The need for more science education is so ingrained in the science lexicon it has practically become a mantra. This makes sense; without question America leads the world in science output, producing over 31 percent of the studies with less than 6 percent of the world population(1), but in an increasingly competitive world, and with ever-growing populations in Asia, science education will remain important to anyone who wants to retain leadership.
But does that mean we need more science educators? Needing more sounds like we have a deficit. The data say otherwise and perhaps progressive attempts at controlling science education mean instead we are throwing money and numbers at a problem they have created and not allowing the best teachers to flourish.
Science understanding among adults has increased sharply in the last two decades, almost tripling since 1988(2). No Child Left Behind, signed into law on January 8, 2002 by President George W. Bush, also boosted scores for students and has resulted in increases in math and science knowledge to such an extent that females have parity with males for the first time in history.(3)
Yet No Child Left Behind was the target of an all-out assault by progressives and remains a target to this day, despite its success - and now the progressive war on science education has extended to the university sector.
Grasping why science education needs to be constantly fixed by progressives even when it is doing well - adult science literacy triple and science scores up, including for females, the group most often left behind before No Child Left Behind - requires an understanding of real problems versus manufactured ones.
The manufactured problem is that there is a deficit in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education and it can only be fixed by funneling more taxpayer money and hiring more teachers. The real problem, getting the best science education for each tax dollar spent, has nothing at all to do with hiring more teachers - the progressive solution has nothing at all to do with providing a better science education but they need to convince people there is a problem only they can fix.
When you read articles by progressives about science scores for U.S. students, you see terms like 'dismal' and 'falling behind' even though scores are up. It's startling to read or hear such negative commentary on American youth when science knowledge is greater than in previous generations - generations that have led and continue to lead the world in science. But if there is no problem, one has to be manufactured. President Obama, desiring to show he cares more about education than his predecessor, topped President George W. Bush's commitment to "bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms" by promising "100,000 STEM teachers over the next decade" three years later. It's a bold agenda but an easy one to advocate when the belief is that money is something you simply tell the government to print and the statistics leading him to believe we need more teachers are essentially manufactured.
The actual data does not show there is a problem at all much less one that can be solved by hiring more teachers. Richard Ingersoll from the University of Pennsylvania tracked teacher employment over a period of 20 years and found just the opposite - there are plenty of teachers being hired. During the period of his analysis, from 1988 to 2008, he found the supply of math and science teachers outpaced enrollment in schools.(4)
His findings were not welcomed by progressives intent on increasing teaching jobs. "When I started this work I assumed, like everybody else, that we have a critical shortage. And it was only slowly that I came to these contrarian views. Now I'm getting hate mail from people saying that I'm undermining their arguments to politicians and college presidents about the need to train more STEM teachers."(5)
That's the crux of it. To progressives, the focus is not on providing a quality science education for students but rather on creating more teachers.
With 500,000 science and math teachers, how can anyone claim there are not enough? They do so by framing the argument and placing the focus on schools where there is high turnover rate and then extrapolating that problem out to all of science education. The highest turnover rates are primarily in poor schools but the primary issue is not income, it's teacher job satisfaction, something more teachers cannot solve. A young teacher fresh out of school has to join a union unless they are in a right to work state and, union or not, most of the jobs available will be in schools where experienced teachers with tenure do not want them. Teachers, like anyone else, prefer to work close to where they live and be part of the community they teach in but a young science teacher has to pick any place that has a job, even though it is supposedly the case that there are so few teachers. For the first three years in the education profession, if a new teacher is in a progressive state they are forced to pay dues whether they are in the union or not. There, they exist with rigid controls placed on them, which means there can be student discipline issues and very little room for actual creativity in how they will perform - all things in opposition to the reasons people go into teaching. That's no different than many jobs but not the noble profession and higher calling education is supposed to be.
As a result, in 2006, after President Bush declared America would hire 30,000 new science and math teachers, 26,000 still quit - and the reasons had nothing to do with funding or numbers of teachers. An excellent new teacher full of enthusiasm has no chance at all to compete for any job except a job a teacher with three more years experience does not want - qualified or not. When a teaching job in a better location becomes available, the teacher takes it or, disheartened by the experience, leaves education entirely. Thus, you have turnover so the issue becomes retention, not hiring. And the solution to retention is letting better employees be rewarded more but that is the antithesis of the union mentality.
In the progressive world of science education, fairness under the guise of equality is paramount, not excellence - a mentality that is the antithesis of science, where only the top 10 percent of ideas will be able to get funding. In a world where excellence matters most, under-performing teachers could be replaced with better ones, regardless of tenure or union representation, and then the best ones could be paid better than the below average.
Progressives don't think much of young people or science educators as their use of the term 'dismal' in defiance of results attests, so their desire to create more educators has little to do with education and more to do with increasing union power. Luckily, once students reach the university level, union influence and progressive politics disappears, right?
Not at all.
A constant complaint of conservatives is that academia is too progressive. Of course science academia is progressive, scientists at universities work the same hours as the private sector for a lower salary so they don't care about money and they recognize that being reliant on taxpayer money means having finite limits on what they can earn yet do the job anyway. That's to be applauded and arguing about why university scientists make too much or too little is the topic of a different book but even at the university level, a bastion of intellectual freedom, progressive pressure has come to bear.
Since 1988, the American Federation of Teachers has launched a full-scale campaign to increase their membership by making headway at the university level. This makes sense to some - a new Ph.D. who works as a post-doctoral fellow will get a wage far below what peers in the private sector make, but that is because we produced six times as many Ph.D.s each year than there are jobs and laboratories are funded by taxpayers so principal investigators, the researchers who obtain the grant, have to spend wisely. Today, 440,000 people at the university level are members of collective bargaining groups.
Anyone who knows the history of unions knows job cuts are sure to follow but the public sector is a different animal - it is very difficult to fire anyone. Government employees now make more money than their private sector counterparts for the first time in history and they have a union to make sure it stays that way. In the old blue-collar union vice grip, the industry could simply disappear from America, like steel, but the government and universities cannot disappear.
Then there is the political-cultural issue. Progressives like unions, and academia become more diverse demographically in the last 30 years but far less diverse politically. Unions know if they increase their numbers, they will have more success and if they have more success, they will create more progressives who like unions. As an additional incentive, unions can now eliminate the one thing that makes academics work hard early in their career: tenure. An academic who doesn't want to work in the private sector but can't get tenure will instead join a union and be able to keep employment through another route.
Unions institute equality at the expense of excellence and that is a very bad thing for science education.
Take Stony Brook University, an outstanding research school on Long Island, 60 miles east of New York City. It is a state school but ranked among the top overall 100 universities and top 50 public schools by U.S. News&World Report among the top 25 'best values in public colleges and universities', according to Kiplinger.
And it is a steal at $6,000 per year, but because its reputation and its education are superior to most other schools in nearby states, they would like to charge more. In opposition? The United University Professions union. Letting superior schools charge more would mean not all schools are equal and therefore undermine union solidarity.
No mention at all of education quality in there.
There are other issues that may come into play; unions historically want to negotiate a number of working conditions. In education that means the curricula and grading standards and working hours. As shown, the problem we have in high school science education is not numbers of teachers, it is keeping good ones when they see poor teachers ahead of them and have little chance to succeed and that is not something we want duplicated at the university level, where taxpayers are already funding a great deal of the costs and then parents are privately paying the rest.
If science, and science education, is to remain committed to excellence, it can't be hindered by the artificial equality progressives seek to institute. Most researchers don't want to be part of a herd, that is what has made American science historically great, and losing that competitive streak would be a blow to future generations
