National Strategy Urged to Reformulate Math, Science : Education: Curriculum planners say changes must start now. But they will take time--and lots of money.

Working with an army of experts from around the country, scientists, engineers and lawmakers here are laying plans to capture the hearts and minds of American youth and win them over to science and mathematics.

Known by such code names as “Project 2061,” “Scope, Sequence and Coordination Project,” and “Everybody Counts,” the plans are part of a nationwide campaign to increase the number of students who pursue careers in science and engineering and to improve the technological and mathematical literacy of all Americans.

President Bush has declared moral, if not financial, support for the campaign. At an education summit in Virginia last fall, the President, along with the governors of all the states, pledged that for the first time the United States will establish national performance goals--”goals that will make us internationally competitive,” Bush said.

By the year 2000, the President said, U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement. Now, most surveys rank U.S. students anywhere from average to well below average, compared to their counterparts in other industrialized countries.

Although there is considerable skepticism that an effort of this magnitude can be executed so quickly and without a sizable infusion of funds from the federal government, there is no debate about the urgency of launching what may one day be known as America’s war on scientific illiteracy.

“The entire system has to be radically changed,” said F. James Rutherford, chief education officer of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science and architect of Project 2061, the longest-running and the most ambitious of the plans to bolster the United States’ beleaguered educational system in science and math.

“It will take a quarter of a century,” Rutherford said. “It will take a generation of students. It will take an all-out national effort. . . . But this is a war that can and must be won.”

“The important thing is, this has to be a coordinated attack,” said Fred Easter, executive director of the MESA program, a math and engineering program for minority students in California.

“Math and science are unlike almost any other subject in that they must build one on the other,” Easter said. “You can read Madame Bovary without having read Shakespeare. But you can’t do algebra without first knowing how to multiply and divide. . . . Either the whole system works, or the whole system fails.”

And right now, by most accounts, the whole system is failing.

Although numerous individual experiments are under way in classrooms throughout the country to raise academic standards and increase the number of people who pursue careers in science and mathematics, there is as yet no concerted national program to improve science and math education in all school systems at all levels of education.

“What we need is a comprehensive nationwide strategy,” said Bill Honig, superintendent of public instruction in California and one of the many leaders in the reform campaign. “If we have one, there is a good chance we can pull this off. . . . After all, similar comprehensive strategies worked when this nation decided to put an astronaut on the moon, when we entered World War II, when we figured out what it would take to eradicate polio.”

No one knows for sure when it actually dawned on American scientists and policy-makers that the United States education system had fallen dramatically behind the rest of the world. But in the mid-1980s, Rutherford, who worked at the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education before coming to the nation’s largest scientific organization, decided to do something about it.

He created Project 2061, a long-range, multiphase effort by the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science to determine what scientific literacy is or should be in the latter part of the 20th Century and how it could be realized by the beginning of the 21st Century.

The name, Project 2061, came from Comet Halley, which happened to be visible from Earth in 1985, the year the project began.

“We realized,” Rutherford said, “when the comet next returned, in the year 2061, the people on Earth who would (still) be alive to see it were young children just then beginning school.”

With their futures and their children’s futures at stake, “it became clear to many of us it was time for an all-out attack on the system,” Rutherford said in an interview in his office near Capitol Hill.

“We have seen many isolated experiments in science and math education that work--career ladders and mentor teacher programs to strengthen the teaching profession, magnet schools to draw students toward science, states like California that have increased science and math requirements and tried to revise their curricula, partnerships and alliances between schools and industry.

“But, in the end, it all adds up to nothing. Why? Because no place has done all the things that need to be done--varied the salaries of teachers (offering higher salaries for better instruction), cut down on the size of big schools, increased the size of small ones, gotten rid of crappy tests. . . . People for years have been saying, ‘Just copy the Japanese.’ Yet we never do it. Why? Because it costs too much money to scale up. Many reports say that by the year 2000 we want to be best in the world. That’s wrong on all kinds of fronts. We don’t even know what best is.”

The first phase of Project 2061 ended last year with the publication of the 217-page “Science for All Americans.”

The council’s pronouncements were broad and sweeping. The bottom line of the report, Rutherford said, is that American children--not a gifted few but every one--should be scientifically, mathematically and technologically literate. Everyone should understand what nuclear power is and what its dangers are, how a light switch works and how to repair it, what mathematical formulas are and how they can be used in everyday life.

Phase II of Project 2061, now under way, is being carried out by six teams of educators and school administrators around the country.

Each team has been assigned the task of drawing up detailed math and science curricula, beginning with kindergarten and extending through the senior year of high school. They are focusing on the special educational needs of their particular regions--small-town students in Wisconsin, rural students in Georgia, Latino students in San Antonio, black students in Philadelphia, Asians and other minority students in San Diego and San Francisco.

By 1992, the final and in some ways most difficult phase of Project 2061--implementation--is scheduled to begin.

“Ultimately,” Rutherford said, “we will have to persuade individual teachers, school districts and entire states to adopt whichever one of the new curricula seems best suited to the needs of their particular students--and provide them with the means and resources to implement those curricula.”

Turning blueprints into educational practice is a process that could take a decade or longer to complete for it will require major changes in the system--new textbooks, new equipment, new and retrained teachers.

Because change of this magnitude could be enormously cumbersome and will surely be costly, Project 2061 planners say they expect to ask Congress, state legislatures and private foundations for money to implement the final recommendations of Project 2061 in stages, stretching well into the 21st Century.

