Parents Want Kids That Are Clean, Not Smart

A recent survey conducted through the Intel Corporation found that parents are more comfortable talking with their kids about drugs than about science and math.

Of course this may be due more to their own ignorance or fear of science and math than to a desire to keep their kids ignorant. Indeed, the data suggest this is part of the problem. According to the survey, 53% of parents admit that they have trouble helping their children with math and science homework. 23% said their lack of knowledge of these subjects was a barrier to helping their children and 26% said they would be more involved if there was a clearing house or similar resource for refreshing their memory on the subjects.

Yet parents are often ignorant and scared of drugs and that does not keep them from talking to their kids about this subject, sometimes with disastrous results. According to Wired Magazine, which covered the story, parents find it easier to talk about drugs because it is “vague” and you can get the message across quickly with a few choice examples of burn outs and bums who’ve ruined their lives with drugs.

In reality, parents who talk to their kids about drugs like this are simply attempting to beat them into submission with scare tactics, much like the federal government has done with the war on terror. (e.g., If you don’t do drugs, you won’t end up living under the freeway, and if you let us monitor your internet activity you won’t end up bombed by Al Qaida).

To really understand the risks involved with drugs and alcohol, it is helpful to know a little about how drugs act pharmacologically, which requires at least a basic level of secondary school science. Telling kids to “Just Say No” is as vapid and useless as telling them to remain chaste because it’s God’s will. It also obscures the fact that there are many drugs out there with legitimate uses and others that are legal, but that still have abuse potential. Indeed, the number one and two preventable causes of death are tobacco and alcohol, both of which are legal drugs for those of the appropriate age. And while caffeine has a much lower risk of injury or death associated with it, it is still a drug and one that can lead to social or physical problems if abused.

Parents and children do not need to have a degree in biochemistry to understand enough of the chemistry and pharmacology to make informed decisions and engage in intelligent discussions. It is something I teach my high school students as a “hook” for learning about the nervous system and molecular biology. It is something that parents can pick up by reading their children’s textbooks or by going to the library or even from the internet, if they are savvy enough to bypass the moralistic fear mongering that is out there.

The same is true of science and math, in general. If their teenagers are old enough to read the text books, and if they themselves learned it once before, then what is so hard about looking over their children’s textbooks and relearning it? This is the one-stop clearinghouse for refreshing parents’ knowledge of science and math.

Wired correctly identifies a more challenging problem for parents who wish to help their children in math and science: they often do not know how to relate what they do understand in a way their children can understand. This should not be surprising considering that few of them have been trained as teachers. They do not know the content standards. They do not know how to develop lesson plans or how to sequence a unit. They do not have the benefit of having seen hundreds of kids make the same mistake or get caught up in the same misunderstanding of a concept. They do not necessarily know what prerequisite knowledge is required to understand the material or how to deliver it in a way their children can grasp.

Yet there are many other ways parents can help their children. For example, when a child is struggling with a math problem, a parent can read the appropriate section of the text with the child, both to gain an understanding for himself and to help his child understand it better. They can do some of the problems together and the parent can watch to make sure the child is following the necessary steps to do the problem correctly.

Even without helping children directly with math and science problems, parents can do much to support their children, like ensuring there is a quiet place to study and a regular routine and time period for doing homework. They can help their children organize their binders and backpacks and update and maintain daily planners or smart phone calendars. As a teacher, I find that the majority of my students who do not do well in my classes also have disorganized binders and backpacks. This makes it harder for them to find assignments when it is time to turn them in, resulting in unnecessary zeros. It also makes it harder to study, as they cannot find lecture notes, handouts or worksheets that could help them prepare for an exam.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges parents face is lack of time. The survey’s finding that they needed a one-stop shopping center for updating their math and science skills could be interpreted as a desire for an easy, quick route to competency, something that cannot be achieved for an entire subject area. Providing more resources to parents still requires that they read, think and take time out of their busy schedules. This may be the real reason why they are more comfortable talking about drugs than science. With drugs, they can simply preach “don’t do them, they’re bad for you,” whereas with science and math they must actually think and help their children understand.

Ultimately, support from Intel will do little to make parents better able to relate to their teens or give them the time necessary to read and understand the content their children are expected to learn. But it might encourage them to buy more software “solutions” for their struggling students.

Shoddy Science By Scientific American

“Experience and degrees don’t matter in the classroom nearly so much as mastery of science and math and some plain old smarts,” (Pat Wingert, Scientific American, August 2012).

