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Taking Issue With Claims That American Science Education is 'Dismal'
TaeKwonDood writes "We've all seen the stories about how 'dismal' science education in America is. It turns out that it's kind of a straw man. America has long led the world in science but the 'average' score for Americans on standardized tests has never been good. Instead, every 2 years American kids get better but we keep being told things are terrible. Here is why."
Column: Quit fretting. U.S. is fine in science education
The article is correct in a lot of respects. But one thing I personally disagree with is that we should quit fretting. If you believe you are the best in the world at something, you might quit working hard to achieve that and stagnate into irrelevance. Personally I always view myself as "behind the curve" and therefore I am always working harder to overcome my self-perceived adjustment.
Likewise, when I am judging the United States, I'm often harsh. Because it's not going to get any better if I say "Yep, education is top notch, best in the world. We're #1." Unsurprisingly enough, my Republican friends call me a self-loathing liberal because my criticisms of the United States are often harsh. Better that than the alternative of stagnation and irrelevance.
American science education might not be 'dismal' but valid criticisms abound. Also, the measurements used for it being dismal or great are almost always flawed. For example, in the article:
Yet during this period of national "mediocrity," we created Silicon Valley, built multinational biotechnology firms, and continued to lead the world in scientific journal publications and total number of Nobel Prize winners. We also invented and sold more than a few iPads. Obviously, standardized tests aren't everything.
Surely, every one of these things had influences and inspiration other than the "United States public science education"? I'm reminded of someone from Alabama chastising me for complaining about states that have low literacy rates. She reminded me that Huntsville has more post-graduate degree holders per capita than any other city in the United States. Great. Good for them. Does that have anything to do with whether or not a random 15 year old can read in Alabama? You can cherry pick statistics one way or the other, I think China's got more published academic papers per year now than any other nation ... of course the quality over quantity can be argued.
Don't be afraid to look at yourself critically -- if you don't how will you ever improve?
My work here is dung.
Claiming that the US is #1 in the world-- check.
Vague accusations of anti-Bush bias-- check.
Implication that teachers can't stand to be held accountable-- check.
Assumption that the government spends too much on education and wants to spend more-- check.
Hinting that Obama is subverting the system for political motives-- check.
Whether or not the article has a good point-- it may be true that we're not as badly off as we think-- the article is written in a divisive way by someone who clearly leans toward the Republican end of things. Throughout the article, there's the running implication that all the doom and gloom is a scam, perpetrated by Democrats, in order to get more funding for education. However, even if we stipulate that our educational system is good, there's still another explanation: As a rule, people throughout history have believed that "the system" is falling apart and they were witnessing the downfall of civilization.
However, I would offer another interpretation of what's going on. For one thing, I would be very careful about trusting any particular standardized test, and even about trusting standardized tests in general. When you say, "Students scored higher on the ABC test this year than the year before!" you can't necessarily assume that students have been educated better. It may be a reflection of changes made to the test. The increase may not be statistically significant. It may be that the teachers started "teaching to the test" at the expense of other lessons. It may be that the school system pulled some other shenanigans to manipulate the test scores. It may be that the test was simply poorly formed in the first place, and is not actually a good reflection of the educational level of the students.
The article begins with a quote about how education is suffering, and then goes on to note that the quote is from *all the way* back in 1983. This may be a sign that the doom-saying has been going on for a long time and does not reflect a real problem. Or it might mean that the educational system has been suffering since at least as far back as 1983. In fact, I'm sure that there are people who would claim that to be the case.
Why are people here so damn obsessed with religion VS science debate? It's not a significant issue (queue up apocryphal stories...). Virtually every scientist in the history of science was religious and science has progressed nicely despite the fact that the vast majority of the human population is religious.
People tend to focus on these obscure side issues like creationism, etc. I am as conservative as they come, I was raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and spend all my time with people who are religious to one degree or another. No one I know sees a significant conflict here,
WTF, another union bashing post? There are lobbyists everywhere - think textbook publishers, Universities, people that want to privatize the public educations system, etc. that would all gain by downplaying the success of the education system.
When you look at the pay, I don't think you can call a teacher's salary high by any standard.
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I think TFA and TFS misses the point: The problem isn't that we don't have decent science education; the problem is that we don't create scientists.
Look at any science or engineering school in the U.S. and it becomes pretty clear. There are many, many more foreigners than Americans. Now go look at the liberal arts programs: Nothing but Americans. The country and the world don't need more out-of-work English majors. There not a shortage of tech jobs right now, particularly in engineering, but also in other hard sciences.
Exactly. Would they except this standard with anything else? 65% of students being literate, for example?
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
I tell you what, show me the science tests where kids fail miserably at an understanding of evolution but score crazy high on common place science matters like basic physics and chemistry and I might begin you think to have something there.
The bottom line is that it matters little when you question evolution if Little Johnny can't understand high school Physics 1, Biology 1 or Chemistry 1. To date I haven't seen of a religious group that's trying to get f=ma or the earth orbiting the sun tossed out of the science classroom but I bet you there are more students who don't understand these concepts as there are those who reject evolution.
You make it sound like there is a substantial number of people in this nation who are still following Christian dogma from the 6th century and this simply isn't true. The questions where religion and science are likely to conflict are so few that they're not going to have an overbearing effect on the testing. Little of what's taught on the high school level is controversial.
Stop making religion your punching bag for ten minutes and consider *where* these students are failing in science and math and you'll see that religion isn't a problem. At least not as much of a mountain as you make it to be from the molehill it started from.