The decision to set national education goals was perhaps the most important result of the Education Summit last September. Now we have them: In his State of the Union speech, the President unveiled six goals for America to accomplish by the year 2000. How do they look?
First, it's encouraging that the President is keeping education at the top of the national agenda. But as most commentators noted, there was a yawning gap between the President's education goals and the money added to attain them. The announced increase in the federal education budget will not be enough even to take care of inflation.
As for the goals themselves, I'm glad the President has put them out. I hope we'll get to discuss and improve them because they need work.
Goals can be expressions of high aspiration that are not possible to carry out or they can be statements of purpose that move people to action. When President Kennedy announced that we would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, he knew we had the technology to make this happen; the goal was within our reach. If George Washington or Abraham Lincoln had set moon travel as a goal, it would have been sheer foolishness. Furthermore, President Kennedy knew that an enormous amount of money would be needed, and he proposed spending it. What about President Bush's goals? Is he talking about things that we can reasonably expect to do in ten years -- and with the money available -- or is he talking pie in the sky?
Take the math and science goal. "By the year 2000," it says, "U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement." Where do we stand now? According to the International Assessment of Mathematics and Science, which compared 13-year-old students from the U.S. and 11 other countries and Canadian provinces, American students were at, or close to, the bottom in every category. And they were far below the leaders in math -- students from Korea -- and in science -- students from British Columbia and Korea. These findings make sense, given the state of our math and science education; the goal of being first in the world by 2000 does not.
Most high-school science teachers are poorly prepared to handle the courses they teach -- according to a recent study done for the National Science Teachers Association, 80 percent are teaching outside their primary field. And nearly one-third of the people teaching physics never took a physics course themselves.
The situation is worse in elementary school. Elementary school teachers, many of whom have never had a serious lab science course, are often uncomfortable with science. So science class is frequently no more than kids' reading their textbooks and learning a bunch of science vocabulary words. The result, according to Marshall Smith, Dean at Stanford University's School of Education, is that "the game is lost" before our students get beyond grade 8. Most of these kids don't take science in high school if they can help it. The ones who do begin at the beginning because the people who write high-school science curriculum assume -- correctly -- that students are unlikely to have learned any science in elementary school. No wonder they do so miserably in comparison with 13-year-olds from other countries.
We have similar problems with math education -- that is, a shortage of qualified teachers. The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world where you can graduate from high school and college without knowing much beyond arithmetic. Businesses complain about this problem, and schools suffer from it, too. People who barely pass the basic math competency test for beginning teachers are not going to be comfortable teaching math -- and too many are in just that position.
Moreover, we have no prospect of getting the number of qualified teachers we need to handle elementary and high school math -- or science for that matter. We're probably not even producing enough math and science teachers a year to put one in every school district in the country, let alone fill the positions that open up in every school. And we're not going to turn that around in a hurry, especially given the pitifully small number of high-achieving high school graduates.
Can we improve things? Sure, we can try teams of teachers. That way, each team could have a teacher qualified in the field. But even so, schools might fall short. Or we could try using technology -- except that schools don't have the technology yet. Either of these would take a lot of trial and error and more money than we have now. And the same goes for other ideas we could conic up with. At best, we can hope to have all our math and science classrooms adequately staffed in 15 to 20 years.
None of this means that we shouldn't set challenging national goals or that we can't find creative ways around obstacles. But challenging goals are different from unrealistic or impossible ones. And the last thing we can afford now is cynicism.
President Bush's goals are a good start, but national goals are not something that can be handed down as from a throne. Now that we have his ideas we need to look at them, discuss them widely and rework them where they need it. There's too much at stake here not to do it right.