Image from Flickr, by IrisDragon

Scientific American generally does a pretty good job of presenting exciting new discoveries in a clear and accurate manner. However, Pat Wingert’s piece, “Building a Better Science Teacher,” falls far short. In fact, it is outright embarrassing for its shoddy science and journalism.

To start with, her lead paragraph contains a math error. While I am happy to write this off as a typo, brain fart or slip up by the editors, a first impression often sets a negative tone for what follows—in this case, more of the usual education reform nonsense.

Let’s examine the above quote concerning experience versus “mastery of science.” Few teachers begin their careers with a mastery of every aspect of the content standards. The standards for some disciplines (e.g., life science) are so broad that it is impossible to master all of them. Consider that even a tenured professor in cell biology is unlikely to also have mastery of ecology, evolution and the nervous system (though he or she likely has a broad, general knowledge of them). Yet a high school biology teacher is expected to master each of these subjects sufficiently to not only teach the facts, but to identify the prerequisite knowledge necessary for teenagers to understand them and ensure that his or her students have mastered this, too.

It is through experience, not mastery, that teachers learn where their students tend to struggle and where they will need additional support and background knowledge. This forces a reflective teacher to not only learn that material more deeply, but to figure out how to make it more tangible and accessible to her students. Furthermore, an experienced teacher can quickly master new content, as I have had to do on numerous occasions when asked to teach a course I have never taught. An experienced teacher also develops the ability to make that science exciting and fun for children. She learns how to identify their particular academic strengths and weaknesses, manage their behavior, design engaging and meaningful lessons and lab activities, write good exams, and deal with the often conflicting demands of administrators, colleagues and parents. Mastery of science has little to do with these teaching responsibilities.

Wingert, like many who write about education reform, has identified a school (Troy Prep in New York) that has high science and math test scores on standardized exams despite having a predominantly lower income student body, and she uses this anecdotal example to draw the conclusion that Troy Prep has somehow found the magic formula that has eluded other low income schools in the country.

From a scientific point of view her example might be called intriguing and worth exploring, but certainly nothing close to compelling. Troy Prep is merely one example. In science, we need to have a statistically significant number of examples with similar results before we start getting excited. One reason for this standard is that the result might be coincidental. Her article provides no evidence of why their test scores are high or even if they have the ability to maintain those high scores. Troy Prep could have higher test scores for reasons that have nothing to do with teachers’ skill, experience or “smarts.” For example, it might attract a higher than normal percentage of students who have an interest in science and math or who have families that are more involved in their children’s education. They might receive more funding and support from philanthropists with STEM backgrounds. They might even push out students who tend to score lower on standardized tests.

Even if the school has found a legitimate and reproducible way to boost test scores, this is not evidence that its students are learning more science or learning it better. Most standardized science tests assess students’ knowledge of basic facts, like the role of mitochondria or their ability to translate DNA sequences into amino acid sequences, not mastery of the scientific process. The tests do not assess the ability to design a controlled experiment or critique the merits of an experimental design. Students are not expected to generate original data or draw logical conclusions from that data. Furthermore, most of the things that are tested can be taught through rote memorization and pen and pencil simulations and do not require that students engage in authentic science. The consequence is that even students who do well on standardized exams are not necessarily prepared to think scientifically or to explain why a particular scientific explanation is valid (or not).

Wingert makes another common error by drawing conclusions from a statistic that are not supported by that statistic. In this case, she uses Eric Hanushek’s claim that highly effective teachers make about three times the academic gains of those with less talented teachers, regardless of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, to support her argument that a “good teacher trumps such factors as socioeconomic status, class size, curriculum design and parents’ educational levels.”

While it stands to reason that a good teacher will have more success with her students than a mediocre one, it does not necessarily follow that she will be able to overcome the effects of poverty or that she will be effective with all of her students. For example, her classes might get better overall test scores than those of her mediocre peer, yet she could still have a significant number of students who do poorly on the tests because they are reading far below grade level, have too many absences, do not do homework or have trouble focusing for extended periods of time—all problems that are more common among lower income students.

