Wendy Lecker is an attorney for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity project at the Education Law Center.
In this article, she argues that the STEM crisis is overblown because there are more STEM graduates than there are jobs for STEM graduates.
She does not argue against teaching math, science, and engineering. She worries that our undue emphasis on standardized testing is crushing the spirit of inquiry and the innovative thinking that our future scientists and engineers need.
She concludes:
Yet our policies in recent years are moving us away from that creative culture of learning toward a system that produces compliant, conventional thinkers seeking the one right answer. Our leaders are singularly focused on increasing test scores as a measure of student, teacher and school success. This obsession has forced schools across the country to eliminate arts, music and physical education and drastically reduce subjects like social studies. It has forced teachers to teach from a pacing guide or script and use rubrics. And it has ignored the importance of diversity, so that more and more children are attending highly segregated schools.
Experienced teachers see the change in our children. My son’s fifth-grade teacher once said that by the time they got to her, after several years of CMTs and an increasing barrage of district-wide assessments, students were following her around, asking if they had the right answer. She saw that as a habit of which she needed to gently break them. In her class, free-flowing ideas led to creative connections. One morning the class was studying equilateral triangles. In the afternoon, their social studies textbook showed a diagram of a triangle with the three branches of government on each side. All she had to do was ask the class what an equilateral triangle meant and the children embarked on a robust discussion of the balance of powers.
Epiphanies do not exist inside rubrics and scripts. It is in the spaces in between subjects that innovation occurs. Therefore, if our leaders are truly trying to create the next generation of creative thinkers who will restore vitality to our stagnant democracy and economy, they must allow the “messiness” of learning back into our schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a wonderful and wise piece, Wendy! Why can’t our elected officials and other policymakers have just 10% of the common sense that’s reflected in this piece and all the others that get posted on this must-read blog? Maybe we need to require that THEY pass some kind of standardized test of their ability to comprehend and accurately interpret research and non-fictional literature, have at least a modicum understanding of child development, and possess even a glimmer of everyday “parental smarts”? Probably would be lots of unfilled bubbles and incorrect answers on their bubble sheets! Instead, our CT policymakers are attempting to reshape UConn and K-12 school districts and magnets to emphasize STEM while ignoring (some would say, squeezing out) the arts, humanities, social sciences, world languages, and ensuring a learning climate that’s actually fun and filled with exploratory opportunities for kids. Makes no sense whatsoever.
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Not Born Yesterday: it’s the same bunch that engineered the massive iPad boondoggle in LAUSD and was shocked—SHOCKED!—that within less than a week students have broken the security codes and are using their iPads to do whatever they want.
Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-lausd-ipads-20130925,0,906924.story
This is what lack of real-world experience, arrogance, and contempt towards students, parents and community looks like.
But look at the bright [?] side: ain’t $tudent $ucce$$ grand?
😦
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No, I think it costs more than a grand.
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True! There is no STEM crisis. STEM crisis is another manufactured crisis. But there is a STEM crisis in congress. They are well…
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How about those I-Pads are only 32 GB and my old laptop is 220 GB and they cost $1,000 each instead of the claimed no more than $200 and a 5 year not 3 year warranty? Something stinks real bad. Not only that using bond money is illegal for this purpose. This is general fund not school construction. It is illegal to use bond money for general fund purposes including things like books and I-Pads except for new classroom construction as a part of the section called “other.” Then we have Aquino and Apple stating at the board that the devices are covered against damage and theft for 3 years and I have the documents with Aquino’s name on them planning to charge parents $717 without depreciation for any problem. CORE-CA has the documents once again because we are trusted that we will not give up where we got them from. Trust is most important. And let us not forget the other 1/2 of this is a result of a commenter on the Ravich Blog posting the Aquino power point. Until then we did not know about it. This is how things like the Ravich Blog work. Someone else has the needed information that may not mean to them what it means to someone working in that area such as this was. Put the two together and Aquino quits within 2 hours of the Yolande Beckles presentation for the California Title 1 Parent Union and after two days before the revelations of the Title 1 Union and CORE-CA on this corruption and other corruption such as their breaking the Title 1 laws for over two years in a letter from the DOE. And the staff and Deasy telling the board that all the investigations from DOE were passed with flying colors and in fact they had miserably failed them all. We have the documents from DOE on both.
Do not give up. Get your documents. Do the tedious work it takes. They win when you do not do the hard tedious work to get the answer and proof. Without that you have nothing.
In L.A. if you want a job be and engineer. Did any of you know that Boeing, Northrup-Grumman and JPL are seriously involved in arts in schools and have a $675,000 grant for such? At a hearing CORE-CA was at we heard their representatives for this subject from these corporations state that arts is essential to the survival of their business’s. The reason being that their business is totally dependent on “Thinking outside of the Box.” Without that they are dead in devolupement of new technologies. The Boeing rep. even stated that children need arts from birth. They seen to understand this better than the educrats. We have never heard this out of the educrats. Instead the educrats are cutting back on the arts while there is a statewide organization in California called “Create California” is joining to put the arts back into all California schools. You can see the students perform for this group in Fresno recently over 2 days at George1la. They are amazing. If you are in California please join Create California to help us put the arts back into schools. CORE-CA is now assisting “The Community School of the Arts Foundation” put the arts back into schools. They have provided this program to more schools in LAUSD than LAUSD has arts in schools as a result of the district. This is upside down. Yet we will continue and just gave the information on Create California to the deaf community as they certainly need to be involved for their fullfillment of their lives also.
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“Epiphanies do not exist inside rubrics and scripts.”
Great line!!
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The concept of shortage or surplus is always connected to the price.
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