John Friedrick: Magic ingredient to STEM success is empowerment

Regarding Jim Goodnight’s April 16 Point of View on STEM education: Since the 1970s, educational reforms generally have failed despite well-meaning advocates, high expectations built into federal laws and state policies, philanthropic support and plenty of analyzed data to monitor progress.

While director of three schools of science and mathematics and as a science teacher before that, I saw the highest levels of student achievement and the lowest. To improve STEM achievement, I studied the history of science education and looked for the reasons that some students succeeded while others didn’t.

Students have asked “Why do I hafta learn this stuff?” since schools were invented, but today there is less of a good answer. In the 1960s there were several avenues to the American Dream: the military, industry, labor, industrial schools or college. Teachers were able to connect science and math lessons to fixing a car or appliance, building a shed, running a business, going to the moon or calculating how much paint is needed for a house. All these applied to available jobs and careers, and teens knew people who did those jobs. Now, cars are computerized and harder for a novice to fix, industries are robotized and outsourced, and we don’t go to the moon. Today’s students see that their parents and friends often have not benefited from an education, so why try? There are far fewer middle class jobs, fewer long-term careers and few industries that require the skills of a high school graduate.

The nation does not have a plan for its long-term direction so that students could be inspired as they were when Kennedy pointed to the moon as an American goal. During the 1960s, science achievement did improve, partially because students had choices in physics, biology and chemistry curricula according to their career interests and partially because there was a connection between what they learned and what their lives could become. They knew why they had to learn that “stuff.”

Each time the economy changed – from agricultural to industrial, from industrial to information based, from information to robotic – there was a significant mismatch between the education provided and the education needed to meet the needs of the workplace. Today’s mismatch is due, in part, to the rapidity with which the workplace has changed.

We could improve STEM skills if we found ways to motivate students to become part of the solution for the nation’s great problems. Goodnight proposed that effective reform requires high expectations, achievement testing and parental use of student performance data to improve student performance. Those actions alone are not enough. The magic ingredient is empowering students to use their education to address real problems: access to clean water and air, solving terrorist and identity theft dangers, solving hunger problems sustainably and conceiving the type of infrastructure needed for tomorrow. Done correctly, it would motivate parents, students and citizens as to our country’s direction, helping us all to know why students hafta learn that stuff.

The length limit was waived to permit a fuller response to the Point of View.

This story was originally published April 21, 2015 at 2:36 PM with the headline "John Friedrick: Magic ingredient to STEM success is empowerment."