Brian Crosby is an inspiring elementary school teacher. He has been teaching in upper elementary grades for 30 years. He is a STEM teacher in Nevada. After he read Sharon Higgins’ post, he chided me for seeming to diminish the importance of STEM subjects. I assured him that this was not my purpose, and I am sure it was not Sharon Higgins’ either. Her point was that the “crisis” has been vastly oversold, and that many young people with STEM backgrounds are not finding the jobs they trained for. If this is true, I suspect it is because our major corporations are quick to outsource STEM jobs to countries with wages far lower than ours.
I want to assure Brian and everyone else who is teaching STEM subjects that I believe they are a deeply important and valuable part of a liberal education. I don’t think anyone should be ignorant of mathematics, science, engineering, and technology. These are hugely important skills, tools, and knowledge in our society–not only for careers but for general civic understanding and personal survival. For daily life, everyone needs enough mathematics to function in the world, as a consumer and as a citizen. We are constantly debating issues of science–whether it has to do with the environment, or space, or global warming, or evolution, or the effects of tobacco on our health, or the causes of obesity, or a million other topics.
STEM may or may not be necessary for the careers of the future–in my view, we have no idea what the careers of the future will be, say in ten years. But the STEM components are valuable. They comprise necessary skills.
But I insist that STEM subjects must co-exist with other important subjects, subjects that are also important for citizenship and the development of each of us as thinking persons. I insist on the importance and value of the arts, literature, history, civics, government, economics, geography, foreign languages, and physical education.
I believe in a full education for all students. They need to know about the world they live in and they need to know how it came to be. They need to learn about their society and other societies. They need the insight and inspiration that can be gained by reading literature, and they need the understanding that comes from the study of history.
So, Brian, this is meant to assure you and others who are teaching STEM that I support what you are doing. And I hope that you find time to listen to music, to see a play, to read a novel, to read a history, to learn a foreign language, and to get outside and play. All these things matter. We go to school not to become global competitors, not to prepare for a job (because we have no idea what jobs will exist in the future), but to explore all kinds of possibilities, to try out and develop new talents, to learn and discover new ideas. Education is a beginning. The hard thing is to learn how to learn, and to continue doing it long after you graduate from high school or college.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is a beautiful 7 minute piece from the Academy of Arts & Sciences that shows the balance of STEM and the Humanities. Features John Lithgow, Yo Yo Ma, Justice O’Connor and many others. http://vimeo.com/68662447
Sounds like “cultural imperialism”
And David Brooks. Don’t forget David Brooks. I’m sorry, but gag me with a spoon, please.
I remember people trying to push art education on the argument it would raise MCAS scores. No, art gives form to feeling, it doesn’t have to be marketed for its market value. Fight for art, please, for art’s sake.
Thesis: “STEM is the stem, but the humanities are the flower.”
And by “humanities”, we seem to imply the academic disciplines, rather than their core mission of recognizing our shared human consciousness and passing it on.
Science is the systematic study of the physical universe, and of the physical basis of life and living process. It already includes the application of that study to meet human needs (including but not limited to human needs for art, music and storytelling). It absolutely must not be reduced to job preparation, or reverenced on a useless pedestal with offerings of pious gibberish.
The STEM promoters overlook the mission of serving human needs, and replace that with the mission of supplying a job market. They claim we have too many students majoring in the life sciences. The job market is saturated, but the people of the world need health care practitioners of every kind. The “flower” of applied science is health, prosperity, safety, warmth and light, and the attainment of those things points to its real relation to the humanities.
In STEM practice, Technology turns out to mean biotech classes and computer graphics. Engineering is Lego robots. Students are trained to see themselves as design teams, but not equipped to take power as human beings over technological creations.
Science is something else, much larger, and we can teach that for its own sake.
Magnificent, chemtchr! Brilliantly said!
I have copied and saved this post. I want to have it to read out to people when they start with that the evil, fascist 21st century workforce crap.
Thank you.
And Ira Shor for “They should be taught along with history, art, literature, music and dance–every subject matter has a science to it, a technology underlying it, an engineering mind at work in it. The privileged separation of STEM from the rest of student experience and school subjects is a political maneuver”
I am blown away by the level of discussion on this blog, by the decency and uncommon sense and outrage against the machine that one encounters here again and again. Thank you.
Einstein would have known what to say about the Common Core, BTW. He said, “Common sense is that layer of prejudices we lay down before the age of eighteen.” I am grateful for the uncommon sense I encounter on this blog almost daily.