Numerous studies have found that an achievement gaps exists before children even begin school (see here,  here and here) and that it tends to grow over time. Poor children may come to school hungry or malnourished, which affects their ability to concentrate. They tend to miss far more school than their more affluent peers because of lack of health insurance, which decreases the chances they will graduate on time. Poor children have higher rates of lead poisoning, iron deficiency anemia, low birth weights and other health issues that can lead to learning disabilities or cognitive impairment. And they suffer more familial stress which can lead to chronically higher levels of cortisol in the blood, which some researchers suggest can impair memory and learning. Furthermore, lower income children have less access to enriching extracurricular activities after school and during the summers that contribute to the academic growth of their more affluent peers. Children who fall behind their peers, particularly in math and reading, tend to fall behind in other subjects as a result. Many lose self-confidence and self-efficacy and, as a result, tune out or give up on school.

Mastery of science content does not make a teacher better able to address these seemingly intractable problems, though it certainly could make the teacher better able to design authentic science lab activities for those students who have the requisite skills to benefit from such curriculum. Experience, on the other hand, is far more likely to help a teacher serve the diverse needs of today’s classroom. For example, experience not only helps a teacher learn to recognize when a student is losing focus or misbehaving because of hunger, pain or familial stress, but also to develop strategies for helping that student survive in the classroom.

It would behoove Wingert to not only pay closer attention to the logic (or illogic) of her arguments, but to also look more closely at the breadth of work of those she cites. Eric Hanushek (whom she quotes to support her claim that teacher expertise trumps socioeconomic status),  also said that less than 10% of students’ academic success is attributable to teacher quality and the rest was due to other factors, including students’ socioeconomic status.

Wingert also makes a number of interesting claims without providing any citations, which is frustrating for those of us who would like to read the studies. However, it also draws into question the validity of her claims. For example, she says that “several studies indicate higher math achievement among students whose teachers hold an advanced degree in math,” yet she does not identify any of these studies or their authors.

Nevertheless, it does seem likely that a more in-depth training in their disciplines would benefit teachers in concrete ways. For example, one would expect them to be better able to answer students’ questions, make connections to current research trends and discoveries, and to design more authentic science activities.

Yet even if advanced training does improve the quality of teaching, one must consider whether the costs are worth it. Requiring advanced degrees for math and science teachers would also require significantly higher pay and probably greater autonomy and academic freedom, too. Anything short of this and those highly trained scientists and mathematicians will go to work in academia or private industry where they could make a lot more money and have a significantly higher social status, with a lot less of the aggravation. As it stands, too many teachers from all disciplines leave the profession because of dissatisfaction with the overwhelming and often unreasonable demands, low status and pay.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 Of course there are many out there who would argue, “Yes, it is worth it—anything to improve our schools!” But these same “reformers” seem to have no interest in increasing taxes to a level that would permit ample funding of our schools or provide the services and support that would shrink the wealth gap or give lower income children some of the same developmental advantages that affluent families take for granted.

There are numerous reforms that would probably give more bang for the buck than requiring higher degrees for teachers. For example, many districts, in response to the harsh punishments of NCLB, have slashed science curriculum in the k-5 grades in order to create more space for test prep. As a result, many kids now receive little or no science education prior to middle school. Thus, ending NCLB and the testing mania that has decimated education over the past decade seem like the cheapest and most expedient ways to improve science education and achievement.

Other relatively inexpensive reforms include requiring preschool or head start, particularly for lower income children, as it would help close the achievement gap before kids start school and improve their chances of being academically ready for science. Likewise, state-funded summer school could help shrink the achievement gap that typically occurs during the summer.

Obama’s Plan to Improve Science Education by Overworking Teachers

It is perplexing to many that we continue to have high unemployment and simultaneously have to import foreign workers to fill so many high tech jobs because of the dearth of sufficiently educated domestic workers. There have been numerous attempts to rectify this problem, but they all suffer from similar fallacies such as the myths that our education system is broken or deteriorating or that our teachers are terrible or disinterested or unwilling to persevere in the profession.

Indeed, 30,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers leave the profession each year according to Good Education and this, no doubt, takes a terrible toll on the consistency and integrity of STEM programs. However, K-12 education loses thousands of teachers each year from all disciplines, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the needs and specifics of STEM teaching. For example, over 100,000 teaching jobs have been lost in the last year, while over 300,000 have been lost since 2008, according to Fire Dog Lake, primarily due to budget cuts resulting from declining tax revenue.

Furthermore, significant numbers of teachers from all disciplines quit within their first three years because they were not sufficiently prepared or are no longer willing to deal with the demands, stress and intensity of the job. And, as Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog pointed out last year, the attrition rates in other professions are also relatively high and this may actually be a good thing, especially for K-12 education, as it helps weed out those who are ill-prepared or ill-suited for the profession.

