say, ‘That’s something we can scuttle,”‘ O’Brien said. “At this point what we need is science education for teachers.”
As Archimedes would say, Eureka.
On Friday, President Bush, who’s no Archimedes himself, called for the creation of a global fund for research into clean-energy technology.
Yes, after years of dissing scientists, now he’s counting on them to get us out of the global-warming mess.
At the same time, Gov. Bill Ritter has made it clear he wants Colorado in the forefront in the competition for contracts, grants and businesses involved in alternative energy.
With his STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) agenda, O’Brien said, he has created “a forced focus on science.
“We don’t want to have to import scientific thinkers to this state anymore.”
Nationwide, study after study has shown declining science achievement since at least 1983. The Center for Education Reform recently ranked the U.S. 19th out of 29 industrialized nations in science proficiency.
Meanwhile, the generation of scientists that was inspired and nurtured by generous educational scholarships after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 isn’t getting any younger.
I know something about this.
I was in first grade at Philipp Elementary School in Milwaukee when the news broke that the Russians had just walloped us with Sputnik.
Ms. Francisco gathered her class of rambunctious 6-year-olds and told us that we were going to go to the moon.
For weeks she taught us about planets, stars and moons. We learned the meaning of words like light year, gravity, oxygen, precipitation and atmosphere. We drew a solar system roughly to scale on the classroom wall. We built a spaceship out of cardboard and spacesuits out of aluminum foil.
Then we invited our parents to watch the mission.
We counted down and blasted off. Each of us had to deliver a report on our scientific research as we walked on our imaginary moonscape.
All of this involved reading, writing, math and science and, honestly, I’ll never forget it.
How could I? I learned how to say cumulonimbus.
Did I mention I was 6?
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