Some educators are not willing to wait that long.

Imitating approaches long used in Japan, the Soviet Union, China and many European countries, the National Science Teachers Assn., another Washington-based organization, has already designed a new science curriculum for grades 7 through 12 and will begin work shortly on a companion curriculum for kindergarten through sixth grade.

Financed in part by an $8.6-million grant from the National Science Foundation, it is perhaps the most far-reaching science education reform effort in the United States since the post-Sputnik reforms of the 1950s and ‘60s.

The experiment, known as the “Scope, Sequence and Coordination” project, has been field-tested in the Houston school district and in 30 schools in California. This fall, more than 200 California schools joined the program, and the Texas Legislature has been moving quickly to adopt the program for the entire state.

The idea is to alter fundamentally the way science is taught in U.S. schools, said Bill G. Aldridge, executive director of the science teachers association.

Rather than the current “layer-cake” curriculum, which forces students to take separate and overly abstract courses in biology, chemistry and physics, the new approach requires students to study all branches of science simultaneously. Each week in the seventh grade, for example, students would take one hour of biology, one hour of chemistry, two hours of physics and three hours of Earth and space science. By the 10th grade, they would be taking three hours of biology, two hours of chemistry, one hour of physics and one of Earth and space science each week.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand how the existing system has failed and how it might be altered is to compare it to a gas-filled container, Aldridge said.

Imagine, he said, a flask full of several types of gas molecules, all moving in different directions at different speeds. Suppose you decide to select the fastest molecules moving in a particular direction. If you do that, you ignore even faster molecules moving in other directions. You also ignore other molecules that will later change speed.

“The present direction of secondary school science is like this state of gas,” Aldridge continued. “We select the young people who happen at a certain time to be moving fastest in the ‘right’ direction, and we ignore even faster (and more able) children who do not happen at that moment to be moving in the ‘right’ direction. . . . We give those selected students the added push (and advantage in the form of resources, teacher attention, and recognition); and we ignore the rest. . . .”

The obvious solution, Aldridge concluded, is “to heat the entire sample of molecules so that all will move faster”--in other words, the establishment of first-rate science education for the masses.

Changes of that magnitude are also being made in the way mathematics is taught in U.S. schools.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the National Research Council, an arm of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, have joined forces to launch a sweeping reform campaign aimed at making mathematics less theoretical and more fun for students.

The goal, according to “Everyone Counts: A Report to the Nation on the Future of Mathematics Education,” published in 1989 by the National Research Council, is “to ensure that every student graduates high school with a command of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, probability and statistics, and that they know how to apply these disciplines to solving problems--in their own lives and in the life of the nation.”

In September, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, “On the Shoulders of Giants: New Approaches to Numeracy,” which spells out specific examples of what it means to be literate in mathematics. Uncertainty, change, shape, dimension, quantity--all are mathematical concepts a literate, capable adult should understand and be able to apply to problems in their homes and in their work, the authors of the report said.

Both the teaching council and the research council, in consultation with business executives, scientists and engineers, have also endorsed new methods of teaching math. Among their recommendations are the use of computers and calculators in the classroom and new curricula that focus on real-world problems rather than rote memorization and abstract formulas.

No one has ventured a guess at what the total bill for major reform of the U.S. education system may be, but it could be astronomical. The Education Commission of the States recently estimated that just adding an extra day to the 180-day school year would run just shy of $1 billion a year. A typical science textbook now costs between $15 and $30. With nearly 46 million schoolchildren in the United States, the book bill could exceed $1 billion.

There are 30,000 high school science and math teachers and well over 1 million elementary school teachers. At a cost of $5,000 per teacher, the teacher training bill alone could exceed $5 trillion.

One of the important obstacles to overcome will be the notion, popularized during the Reagan Administration, that the federal government should no longer be in the business of educating students.

“We have to give up on the notion if we just repair things here and there it will add up to reform,” said Rutherford of Project 2061. “Given what’s involved--new textbooks, entirely new teacher training programs--you can’t create a curriculum locally. Even though federal involvement is not a popular idea now, it is going to become critical if we are to succeed in our efforts.”

At the urging of President Bush, a number of federal agencies, including such unlikely ones as the Department of Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, have increased support for science education in recent years, but overall federal spending for education has not risen fast enough to keep pace with rising costs. In 1980, according to the Quality Education for Minorities Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the U.S. government spent $34.3 billion, and in 1988 it spent $43.4 billion. But to keep pace with inflation running at a total rate of 44% over those years, the federal commitment would have had to rise by an additional $6 billion.

“The big beef I have with the Bush people is that they say the right thing,” said California’s Honig. “But what they are doing is a drop in the bucket. They wouldn’t flinch if we were trying to redesign an army or get to the moon or design an airplane. They are saying it doesn’t cost money.

“There is a good chance we can pull this off,” Honig insisted. “An amazing amount of progress has been made in a short period of time. We’re not talking about small changes. That’s what’s missing: No one is willing to put money into it, because no one thinks anything can be done. It can, it is, and it will, if we just get down to business and do it.”

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION FUNDING Funding for education as percent of NSF budget 1952-’55: 24.6% ‘56-’60: 40.9% ‘61-’65: 29.9% ‘66-’70: 27.1% ‘71-’75: 13.9% ‘76-’80: 8.6% ‘81-’85: 4.2% ‘86-’90: 8.1% Source: National Science Foundation