Of course it’s not just about retaining STEM teachers. It is also about attracting them to the profession in the first place. STEM graduates tend to have more remunerative options than humanities and social science graduates, like working for a biotech or software company. To this end, the White House announced last week the creation of an elite STEM Master Teacher Corps, the members of which will serve as models and inspiration for aspiring young STEM teachers, according to the Good Education report.

The Obama plan will begin this year with 50 teachers, expanding to more than 10,000 teachers over the next four years. These "master teachers" would be required to lead professional development and school reform efforts in their schools and districts, create lesson plans and novel strategies to improve their peers’ teaching, and mentor novice teachers to help keep them in the classroom. In exchange for all this extra labor, the “master teachers” will receive a national award recognizing their excellence and a stipend of $20,000 per year.

The Good Education article suggests that while the stipend “might not put them on par with a hot programmer at Google, the compensation will close some of the gap and make their salaries competitive with other careers they might be qualified for.”

Now $20,000 might seem like a substantial sum of money, particularly when many teachers are making only $40,000 per year (or less). However, for a teacher earning $30-40,000 per year base pay, their new salary would hardly be competitive with the IT or Biotech industries. Furthermore, Good’s estimation looks only at the take home pay, not the amount of pay relative to the amount of labor, status and stress.

The typical workload of a teacher includes managing and controlling classrooms of up to 35-40 students while identifying and serving their diverse and unique needs. This, alone, accounts for 5-6 hours (66-80%) of a teacher’s workday. In the remaining time, teachers must design and prepare creative and effective lesson plans; set up labs and projects; read and grade essays, lab reports, exams and other assignments; attend meetings; fill out reams of paper work; satisfy the sometimes contradictory and often overwhelming demands of administrators and local and state ordinances; and regularly communicate with parents. During this time, they have dozens of intense interpersonal interactions, generally with people who are not very good at articulately or respectfully communicating their needs, thus adding stress and frustration to an already overwhelming work day.

Considering these demands, all teachers, regardless of their discipline or location, should be earning six-figures as their base pay, without having to do a lot of extra work, as required by Obama’s STEM plan.

While it is certainly nice to be offered extra money for extra work, $20,000 does not come close to compensating teachers for the amount of work required by Obama’s STEM program. Mentoring novice teachers, alone, could add another 5-10% to a teacher’s already busy workday, especially if it includes frequent observations and meetings to debrief the observations. Curriculum design, too, can be extremely time extensive. Many teachers devote entire summers and/or additional hours after school (without pay) to curriculum design. Likewise, school redesign and reform efforts can eat up weeks or months during the summer, followed by additional daily or weekly labor during the school year.

It should also be pointed out that all this extra work can burn teachers out, taking away attention, patience and focus from their students. Many teachers no doubt have the energy and drive to make this work in the short-term, but the Obama plan calls for a minimum four-year commitment. It is difficult to imagine 10,000 martyrs across the country not only being able to give up so much of their personal lives to the cause of improving STEM education for four or more years, but being able to do it well, without sacrificing the wellbeing of their students and colleagues.

Under the Obama plan, STEM teachers will still to have relatively low status and autonomy (like other teachers), thus contributing to high attrition and difficulty attracting people to profession in the first place. They will continue to be subjected to arbitrary and ill-conceived reforms and legislation (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top), attacks on their working conditions and job security (e.g., tenure and evaluation reform), and little to no academic freedom and autonomy in the classroom. They will also continue to be subjected to unreasonable expectations to solve major socioeconomic problems that are beyond their capabilities (like ensuring that low income 9^th graders who are reading at the 2^nd grade level are able to graduate on time ready to enter a four-year university).

This brings up another faulty premise of the Ed Deform movement: Kids aren’t graduating prepared for career and college because of defects with their schools or teachers. In reality, the minority of students who are not graduating on time or who are graduating without the necessary basic skills for career or college are overwhelmingly low income students who started kindergarten far behind their peers in pre-reading and math skills and who fell further behind as they progressed through school, not because of bad schools or teachers, but because their more affluent peers had a host of after-school and summer advantages that were unavailable to them.

Therefore, if we want to see more students graduating prepared for STEM careers or college we need to address both the increasing poverty of our students and the growing societal wealth gap, as well as the declining revenue available to K-12 education, since education funding can help ameliorate some of the negative educational impacts of poverty (e.g., free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs; after school childcare for young children of working parents). A much more effective use of the $100 million the Obama administration plans on spending on his STEM program would be to increase funding for programs like free and reduced lunch, restoring nursing and counselors to the schools, and adding more after-school and summer enrichment programs for low income children.

