Sharon R. Higgins, an Oakland parent and blogger, questions
whether there is a STEM cris and offers documentation for her
views. She writes: The STEM alarm is definitely a manufactured
crisis. 1. “As the push to train more young people in STEM —
science, technology, engineering and math — careers gains steam, a
few prominent skeptics are warning that it may be misguided — and
that rhetoric about the USA losing its world pre-eminence in
science, math and technology may be a stretch.” (“Scientist
shortage? Maybe not.” USA Today, 7/9/2009,
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-science-engineer-jobs_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
2. “’There is no scientist shortage,’ says Harvard University
economist Richard Freeman, a leading expert on the academic labor
force.” (from “Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?”
Scientific American, 2/22/2010),
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-the-us-produce-too-m&sc=WR_20100224
3. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the top 20
fastest growing occupations, only one is STEM-related (biomedical
engineers). http://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm 4. According
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the top 20 occupations
w/highest projected numeric change in employment, ZERO are
STEM-related). http://www.bls.gov/ooh/most-new-jobs.htm 5. The STEM
push ignores the subtleties. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, some STEM occupations have job outlooks that are
“faster than average” but many fall into the “average” or “slower
than average” category. 6. The Gulen Movement has cleverly taken
advantage of the STEM push for its charter school expansion. ALL
their schools boast about having a STEM emphasis. Just one example
is with Harmony Public Schools, the Texas chain.
http://www.harmonytx.org/AboutUs/TSTEMatHarmony.aspx
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Just recently I attended a Cub Scout Pack Meeting. I used to be a Cub Scout leader, but I haven’t done it in a while. The theme for the month? STEM. I nearly threw up. Now we’re indoctrinating 8 year olds.
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Wow, I look back on my experiences in the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and see both as instrumental in my lifelong love of science and engineering as well as the outdoors. To me, the Cub and Boy Scouts have always had “STEM” as one of their focuses, they just weren’t labelled as such. Learning to build a fire from scratch, how to build a shelter, tie knots … I could go on and on … those are all problem solving in a very STEM approach! Not sure what the STEM approach your Pack was taking that made you have that reaction, but not sure how you do scouting if you take out all the connections to what we NOW call STEM.
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One son of mine is an Eagle Scout and one is a Life Scout, almost an Eagle, so I am a HUGE supporter of the Scouts. And I agree that there’s a lot of math and science and engineering there. BUT, do they HAVE to label it? Can’t is just be Scouts without all of the STEM stuff?
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I’m with you there … I don’t feel the need for a label … I think it is a reaction to what is being talked about and seems current … and scouting wants to be seen as current… don’t see it hurting anything (am I missing something?), so tend to let that go. But I get your point.
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I would say Cub Scouts had these practices always ; STEM proponents reverse engineered things to make it look like the Cub Scouts aligned the ideas to STEM and not vice versa.
Just like Girl Scouts are now Common Core aligned! They have a common core badge! http://www.girlscouts.org/program/national_program_portfolio/curriculum/
This whole initiative has very long tentacles.
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Careful Diane you and Sharon are painting with an awfully wide brush. Although I agree that using the, “We need more STEM to prepare students for careers,” is overused, it also misrepresents much of the push for STEM. STEM learning, when done well, “un-narrows” the curriculum in ways you would support. I’m currently training teachers in STEM learning … and guess what? 90% of them are teaching in our most at risk schools where there is a big STEM push. Schools (where I taught until recently) that had the philosophy of, “When you agree to teach at a Title 1 school you give up your right to teach anything but math and ELA.” Those very schools now are hungry for science, social studies, engineering and … wait for it, ART … because that is often part of engineering design and science learning … and to be skillful enough in art to use in those areas students are seeing more art for art sake experiences so they regain skills using art media.
The main reason I took my current job in STEM is because it offers students the broad, rich curriculum they deserve. Yes, like anything else it can be misused, but lets not denigrate STEM because a few bastardize it’s promise.
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brcrosby, I am all in favor of teaching STEM subjects! I favor a full curriculum for all students, including math and science but also the arts, literature, foreign languages, history, civics, economics, geography, and physical education. I don’t think any student should be denied a full curriculum.
I think we need to be careful to stop treating everything students do in school as preparation for a career. No one knows what jobs will be available five or ten or fifteen years from now. We don’t take courses in the arts because we expect students to be artists but because we expect that the arts will enrich their lives. The same could be said for every subject that matters. We read great literature not to grow up to be a writer but to partake of the human experience in different times and places.
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Social Studies is left out no matter the discussion. Students NEED history, geography and civics. They NEED to learn how to be productive members of society. Public education was partly to create an educated, voting citizenry. STEM or the NCLB-inspired “English and Math only” ignores this importance. Of course, arts, physical education, technical education and more are also needed for well-rounded citizens.
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There does not need to be any STEM designation or emphasis for there to be a broad, rich curriculum.
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Exactly! Agreed, but that is not the tenor of your post … you don’t say that. You don’t mention that this is a misuse of STEM that really has much promise when done for the right reasons. There are those out there that constantly bash STEM for the very reason the post promotes. Unless you qualify your comments, it could be taken as STEM = another bad reform shoved down our throats by neo-reformers. I know that is not your intent, hence my comment.