I live in Nevada and I am a math teacher. I do not like how my own children had art yanked out of their school to make way for the STEM program. They are not even part of the STEM program but still attend the school that chose to use those resources to convert over and neighborhood kids not entering the program got shorted. Both of them were art majors that had ALL art classes taken away from their school. My oldest just started college at UNLV, and is back in an art class until “they” decide to take it from higher education.
Hi Lisa – Any “STEM” program that yanks art out to make way for the STEM program is misguided and is what many of us in Nevada are fighting against. That is not, and should not be the intent for a STEM program, any more than narrowing out art, PE, science, social studies and more in the name of “literacy and math” makes sense. I totally get your reaction to STEM based on your own experience, but know that is not how we are training the teachers we are working with – in fact just the opposite … we implore teachers to include the arts and administrators to support the arts as well. BTW – have students at UNLV too.
You may not be training teachers to do so, but decision makers are doing so. My daughter is an AP student, and I want everything offered to her. But she is not offered art, and tthat was not a teacher decision to erradicate a whole department. It is a thought that we will be better off by changing our priorities by decision makers. Somebody missed the clear data that the arts have the highest amount of critical thinkers, of course until they brag about those students acheiving in their district. This is a ploy just to open charters in the name of the arts. So much for full rounded students.
quote: “STEM may or may not be necessary for the careers of the future–in my view, we have no idea what the careers of the future will be, say in ten years. But the STEM components are valuable. They comprise necessary skills.”
This is the part that really gets me; there is no validity to what they are saying about being “job ready” it is all hype from the Chamber of Commerce etc. The basic problem is they are using tests to make a subset or “Quartile” that must go to the back of the line for everything; by calling them “failing” “flunking” and worse these students will be labeled shiftless, lazy etc…. because they are “NOT READY for jobs that are not available.” We should be focusing on the jobs part of the equation in our states and localities…. Instead, while jobs are diminishing we tell more and more students they “don’t have a chance because they are not job ready” It’s circular reasoning and it is immoral and unethical.
As I’ve noted before, there is no STEM “crisis.” It’s part and parcel of the whole public education “crisis” facade. Diane should know better.
See my comments below.
Democracy, what are you going on about? This is what Diane wrote:
” Her point was that the “crisis” has been vastly oversold, and that many young people with STEM backgrounds are not finding the jobs they trained for. “
Good post!
Without STEM we are finished. This is the future and that is technology of all kinds. We will not be able to compete without it and the arts in our schools and a real “Highly Gifted Program.”
George
We go back a long way, and I love you.
Please expound on this. How do you mean “compete” and a “highly gifted program”. The future starts with the present.
Oh please. The whole STEM issue is a non-issue, and it’s a very good example of why the “revolution” against corporate-style “reform” is likely to fail.
Can’t have both. Money by way of funding has already dictated. Unless we stsnd up andd say NO.
I am in a credential program to become a math teacher. I think that selling math and science classes as merely job skills turns off more kids than it attracts. (“I’m not going to be an engineer, so why should I take math?”) Yes, we need a certain number of mathematicians, scientists and engineers, and yes people need a basic understanding of these subjects to function in society. But we also need journalists, artists, parents, neighbors and others who can see the world in the way that math and science reveal it to us. It’s much easier to make math relevant when students have experiences with music, art, history, and sports.
Brian
I sit at your feet.
How will you bring in literacy to enhance your work?
I see you as a great teacher by your concerns.
Did you know that Darwin wanted all of his works about evolution to be destroyed at his death bed? Evolution is an interesting idea, but could it have some variables from the ideas of quantum physics?
Run with it brother!
The bit about Darwin wanting his work to be destroyed is purest moonshine. Did not happen.
Joseph,
You are terribly misinformed about Darwin.
Darwin was an incredibly beautiful human being. Gentle. Horrified by the Social Darwinists. He wrote a magnificent book called The Expression of the Emotions in Humans and Animals to try to get people to grok that we are all family. He spent ten years looking closely at earthworms. One of the most amazing pictures in my mind is of the bearded Darwin, in his age, playing the saxophone for a tray full of earthworms to see their reaction. (He actually did this.) He was convinced that consciousness went all the way down, that there was an earthworm variety of it. He was the guy who figured out that we owe a lot to earthworms, that they aerate the soil, for example, and do a lot of the heavy lifting in the cycle of resurrection by which the dead become the living again. He hated the Social Darwinists and wrote about how one of the most important of evolutionary strategies was cooperation.
