GOVERNMENT
Senate Debates Funding Proposals For High School Science Teaching Proposed bill calls for $270 million split between NSF, Department of Education; National Science Board is blamed for ignoring needs Wil Lepkowski, C&EN Washington
High school science education is about to get some whiffs of future big money, all in the hope that big bucks will rescue the U.S. from the current belief that it is becoming a second-class technological country. The debate over how to improve precollege mathematics and science teaching has been gaining force for more than a year now, and a bill providing $425 million for this (H.R. 1310) passed the House with ease. The Senate, meanwhile, has been more deliberate. Last week its Labor & Human Resources Committee, headed by Orrin G. Hatch (R.-Utah), was continuing hearings on about 14 bills his committee is considering. But what his panel finally will report out likely will be a compromise between a measure Hatch has been putting together over the past few weeks and S. 530, cosponsored by Sen. Claiborne Pell (D.-R.I.) and Sen. Robert Stafford (R.-Vt.). Hatch's new proposal totals $270 million, with $60 million going to the National Science Foundation and the rest to the Department of Education. NSF would use the money for teacher traineeships, curriculum development, graduate fellowships, refresher courses for teachers, young investigator awards, and Presidential Excellence-in-Teaching awards. The Education Department's $210 million share would cover block grants to states for textbooks and curriculum materials ($120 million) 12
April 25, 1983 C&EN
and scholarships to science and mathematics teachers to improve their skills and to advance development in their fields ($80 million). The final $10 million would consist of state-controlled funds for improving instruction, contingent on their being matched by public and private institutions, including business. "A lot of coordination between districts will be needed to make the best use of what little money there i s / ' says William Green, manager of legislation in the National Education Association's department of government relations. "The best these bills can do is to help make an inventory of needs and maybe set up plans to meet them." He and everyone else connected with education and its politics are convinced that math and science education is facing a catastrophe (C&EN, July 19, 1982, page 9). The National Science Board's Commission on PreCollege Science & Mathematics Education lists as some symptoms:
Aldridge: board has reduced support
• Training deficiencies in as much as 30% of all public school science and math teachers. • Declining achievement scores of students. • General scientific illiteracy of the majority of graduating seniors. • General student distaste for science and math courses. • Little attention to problemsolving skills needed in average work situations. Every year, the Soviet Union graduates 8500 new physics teachers. That yearly input into the Soviet educational system exceeds by 2200 the number of physics teachers in the U.S. At least that's what the critics say. But there are paradoxes. For example, the U.S.S.R. still is seen as a plodding technological country. The Japanese continue to envy the U.S.'s technological creativity. And the U.S. is currently the most economically healthy country in all the world. Moreover, the Department of Education's National Commission on Excellence in Education says in its final report scheduled to be released this week that despite enormous sums of money spent on secondary education, test scores consistently have gone down, in inverse proportion to the amount spent. Between 1950 and 1975, total spending on schools rose from 3.4% to 8% of the gross national product. So vast sums of money may indeed not be the answer to whatever the core problem might be. Bill D. Aldridge, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, has been campaigning for the past five years to reverse the decline of science education support by NSF, a problem he blames not on the Reagan Administration but on the National Science Board itself. "If you look at the history of that
board," says Aldridge, "you can see that it systematically reduced support for science education and did it to promote scientific research support. I think it was an outrage and self-serving because these same people on the board are the direct beneficiaries of research funding and they were neglecting what was coming into the research pipeline." Aldridge believes that the only reason the board established its Commission on Pre-College Mathematics & Science Education, due to wind up its work this fall, was fear that the Republican right wing would cut out the research directorate. Walter Gillespie, who heads what is left of NSF's science education program, agrees that science education always suffered from poor peer prestige on the foundation's totem pole and that it will have to do a lot of gearing up for the resurgence of funding. In 1959, fully 46% of NSF's $133 million budget went toward science education. Support peaked at $135 million in 1968. As late as 1980, before the Science Education Directorate was abolished, 125 persons were administering a $77 million program. Now only 19 people r e m a i n , r u n n i n g a $30 million program. Douglas Pewitt, an assistant director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, has admitted privately that the Administration erred in deciding to eliminate science education support at NSF two years ago. The White House now feels that it has encountered "a locomotive out of control and that while it can't be stopped, the Republicans can at least try to direct it,"says a Washington science education source. Meanwhile at the Department of Education, science, math, educational technology, and research on learning are gaining prominence. These activities come under the office of Donald Senese, assistant secretary for research and educational improvement. Senese has two significant responsibilities: administration of the department's portion of whatever bill Congress passes and President Reagan signs; and development of the department's technological initiative, a program devised by Sec-
retary Terrence Bell aimed at bringing the best computer-based learning into U.S. schools. Yet to be worked out completely is how NSF and Education will divide responsibilities. The glib formula says that NSF should be in charge of upgrading skills of existing teachers and Education should fund the training of new teachers. Yet, the major engineering societies are saying that Education also should fund summer institutes where high school teachers are exposed to highquality research in top universities. The scientific societies, on the other hand, say NSF is much better at supporting that. Aldridge says that the Education Department is nowhere near so well equipped as NSF to re-equip high school teachers, because NSF represents the best direct contact between top-level scientists and the school systems. He also believes NSF can more easily pluck the Nobel Prize winners and other top-level scientists for the design of the best scientific content in curricula. On the other hand, the Education Department, though heavily politicized and mired in bureaucratic inertia, has the closest contact with schools, teachers, administrators, and theories of learning that will need to be applied if the current initiative is to work. The Administration, he says, has stacked the agency with "ideologues of the far right who often
Gillespie: poor peer prestige
lack even the most basic education or experience relevant to the job requirements." What isn't being given much attention during current debates is the question of what kinds of intellects the new initiative is going to produce. Local and state education agencies are going to have a lot to say about course content, but a great deal of information about the way children learn and the place of science in current culture is going to have to be put together. For example, in teaching science, experts debate whether the approach should be through the disciplines or whether the basic orientation should be interdisciplinary. The great educational theorist and experimenter, Jean Piaget, t h o u g h t the latter should be the basis for a true education (as opposed to mere "training" in the sciences). Piaget, as he outlines in his book, "To Understand Is To Invent," believed in the pluralistic route toward science teaching based on the way the individual student's mind works. He reported that there were very few "bad" science students. Much depended on how the subject was taught. Thus, generalized curricula applicable to a whole classroom would be self-defeating. In other words, Piaget believed that aptitude was purely situational. What is needed, he said, are teachers "who know their subject but who approach it from a constantly interdisciplinary point of view—that is, knowing how to give general significance to the structures they use and to reintegrate them into the overall systems embracing the other disciplines. In other words, instructors should be sufficiently penetrated with the spirit of epistemology to be able to make their students constantly aware of the relationships between their special provinces and the sciences as a whole. Such men are rare today." In any case, the National Institute of Education, itself emerging from considerable turmoil over faulty leadership, is forging a plan to look into such questions as how students learn. So is NSF. So, apparently, will everyone else with an academic chair, a grant proposal, and an opinion. D April 25, 1983 C&EN
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