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I will rectify that for sure. STEM is important, as are the arts and humanities. I will shout it from the rooftops!
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math and science are important, so too learning how to use technology as a tool….but STEM is not.
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Me too!
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I don’t for one minute believe there is a shortage of workers in the US who are ready & willing to work in these areas. The trouble is they want & deserve a good wage & benefit package.
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there’s not….see my comments in the post dedicated to BCrosby.
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Thank you for this post. My husband is a STEM person. There is no STEM crisis. The crisis is the FEDs!
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This August 2013 post explains why the STEM crisis is bogus:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
The bottom line from the is that employers want to suppress wages… the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who published this have no political axe to grind, they just want a clear and accurate picture of the workforce needs to be published.
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This is interesting. It is almost as if the ownership-worker dichotomy has been replaced by the manager/administrator-worker dynamic.
It seems to me that that is all out of whack and chock full of perverse incentives.
Maybe this whole education snafu is a reflection of this.
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Beat me to it! The STEM industry itself knows there is no crisis. Here’s another good article on it. It echo’s many of the cogent points in these comments. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/07/09/stem-culture-and-the-real-stem-crisis/
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I’m glad DR cleared up her view on STEM subjects, but, really, the post didn’t denigrate STEM subjects; it made the point that the perceived STEM crisis appears to be manufactured. The question I would have is why was it manufactured? Is it merely a way to narrow curriculum and increase rigor or is there something more to it?
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The more STEM workers you have the cheaper and more disposable they are. Also, you can make big $$$$ giving them an education they will not be able to later be employed in.
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One deficit we do have is in the funding of scientific research. In one area of study, high energy physics, you can trace that back to the early 1990’s. After two billion dollars had already been spent, the Superconducting Super Collider being built in Texas was canceled in 1993. There was a debate during the George H. W. Bush administration, and Congress eventually decided that the International Space Station should be funded but not the SSC. This set a trend in motion, and most high energy research is now done outside the US. Today, under the “sequester” bill, all scientific research is losing funding. This trend will make our country poorer, and will make it even harder for scientists, young and old, to find jobs.
I think we should be pouring more money into basic and applied research instead of cutting it. Stop handing out corporate welfare checks to oil companies, agribusiness, and private equity operators. Use those tax dollars to support the next generation of scientists and scientific discoveries.
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The Idaho Statesman recently reported on Micron Technology funded research being done by the University of Idaho. Once again, the public is given the impression that there is a STEM crisis. I wrote challenging the findings because my experiences show that students actually increase their interest in math and science IF…teachers work together to design a comprehensive lab science program. Unfortunately class sizes in Idaho have grown to the point where it is no longer safe nor practical to do laboratory investigations. So what we have is a manufactured crisis. We blame the teachers. And the deformers use it to privatize education or to sell technology. http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/09/11/2754094/idaho-faces-hurdles-getting-math.html
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The whole point of the STEM hysteria is to create an even bigger glut of workers so as to drive the pay down even further.
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see my comments in the post dedicated to Brian Crosby.
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Again when talking about a surplus or shortage in a market, it needs to be connected to the price level. There may be no shortage of engineers at the current wage, but if wages were to drop there would be an excess demand for people with those certified skills and abilities.
The projected growth rates of occupations, if done correctly, must also take wage rates into account. If a particular type of labor is expensive, a firm will seek out ways to economize on its use and future job openings will be scarce. This is a good thing, however, as that type of labor must be rare and should be used judiciously.
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the Technology Bubble (that exploded in the Wall Street markets) never receded in education. Diane shows two streams or themes and if we add the Technology bubble we have a picture of STEM hype…
quote from Diane’s book: “There was the testing and accountability movement, which started in the 1980s and officially became federal policy in 2002 as part of the No Child Left Behind law. Then there was the choice movement which had been simmering on the back burner of education politics for half a century, not making much headway… NCLB breathed new life into the choice movement by decreeing that schools persistently unable to meet its impossible goal of 100 percent proficiency be handed over to private management, undergo drastic staff firings, or be closed… Now the two movements are no longer separate. They have merged and are acting in concert.”
Big firms had computer space and they had to make profit centers and “sell” to the market — voila, sell test scoring to schools. There staff were mostly science or engineering graduates and really wanted to make a contribution to education. But then it got out of control. When MITRE was doing this in MA there overhead on an education grant from the U S Office of Education was at 90% so they could see a profit by staying with the education programs through the recession when all other markets were dwindling.
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Here’s another good article on the so called crisis. http://www.jrothman.com/blog/htp/2013/09/no-stem-crisis-no-war-for-talent.html
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“Training our imaginations now for the future cannot begin and end with policy-based educational funding systematically referenced to STEM and economic parameters. This is the real STEM crisis. Although STEM culture is not one fixed thing, in education its perversion for the appearance of scientific rigor has contributed to high-stakes testing, prescriptive curriculum, the erosion of creativity and critical thinking, and the decreased relevance of arts, humanities, and social sciences. Educational research has been impoverished by a lack of federal funding in general and policy-based funding’s limited understanding of the role of context in particular. Anthropologists of STEM education, research, and policy emphasize the centrality of contexts. Programs, policies, and curricula are not static but dynamic, context-specific entities.” http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/07/09/stem-culture-and-the-real-stem-crisis/
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