Robert, I am really not trying to be difficult. Perhaps it is the hour, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what you meant to say when you were writing about Darwin’s book on emotion and wrote the following phrase “…to try to get people to grok that we are all family.”
The message of Darwinism, Darwin’s great discovery and his abiding interest is that we are all connected. He didn’t know about genes. He didn’t know that you share 30% of yours with blades of grass and 92% with pigs and 98.7% with bonobos, but he knew about morphology and behavior and what he saw when he looked at the natural world was that we, you and I and that giraffe and that cassowary and dodo, that we were one family.
In her book Going Rogue (2009), former beauty-queen and Vice-Presidential running mate Sarah Palin says that she doesn’t “believe in the theory that human beings—thinking, loving human beings—originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” Ms. Palin’s horror is not surprising in someone who devalues nonhuman animals to the extent that she does. As governor of Alaska, Ms. Palin threw her weight behind aerial hunting of wolves and removing polar bears from the endangered species list, and she is an avid hunter herself, a hobbyist killer of wildlife. The Bishop Wilberforces and Palins of the world cannot see the astonishing beauty of the fact that we and all the other creatures on this planet, from the smallest viruses or bacteria to the great Sequoias and blue whales, are, literally, one family, that when we destroy the salmon and the tuna and the dodos and the passenger pigeons, as well as Kingman’s Prickly-Pear (date of extinction: 1978) and the Columbia Basin Pygmy Rabbit (date of extinction: 2007), we are literally killing off members of the great family to which we belong. And when we put a pig, still alive, through a modern factory slaughtering operation, we are subjecting to unspeakable horror a being who shares 92 percent of our genes, one possessed of self-awareness, a personal identity, significant relationships with others, and the ability to feel pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, anticipation and regret, just as we do.
Reactions to Darwin’s book were mixed. People at the top of the Western power structure disliked, of course, the notion that they were not part of a special, unique creation given dominion over the rest of creation, but they LOVED the notion of the Survival of the Fittest, for this they took to explain the actual dominion that they had, by the late nineteenth century, enforced throughout the world. The wholesale slaughter, enslavement, and subjugation of indigenous peoples throughout the globe was taken as proof that they, the white Europeans, were the fittest of peoples, and justification could be found in the notion that they were simply following the dictates of a nature “red in tooth and claw,” as Jack London famously descried it. Such Social Darwinism, as this version of the evolutionary theory came to be called, appealed, in particular, to those atop the emerging capitalist hierarchy. American robber baron John D. Rockefeller, for example, once told a Sunday school class,
The growth of large business I merely a survival of the fittest. . . . The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grew up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.
A person like Rockefeller, who aggressively exploited others to amass an enormous fortune, could and did argue that he was simply behaving in accordance with natural law. And so, of course, were all those busily murdering and enslaving the indigenous peoples of earth.
But this, too, was a misunderstanding of Darwin. What the theory of Natural Selection said was not that the biggest, meanest, most ruthless of creatures would inevitably gain dominion but, rather, simply that traits that led to reproduction would tend to be passed on. In our time, evolutionary theorists have anguished over “the problem of altruism,” for example, and over the “problem of homosexuality,” for neither seemed explicable in terms of survival-to-reproduction of individuals. It turns out, however, that altruistic behavior is rather easily explained in strict evolutionary terms. The classic formulation of the answer to the “problem of altruism, in evolutionary terms, was given by W. D. Hamilton in 1963: If you are so built as to cry out when a predator approaches your pack or clan, you might well be eaten for your trouble, but some of your cousins, carrying some of the same genes you do, might survive. From the perspective of “selfish genes,” it makes no difference whether you survive or whether two of your siblings or eight of your cousins do. And homosexuality and bisexuality are also easily dealt with in the context of the theory. One incredibly successful survival strategy is cooperation, and sexual behavior, in addition to serving the purpose of mate selection, can also serve the purpose of increasing group cohesion, as does grooming. The now-well-documented fact that most higher vertebrates are bisexual in both genders and use sexuality not only for mating but also for group cohesion purposes, rather as they do grooming, is explained by this line of reasoning, as is the fact that in every human culture in which there have not been explicit cultural prohibitions against homosexual behavior (as, for example, among the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Apache), bisexuality has been the norm. In other words, it is probably the case that when it comes to sexual orientation, “You have to be taught/before it’s too late/before you are six, or seven or eight” to restrict yourself to partners of the opposite gender.
