Educational Gap In Science and Math : US Falls Bhind

Given the mess that the educational system is in now, teachers unions fighting for more money rather then excellence in education, finding a way to produce changes to the systems ideology will be nearly impossible.

What will be needed is a strong Conservative leaders in the White House, along with majorities in the congress, to move the control away from the federal government and place the responsibility for excellence on the local school boards and the teachers.

Wisconsin is one of the leaders in this effort and it's working by producing individual leadership among the teachers and school boards. Unions have attacked the Govenors budget for it's striking of the collective bargaining from the teachers for pensions and health care, but the result is nearly no teachers were laid off and local communities have saved millions in the process.

The reality is if this new governor hadn't gotten this new budget passed, more the 5000 teachers and public employees would have been laid off. The 3.6 billion deficit demanded changes to the system and the best way to do this was ending the collective bargaining of the public sector unions. Collective bargaining is still in force for wages.

The union said they didn't care about laid off teachers, what they wanted was the collective bargaining left in tact. Without this in place, the unions have no way to force the collection of dues. Now it's voluntary and the teachers and public employees like it that way as their pay checks went up by more than $800. Go figure!

Maybe we can change the system from 'me' to 'them'. Only time and hard work will tell.

The Excellence Gap
Source: Sol Stern, "The Excellence Gap," City Journal, Autumn 2011.

Virtually all education reformers recognize that America's ability to remain an economic superpower depends to a significant degree on the number and quality of engineers, scientists and mathematicians graduating from our colleges and universities. Professionals working in these "STEM" areas produce greater scientific innovation, which has generated as much as half of all U.S. economic growth over the past half-century, on some accounts.

But the number of graduates in these fields has declined steadily for the past several decades as students gradually move away from those areas of study that are most beneficial to the economy on the whole, says Sol Stern, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute.

A report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that bachelor's degrees in engineering peaked in 1985 and are now 23 percent below that level.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 6 percent of U.S. undergraduates currently major in engineering, compared with 12 percent in Europe and Israel and closer to 20 percent in Japan and South Korea.
The World Economic Forum now ranks the United States fifth among industrialized countries in global competitiveness, down from first place in 2008. The fact that students are moving away from these fields has damaged the United States' competitiveness in the international scope. Yet this trend is only one of the dangers that currently plague the American education system.

In tandem with this growing profession shift among students has been the pervasive effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Some 10 years down the road, it is easy to see the good intentions of the law, which was one of the most significant education reforms in modern history. Yet its negative effects are now much easier to identify and quantify than they were at the outset.

Among them is the negative effect on top-performing students. By focusing on closing achievement gaps and lifting up the worst-off students, the law encourages educators to ignore talented learners. Additionally, because NCLB ties federal funding to a given school's performance within state-created metrics, state lawmakers are encouraged to lower standards. This artificially boosts scores and warrants greater shares of federal dollars.

Moving forward, Congress should reconsider some of the most damaging aspects of NCLB and should include policies that encourage the development of talented students who will drive innovation. Additionally, lawmakers should encourage further creation of math and science academies that will encourage greater entrance into STEM fields.