This, of course, is unlikely. First, virtually no policy maker acknowledges how much poverty affects educational outcomes and none is willing to invest in programs that reduce poverty, let alone tax the wealthy to do so. Furthermore, the STEM push is coming primarily from industry which wants greater control of its future workforce and increased consumption of its products. It’s not about helping children, especially poor children.

In the short-term, increased STEM education means more computers and iPads in the classroom, which means more profits for tech companies. In the long term, even if it does result in companies hiring more domestic employees, it will be primarily the elite upper echelon of public K-12 educated students who reap the benefits of high paying, high status tech jobs, as it is today. Lower income kids who are behind in their academic skills and course work will continue to have lower graduation and college admission rates, higher unemployment, and fewer job opportunities. Having better trained science teachers will not erase the effects of poverty, improve students’ reading from the 2^nd to 11^th grade level, or provide a safe, quiet place for them to study.

More Math, Science and College For U.S. Students Than Ever Before

Earlier this week I posted a piece on the Brookings report that schools are no worse today than in the past, contrary to the hysteria whipped by Ed Deformers and pundits that school’s today are in crisis. Their analysis of PISA test scores indicated that while U.S. math and science scores have been improving slightly, they never were (and still aren’t) very strong compared with other wealthy countries.

However, in many ways, K-12 education has been making dramatic gains. Students today are taking more math and science courses than a generation ago, while more are going straight to college after graduation. Between 1990 and 2009, the percentage of high school students taking chemistry jumped from 49% to 70%, and the percentage taking physics rose from 21% to 36%, according to The Condition of Education 2012, a new report reviewed on the Good Education website. There were similar gains in math, with 16% of students taking calculus in 2009, compared with 7% in 1990, and 11% taking statistics, compared with 1% in 1990.

The number of students entering college right after high school jumped from 49% in 1979, to 70% in 2009. While gains were seen for most ethnic groups and were largest for African Americans (66% in 2010, compared with 43% in 1975), there are still significant disparities in total college enrollment. A higher percentage of white students (70%) and a much higher percentage of Asian students (88%) are going to college right out of high school than black students (66%), while the rate for Hispanic students has remained flat over the past several decades. The most glaring disparities, however, were among different income groups, with only 52% of low-income students attending college right out of high school, compared with 82% of students from high-income families.

Why Girls Don’t Go For STEM Careers

The Girl Scouts of Central Maryland hosting a STEM event (Image from Flickr, by RDECOM)

A new nationwide survey of 1,000 teen girls from the Girl Scout Research Institute suggests that girls are both interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) careers and have the confidence that they can succeed in these fields. The institute reports that nearly 75% of teen girls are already interested in STEM subjects at school, and 82% believe they're "smart enough to have a career in STEM."

Despite these numbers, only 20% of STEM jobs are filled by women, according to Good Education, which attributes this to girls’ ignorance about STEM jobs. Indeed, the report said that only 13% of girls listed STEM jobs as their top career choice, while 60% said they weren’t clear about which careers were available in those fields.

Ignorance of STEM careers is only a small part of the problem, however. Consider that well over 50% of the graduate students at UCSF medical school are women (64% in 2006), suggesting that women do want to go into STEM careers and many know exactly where to go to prepare themselves. Yet the only 45% of the postdoctoral fellowships went to women and only 40.6% of the faculty positions are held by women, suggesting that even with an awareness of STEM careers and a solid education to prepare for such a career, women are still being left behind.

This is probably due to a combination of factors, including bias. 57% of girls surveyed by the Girl Scouts Institute did recognize that sexism is a problem in STEM fields, saying they would "have to work harder than a man to be taken seriously."

However, women don’t just have to work harder to be taken seriously. They may also have to consider giving up motherhood or be willing to subcontract out much of their mothering responsibilities to nannies or other family members, something that is not always possible, particularly early in one’s career.  Academic science positions are highly competitive and often require more than 60 hours per week to write grants, do research, teach, write and publish articles and participate in university committees and bodies.

Furthermore, once a female scientist has children, she often faces physical barriers that hamper effective mothering and her own health and wellbeing. At the UCSF Parnassus Campus, for example, there are very few places where a woman can go to safely and privately pump breast milk for her child, thus discouraging breast feeding and undermining the health of her child.