The main point, however, is this: Natural selection is simply the differential survival and reproduction of organisms, and all those attributes that make for goodness, such as nurturing, hard work, cooperation, compassion for and generosity toward others, and concern for not fouling one’s own nest, also contribute to the survival of one’s genes. It’s time to throw over the Man the Hunter myth for a more nuanced theory of human evolution and cultural development that takes into account the ways in which such traits enabled us to flourish by working together. And it’s time, as well, for us to recognize that the ethic of exploitation, extirpation, genocide, and ecocide that has characterized Western culture in the past four centuries is NOT natural but is, rather, an aberration, for it is not in the evolutionary interests of any creature to destroy its own habitat and to run through, unsustainably, in a short time, the resources needed for its continued survival.
In other words, the great lesson of evolution is NOT that we are genetically predisposed to exploit. Rather, it’s likely that just like other great apes, we are genetically predisposed to cooperate AND to be opportunistic. In this respect, we apes are a lot like crows. These big brains of ours have more to do with the sexiness of being bright and with the ability to work out and maintain complex, cooperative social relations than they do with giving us the capacity to figure out how to kill or dominate whatever is weaker than us. And now that we have developed these big brains, perhaps we ought to start using them to build upon the best of our genetic inheritance, on our ability to love and to cooperate and to nurture and to care for our planetary nest and, at the same time, to relish and protect our freedoms (that opportunism I mentioned earlier). And perhaps, just perhaps, we can use those big brains to recognize that the real lesson to be learned from evolution is just this: the other tribes of animals with which we share this fragile planet are our family. And because they are our family, we have a duty to use our big brains to end the holocaust that some but not all of us are perpetrating against them.
sorry about the long-windedness of that answer, but Darwin is astonishingly misunderstood by those who have never actually read him.
It’s not your fault, Robert. Somebody asked you to explain.
So, now that you’ve had some sleep, I wonder do you now grok Darwin, 2old2tch?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok
Thank you, chemtchr. Grok does sound like something out of a science fiction novel…and it is although I would have guessed it referred to some huge, rather amorphous creature with a belly that hung to the ground and arms long enough to pick his toenails while standing upright. Every day on this blog is a learning experience.
I think STEM is being oversold and that some skepticism is in order. Here is one personal story on top of those articles and the information provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
My daughter was very strong in math and ended up majoring in chemistry at a top-20 school. After college she was selected to be a paid intern in the research division of a successful pharmaceutical company. One year later she started in the PhD program for organic chemistry at a top University of California system school. STEM-speaking, this would all seem to paint a rosy picture for her future because she’s done everything right. Right?
But what she learned from working at the pharmaceutical company and from talking with other organic chemistry graduate students, was that much of the R&D in that particular STEM field is being increasingly outsourced to Asian countries. Not only that, but the pharmaceutical company was inclined to fill its labs with a large number of imported scientists (to save money). Some people have theorized that the reason for the current STEM push is to saturate the market with extremely educated scientists who then get stuck having to accept lower and lower wages.
In the STEM field of chemistry, American PhD graduates, even those from top universities, are not having an easy time finding work. These are people in their 20s who have been very, very self-disciplined about their schoolwork from the time they were in grade school. So, as far as our children’s futures go, pursuing any old STEM field does not guarantee success. But that is NOT what Arne Duncan or President Obama would have us all believe.
Sharon
Incredible, if Diane does not say it.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you! The STEM crisis is just another manufactured one. And it’s FOR PROFIT at the expense of the citizens who pay taxes. Keep the citizens scared and control them. Hmmm…who used this tactic?
STEM is definitely being oversold (see my comments below)…and Diane should not be helping to oversell it. It is tightly tied in with corporate-style “reform,” which she says she is against.
ok What is Stem?
Science, technology, engineering and mathematics, according to the hype. Actually, anybody who says they’re promoting STEM all in caps is probably a huckster, though.
My experience too, chemtchr. ALAS!!!
I think that is a bit over the top. I promote STEM because it brings back to the schools and school districts I currently work in a broader curriculum. Many of us are working very hard to define STEM Learning in ways that make it a rich, inclusive curriculum … and so far … with some success. I understand your trepidation … but I’m bent on making it a positive. See my comments elsewhere on this post.
Oh no, brcrosby. I DID NOT mean you!!! Not at ALL!!! There are a lot of reformy types who talk this stuff all the time as part of their “our schools are failing” gig. Clearly, that is not you. I am sorry if I gave you the impression that I thought that.
Fantastc response!!!
A beautiful post, Dr. Ravitch!
