[MATHEDCC] Setting K-12 Science Standards
rbenso@SEACCC.SCCD.CTC.EDU
Thu, 04 Dec 97 11:55:10 PST
Not sure if this relates to math standards in California, but thought
it worth forwarding.
Dick
The New York Times Opinion December 1, 1997
Science Without Scientists
By PAUL R. GROSS
FALMOUTH, Mass. -- As with all things Californian, the public education
bureaucrats there are like those elsewhere, only more so. These experts are
smarter than the Trojans: no gift horses for them while they guard the
topless towers of Ilium. And they're fearless, too. You can't be chicken if
you refuse a valuable and publicly offered gift, as the state commission in
charge of writing the new science standards did recently.
The facts are as follows: California, like other states, is writing new
standards for various subjects taught in the public schools. When they heard
about the need for new science guidelines, a group of scientists, including
three Nobel laureates in chemistry, volunteered to help write them, at no
charge.
Even among Nobelists, those three -- Glenn T. Seaborg, Dudley R. Herschbach
and Henry Taube -- have admirable credentials in education. Dr. Seaborg, a
former Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, helped write A
Nation at Risk, the famous 1983 report on American schooling. Dr. Herschbach
is leading a National Academy of Sciences program to improve the public
understanding of science.
Dr. Taube is a much-honored professor of chemistry at Stanford.
In ordinary business or government, you'd need a whole extra budget to pay
for such consultants. So what did the education nomenklatura of California
do? They snubbed the scientists and offered a $178,000 contract to a group
made up mostly of professional educators based at California State College at
San Bernardino. The Nobelists and their colleagues are appealing the
decision.
Most scientists would shrug at this turn of events and attribute it to the
same bureaucratic foolishness that gave us ebonics, for example.
But that would be a mistake. The conflict is the latest in a long history
of philosophical skirmishes between those in the public education
establishment (including those in the graduate schools of education) and the
academics who generally reside in university arts and sciences departments.
There have been good arguments on both sides. American public education is
an unprecedented social experiment whose burden has fallen on a growing class
of mostly underprepared, underpaid (until recently) and unappreciated
schoolteachers. Professors in the academic disciplines, always somewhat better
compensated, have usually been quick to snipe, but not to offer practical
help. The teachers' bureaucracies, gaining political clout, have responded as
one would expect: with exclusionary rules, like those for teacher
certification, and self-righteous isolationism.
Thus your typical working scientist considers the quality of science
education in the public schools to be dismal, a judgment for which there is
solid evidence. At the same time, the teaching establishment sees the
professors of arts and sciences as a group disdainful of educational method,
people who can't be trusted in a school classroom. A spokesman for the San
Bernardino group suggested that the Nobelists and their ilk would want to
teach grade-school students the laws of thermodynamics, which they might
memorize but surely not understand.
He speaks for the education establishment, which believes that scientists
care chiefly about facts and formulas. Real teachers, on the other hand, know
that they must convey understanding to a diverse population of
schoolchildren.
But anybody who knows anything about how science is constituted, and how
effectively it can be taught, knows that facts and formulas are a very small
part of the whole. And anybody who examines science teaching in the schools
knows that it has failed precisely because the students don't understand the
fundamentals. To deny the next generation of students the insights of those
who actually do science of the highest quality, and who have succeeded in
getting students to understand it, is knee-jerk politics.
You would think that the education establishment would not be so
dismissive, given the well-known and depressing test results in science for
American children compared with students in other countries.
But many education professionals do not put much store in such tests,
which assume that there are right and wrong answers. Instead, they believe
that objectivity is impossible -- that there is no "knowledge," only
"knowledges." Knowledges, they argue, are cultural constructs. So scientific
knowledge is no better than any other belief system. Hence social forces and
interactions, not "correct answers," matter the most in education.
Thus Dr. Seaborg et al. can be dismissed as "traditionalists" fixated on
correct answers. But right and wrong answers exist. If the education
professionals have their way, the result will not be an enhanced public
understanding of science, but its further debasement.
Paul R. Gross, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of
Virginia, is the co-author of Higher Superstition.
Copyright 1997 The New York Times
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