In a 2002 survey of UCSF professors, only ¼ of female and 1/3 of male professors felt like their jobs permitted sufficient time for their families, while 75% of women and 60% of men said they have to work an unhealthy and unreasonable amount. Female faculty were also particularly critical of the way the university welcomed new women and felt that there were unfair limits placed on their participation in the university. Furthermore, 50% of women, compared with 10% of men, felt they had faced discrimination.

Obama Throw’s More Money at the Wrong Problem

President Obama has unveiled a plan to spend $100 million to train 100,000 new science teachers over the next decade, according to the Washington Post. During his State of the Union speech he said that “Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job,” a problem he blames on the dearth of quality science teachers.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 Yet training is only a tiny piece of the picture. With low (and declining) pay for teachers and difficult (and worsening) working conditions, why should science majors want to go into teaching in the first place when they could earn so much more with so much less stress and aggravation working as scientists?

Standards Undermine Scientific Inquirey and Comprehension

At the same time, what are we doing about the poor state of science education among existing teachers? Even the best science teachers are hamstrung by an overwhelming number of standards—most of which emphasize rote memorization of facts over actual scientific inquiry and analysis—and high stakes exams that dictate a narrow curriculum and limit depth. Consequently, many good science teachers rely on the expedients of multiple choice exams, worksheets and “cookbook,” proof-of-concept labs which allow quick and easy assessment of the standards, but which also dull students’ curiosity and turn many off to science completely.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 This is true even in states like California, which was the only state in the nation to earn an “A” for its science standards by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s “The State of Science Standards 2012.“ In many states, the science standards go much further to undermine students’ understanding of science concepts and their ability to develop their critical thinking and analytical skills. Ten states, including Alaska, Oregon and Wisconsin, earned an F in the survey

Many states earned their D’s or F’s because their content was minimal, poorly written and/or contained errors. Some states, like Louisiana and Texas, have undermined or discredited solid science with legislation requiring the teaching of creationism or mandating that teachers provide “both” sides of the evolution or climate change “debate.” Others failed to emphasize the link between math and science.

No Child Left Behind and the “accountability” mania that has swept the nation over the past decade have also contributed to the poor state of science education in the U.S. Many schools have forsaken science entirely at the K-5 level either to make room for more test preparation and English and math support, or because the multi-subject credentials required for teaching K-5 do not emphasize science standards, labs, and inquiry-based activities sufficiently for teachers to feel confident and competent teaching them. Some middle schools have also jettisoned science curriculum for similar reasons. Every year I get a handful of 9^th graders who say they never took science in 6^th-8^th grades and their background knowledge and success in my class often reflect this.

Poverty Undermines Academic Achievement in All Disciplines, Including Science

The biggest cause of U.S. students’ poor showing in science has little to do with the quality or quantity of science teachers. U.S. students rank poorly compared to students in most other wealthy nations in numerous disciplines, not just science, while their poverty rate is among the highest. Placing more good science teachers in the classroom will have little benefit for students who come to school hungry, homeless, sick and several years behind their affluent peers in literacy and prerequiste skills.

A class-based achievement is already firmly in place before kids have entered kindgergarten, (see Burkam and Lee and Hart and Risely) and it worsens over time. This leads to significant differences in vocabulary and pre-reading skills which can reduce children’s self-efficacy and confidence and limit their ability to access high level content, especially science.

Though good science teachers can make science engaging, fun and tangible, even to students with low literacy and prerequisite skills, they will have only limited effect on students’ perseverance, ability to concentrate for sustained periods and study habits, all of which are correlated with social class.

Obama’s plan is just another example of blaming teachers for low student achievement while ignoring the larger societal causes. Students are struggling in science primarily for the same reasons they are struggling in other disciplines, with teacher quality being one of the least significant causes.

Nevertheless, more money for the training of good science teachers is not a bad thing. On the contrary. We should be spending more to train teachers in all disciplines and especially in science, but not at the expense of other investments that could provide a bigger bang for the buck in terms of educational outcomes for children, like programs and policies that reduce poverty, support low income families and promote early childhood education.

We should also make sure that once we have invested millions of dollars into training new teachers we also encourage their continuation in the profession with generous pay and benefits packages, on-site mentoring, professional development, respect and academic freedom. Otherwise, high attrition rates will continue and the investment will be a waste. Likewise, we need to give these professionals more autonomy and decision-making authority and not quash their motivation and creativity (nor that of their students) with high stakes exams and lousy standards, or their expensive training will be for naught.