Joseph, that would be Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Some of the more advanced thinkers in this area refer to STEAM, which adds art, for science is art, and technology is art, and engineering is art, and mathematics, for sure, is art.
Yes, the more advanced thinkers (and doers) in this area are calling their movement STEAM. Here’s an example of some young scientists, technologists, engineers, artists, and mathematicians at cross-disciplinary play in their beloved public university.
https://steamfactory.osu.edu/
One of those advanced thinkers on the left of their webpage is my own offspring. How lucky they are all to have found a place to flourish together artistically and intellectually!
Sharon, my heart goes out to your daughter, and all the members of her age cohort whose gifts, talent and knowledge are being wasted by our warped financial system. They have so much to give.
I have said this until I am blue in the face. Reformers don’t want to see the light or the data that they love so much on how they will see progression from a STEAM program. We are shoveling s*** against the tide . Unfortunately at the cost of tomorrow’s future.
LIKE, as an art and technology teacher, I like STEAM!
I think it is “STEM”
though
the technology of the “steam” period is relevant
from the turn of the century (20th).
Robert. I like you already.
Science is linear thinking, Art is not.
Technology is linear thinking. Art is not.
Engineering is linear thinking. Art is not.
Mathematics is linear thinking, Art is not.
Art is non linear thinking which appeals
to the subjective (not objective) mind.
Every scientists and mathematician I have ever known or studied under considered these things arts.
My experience, as well, Ang.
Joe is exactly correct in what he states. What art does is create the pathways and connections between the two hemispheres and they start to react together instead of separately. This is what creates creativity.
Boeing, Northurp-Grumman and JPL have joined together to promote the arts. This is their reason: “We need people who can think outside of the box to create the new products and capabilities for us to stay in the business we are in the Aerospace Business. This business is totally dependent on the next big leap and that takes thinking outside of the box including in the shop. Many of our ideas come from the shop. We will eventually be out of business if we do not have the “Outside of the Box Thinking” employees in the future.” The Boeing representative at the California Assembly Committee Hearing on the Arts and the Aerospace Business at Northrup-Grumman in L.A. stated “We believe that this is important from Birth.”
I could not have said it better. A complete person is not one sided. Many people have problems through lack of self worth or ability to express themselves in prison, youth justice and in K-12 and on the street act out and this is often solved with the arts. It is the brain working in concert which allows it to “Think Outside of the Box.”
Nicely put, indeed, GB.
Diane and Brian.. there needs to be a serious correction to the constant referring to innovation in science, math and engineering as STEM. John Maeda, a leading academic who bridges both the art/design and technology worlds refers to this as STEAM. You see anything and everything that is man-made must have a creative component to it… the “A” stands for ART!!!!!! The creative process is what leads to innovation in whatever field it may come. Here are some informative links:
http://www.ucira.ucsb.edu/changing-stem-to-steam-qa-with-john-maeda-president-rhode-island-school-of-design/
http://stemtosteam.org/
“College and Career Ready” is bogus sloganeering which plays to parents’ fears that their kids won’t be employed at the end of the long and costly education road. It is manipulative and dishonest. Of course, we can’t predict what the job market will be like in 10-15 years. Here is what we can proclaim: The job market is not ready for our kids. The corporate economy does not welcome or reward our graduates. Colleges and careers are NOT student-ready…Of course the STEM hysteria involves high-tech companies seeking more special work visas for cheap tech grads from India and elsewhere, who bring high-level skills to the job for low wages. 40 yrs ago Ivar Berg of Columbia U Bus Schl wrote ‘The Great Training Robbery’ about the inability of the job market to reward and employ the many grads coming out of colleges. Then, Richard Freeman of Harvard wrote ‘The Over-Educated American’ b/c jobs available then and in near future would mostly low-skill, low-pay ones. Then, sociologist Fred Pincus studied the outcome of community college voc ed and found most tech grads working in fields they were not trained in, b/c grads take any job they can find. Bureau of Labor Stats has continually posted data that most job openings will be in low-wage, low-skill, non-collegiate employments, same as we were told 40 yrs ago. Of course Science, Tech, Math and Engine count, as Diane, Robert Shepherd, and Mr. Crosby said. But narrowing the curric for STEM and teaching stem for voc reasons are recipes for under-educating kids. These science fields are places of wonder. They should be taught along with history, art, literature, music and dance–every subject matter has a science to it, a technology underlying it, an engineering mind at work in it. The privileged separation of STEM from the rest of student experience and school subjects is a political maneuver to further empower the leading political group in our society, tech billionaires. The rest of us who love science and art should relentlessly continue rejecting their manipulations.
