Science scores are up among students and two-thirds of students have a decent grasp of science. That sounds pretty good, right?
If you are in the 'education stinks so let's give it more money' business, though, higher scores are cause for alarm. “This is dreadful,” Gerry Wheeler, interim executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, told the Washington Post.
Well, better scores are indeed a bad thing if you are in the business of being a paid lobbyist to hire more teachers and you have to confront the uncomfortable truth that teacher hiring has far outpaced student enrollment in the last few decades - including science teachers. The other uncomfortable truth is that almost as many quit as are hired and those reasons have more to do with the shackles educators face by unions, school districts and governments and little to do with students, teachers themselves or the nebulous' funding' boogeyman.
Still, Wheeler found a way to blame No Child Left Behind, which was approved with greater bipartisan support than any war we fought last decade but was immediately undercut by states and education unions. “As a country, we’ve backed off on science,” he told Lyndsey Layton. “We even have members in elementary schools who say, ‘My principal told me to stop teaching science.’ ”
Really? Who are these anonymous teachers? It sounds very much like Michelle Bachmann's claim that someone told her the HPV vaccine caused mental retardation. The media jumped all over that. Who else is going to call out Wheeler for his argument-by-anecdote hysterical claim?
In reality, No Child Left Behind boosted math and reading scores substantially, reversing the rampant decline that caused it to be approved so overwhelmingly, and was cheered by the public. Male and female students achieved parity for the first time in history due to No Child Left Behind so how can science scores be blamed on it?
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is given to fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders. Since they changed the science format from the 2009 test it is difficult to compare current results to prior classes but downright irresponsible for anyone claiming to care about education to call these students' performance "dreadful". Scores for hispanic and black students improved. So did white children. Asian students already scored well and did not drop. That means everyone went up. How can that be bad?
Obviously, No Child Left Behind should have been expanded to include science and instead it was gutted by a president who needs education union support going into an election year.