τέχνη transliteration, techne. Greek. Craftsmanship, craft, or art.
It’s important not to forget that.
To the extent that we are not teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics AS art, we are not teaching them.
I suspect that there are about a hundred thousand different kinds of fasteners–little devices for holding things together. The English cotter pin. The American one.
Each one was an artistic creation. Someone DREAMED it up. Some one closed his or her eyes and IMAGINED something that never was but would be.
Someone, for example, not long ago at all, dreamed up how to make a rivet that had a shaft down the center of it and was connected to a ductile piece of metal on the buck-tail, opposite the head, and so when you pulled the shaft (called a “mandrel”), this pulled that piece of metal and caused it to spread. That was the birth of the “blind” rivet, which could be set by one person, from one side, without the use of a riveting anvil or bucking bar. Rosie the riveter would have thought that that little creation was pretty cool. “A regular WORK A ART,” I imagine her saying.
I am SO with you about the Common Core, Ira. It’s completely Philistine crap.
But it’s just the thing if what you are after is a system for training the proles to accept as just “the way life is” any sort of mind-numbing task set before them–doing the online worksheet on standard CCS-ELA-RI-7b and bubbling in those bubbles.
Like extraaaa.
Ira said, “These science fields are places of wonder. They should be taught along with history, art, literature, music and dance–every subject matter has a science to it, a technology underlying it, an engineering mind at work in it. ”
Well said. I just repeated it in case anybody missed it, because he stubbornly refuses to paragraph.
YES!!!
Sorry, chmtchr. I thought it was clear that I was reinforcing the point that Ira had so eloquently made. I was moved to do so. And your post above. It took my breath away. Beautiful. Just beautiful.
Robert, yes, it’s clear you are reinforcing Ira’s point. I am just reinforcing it again. Places of wonder. Our atmosphere, oceans, our planet with a molten iron core, our bodies, our galaxies.
Ira, see my comments below.
Diane and Brian… please consider changing your attitude about “STEM”. Creative process is crucial to STEM so much so that a leading academic who bridges science engineering and technology with art/design relentlessly promotes changing this term from “STEM” to “STEAM”. The “A” is crucial to add into the equation because creative process leads to innovation no matter what the field. Anything that is man-made has to have a design component. Time to rethink! Please take a look at the link below!
http://www.ucira.ucsb.edu/changing-stem-to-steam-qa-with-john-maeda-president-rhode-island-school-of-design/
Thanks artseagal – Yes, STEM, STEAM, STREAM (to include Reading), STREAMS (to include Social Studies), UPSTREAM (to include universal PE) and so on. The point is my attitude about STEM is already about including all of those and more. If a letter isn’t there does that mean we are leaving it out? NO.
My current support of STEM is that it is encouraging bringing back a broad rich curriculum, especially to those students most narrowed out. If we bring back science and engineering it is impossible to keep the arts out … (see Da Vinci for reference). Scientists constantly sketch and so do engineers. Engineering feats are often regarded as art (buildings, bridges, etc.) … and I don’t mean that is enough … we need art just for arts sake as well. BUT if we hang that on having a letter to stand for each component … where does it end? Instead lets set the tone for a broad rich curriculum that STEM is the gateway to. Or maybe STEM+ which is what some advocate. Thoughts?
A bit flippant. I don’t think you get it. Some reading in what is going on in the design field might broaden your thinking. If not, no worries there are fortunately a good many who do understand. I mentioned John Maeda, by the way, as he was the director of MIT’s Media lab and has an MBA, an MFA and MA in computers before becoming the head of RISD – he gets it. I show my students a book called “Design Revolution” as it really shows where creative thinking can lead.
Sorry, but the letters being left out are the topics left out by the school board or the Maayor in the different regions because they are not included and the importantce of the subjects within the new programs follow suit.
So its less important to acknowledge that art (and agreed, design) is important than it is to add an “A” to STEM and call it STEAM? Is that what you are saying? Not sure how that is “flippant” … but OK. I’ve been in meetings where PE teachers are mad as hell because “STEM” doesn’t include PE somehow … so we are not supportive of PE (even when we explain that we are) … and friends tell me of being reamed by a social studies teacher because it should be STEMS … that’s my point. I don’t care if we call it Art or Design or Dog … if it gives teachers and students freedom to teach a broad, rich curriculum that lately has been narrowed to the extreme and denied to my students … I’m for it!
Well said. Every subject is important but we must educate the whole child and teach them to love to learn!
As a social studies teacher, if I hear STEM one more time, I’m going to lose it! Teaching students to understand the political process, to know how to be informed voters, to learn about our system of government, and to “read” political cartoons and other forms of commentary and propaganda, are enormously important. The public school system was conceived partly for that reason. But even adding an “A” to STEM still shortchanges learning about our government and what makes us human.
I tend to agree, but at this point if school districts want to embrace STEM … and that leads to a broader, more in-depth approach in general (that includes teaching the political process – my degree is in poli-sci) … I’m for embracing it and making it a quality, “non-narrowed” learning experience for students.
I hope it does. I’m not holding my breath, though.
Part 1
I’ve said before that there is a glaring omission of the “big picture” concerning education “reform” at the Ravitch blog. This particular post is a prime example.
One cannot be opposed to corporate “reform” and simultaneously in favor of its constituent elements, like the SAT (or ACT) Advanced Placement courses, and STEM.
Many of those who criticize public education in the United States are also those who insist that we need to emphasize science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to move our nation ahead. They are wrong on both counts.
First, there is no public education “crisis.” There never has been.
Although the central theme of A Nation at Risk was that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened American national security and “economic competitiveness,” there was no truth to the claim.
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, examined carefully its specific claims. The Sandia researchers concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
“average performance of ‘traditional’ test takes on the SAT has actually improved over 30 points since 1975…”
* “Although it is true that the average SAT score has been declining since the sixties, the reason for the decline is not decreasing student performance. We found that the decline arises from the fact that more students in the bottom half of the class are taking the SAT than in years past…More people in America are aspiring to achieve a college education…so the national SAT average is lowered as more students in the 3rd and 4th quartiles of their high school classes take the test. This phenomenon, known as Simpson’s paradox, sows that an average can change in a direction opposite from all subgroups if the proportion of the total represented by the subgroups changes.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
“The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
Part 2
Second, despite a larger, poorer, and more ethnically-diverse student population, public schools are doing pretty well for most students. Richard Rothstein recently reported this overlooked fact:
“The only consistent data on student achievement come from a federal sample, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Though you would never know it from the state of public alarm about education, the numbers show that regular public school performance has skyrocketed in the last two decades to the point that, for example, black elementary school students now have better math skills than whites had only 20 years ago.”
Third, the need for more emphasis on STEM is equally suspect. A 2004 RAND study “found no consistent and convincing evidence that the federal government faces current or impending shortages of STEM workers…there is little evidence of such shortages in the past decade or on the horizon.” The RAND study concluded “if the number of STEM positions or their attractiveness is not also increasing” –– and both are not –– then “measures to increase the number of STEM workers may create surpluses, manifested in unemployment and underemployment.”
A 2007 study by Lowell and Salzman found no STEM shortage. Indeed, Lowell and Salzman found that “the supply of S&E-qualified graduates is large and ranks among the best internationally. Further, the number of undergraduates completing S&E studies has grown, and the number of S&E graduates remains high by historical standards.” The “education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand.”
Lowell and Salzman concluded that “purported labor market shortages for scientists and engineers are anecdotal and also not supported by the available evidence…The assumption that difficulties in hiring is just due to supply can have counterproductive consequences: an increase in supply that leads to high unemployment, lowered wages, and decline in working conditions will have the long-term effect of weakening future supply.” Lowell and Salzman noted that “available evidence indicates an ample supply of students whose preparation and performance has been increasing over the past decades.”
Part 3
Beryl Lieff Benderly wrote this stunning statement recently in the Columbia Journalism Review:
“Leading experts on the STEM workforce, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.”
So why the STEM emphasis by the likes of Bill Gates and Norm Augustine (former head of Lockheed Martin)? Benderly continues:
“Simply put, a desire for cheap, skilled labor, within the business world and academia, has fueled assertions—based on flimsy and distorted evidence—that American students lack the interest and ability to pursue careers in science and engineering, and has spurred policies that have flooded the market with foreign STEM workers. This has created a grim reality for the scientific and technical labor force: glutted job markets; few career jobs; low pay, long hours, and dismal job prospects for postdoctoral researchers in university labs; near indentured servitude for holders of temporary work visas.”
Benderly reports that an engineering professor at Rochester Institute of Technology told a Congressional committee last summer this:
“Contrary to some of the discussion here this morning, the STEM job market is mired in a jobs recession…with unemployment rates…two to three times what we would expect at full employment….Loopholes have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers with ordinary skills…to directly substitute for, rather than complement, American workers. The programs are clearly displacing and denying opportunities to American workers.”
You have to wonder. When will those who continually scapegoat public education (and teachers) in the United States, and who push the fake STEM “crisis,” get exposed for their lies and for the ulterior motives behind them?
And when will those who say the are against corporate-style “reform” disassociate themselves from their pet corporate-style “reforms,” including AP courses and STEM?
As an aside, here’s the critical part of Nevada’s (to take but one example) rationale for STEM education:
“to produce informed citizens that posses and apply the necessary understandings to expand Nevada’s STEM-capable workforce in order to compete in a global society.”
Note: as I cited above, there is not STEM workforce “crisis.” At all.
And, as I’ve noted any number of times, the U.S. already is economically competitive.
The World Economic Forum evaluates and ranks countries on economic competitiveness each year. The U.S. was typically ranked 1st or 2nd each year, but recently has started to slide down; it dropped to 4th last year (2010-11) and to 5th last year (2011-12).
When the U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the WEF for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) weak (poor) corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
More recently, major factors cited by the WEF are a “business community” and business leaders who are “critical toward public and private institutions,” a lack of trust in politicians and the political process with a lack of transparency in policy-making, and “a lack of macroeconomic stability” caused by decades of fiscal deficits, especially deficits and debt accrued over the last decade that “are likely to weigh heavily on the country’s future growth.”
THOSE are the problems. Not another concocted problem with the public schools. And one might reasonably ask, how did those problems occur? Who was primarily responsible for them? And why don’t they have the courage and integrity to own up to it?
It’s interesting that the WEF cites the top economic competitors –– those ranking higher than the U.S. –– for efficiency, trust, transparency, ethical behavior, and honesty. Corporate “reformers” seem to take absolutely no notice.
Apparently, neither do many of those who are “leaders” public education..
Thanks for the head’s up, democracy. I looked up the Beryl Lieff Benderly article on Columbia Journalism Review’s website. A very good article. Highly recommended.
I too have cited your points with research from the labor department. In a delicious irony, my principal harps on about STEM, and then is forced to admit that his children are musicians and artists for the T.V. networks. Our new high school math teacher was an engineer until her entire department was forced to train their Indian replacements.
Thanks for an outstanding commentary, Diane. The last part of your blog is a superlative statement and gets at some of what education should be. I would like to point out that one of the problems that is running education off the rails is that it is almost impossible to get even the parents and school officials to reach consensus on what a good education should be. What should a high school graduate know and what should he/she be able to do upon graduation from High School?
Today’s graduate, if he/she was a good student and followed the rules, will know how to read a book and take a test, maybe even be able to write a little, but even our best students typically have very poor writing skills because they have never had much opportunity to practice writing anything longer than a short paragraph. They usually have fairly good short term memory skills, but the danger is that they think they know a lot more than they really do because, when you “teach the test” you have to cram in as many facts as you can and just hope the kids figure out how they all go together in a larger conceptual framework. Most do not have the analytical skills and/or take the time to do that. No longer do we take time to let students explore knowledge, make mistakes and figure out how to correct them. We have moved away from inquiry based learning. The standardized curriculum schedule does not permit teachers the opportunity to cultivate student curiosity.
So what we actually do is force feed facts into students, suppress their curiosity and kill their initiative until, upon graduation, the typical HS graduate is looking around for someone to tell him/her what to do next. I’m not sure what this is, but it certainly is not what a good education should be.
“Education is a beginning.”
And the middle for the end is death!
Many fine points are raised here, except for one. Bread on the table.
Education is to “Enrich” the mind. OK
The function of Education shall not be determined by “College and Career Ready”
results. OK
We can’t predict what the job market will be like in 10-15 years. OK
Colleges and careers are NOT student-ready…
What would empower STUDENTS to change either Colleges or Careers,
to satisfy the “Needs” of students?
Employment, or the means of making MONEY, to provide bread on the table,
exists, to satisfy the NEEDS of the Employer.
WHERE should a “Student” aquire the “Skills” to be employable or
ready for college?
NoBrick, if you go back and read chemtchr’s superb post at the top of the page, the point that she is addressing is, precisely, “bread on the table.”
The student certainly won’t get those skills from the CCSS, BTW. “Career ready.” What a joke! Unfortunately, it’s a joke on the nation’s kids.
Amen, said as a non religious person!
Education should be about more than making us marketable, it should be about making us whole.