Backstage from the media circus, the Obama administration and Senate Democrats have been quietly drumming up support for a new $90 million program to accelerate innovation in educational technology, or ed tech. Called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education, or ARPA-Ed, in the president’s 2012 budget, this lean, mean little research agency would create a platform for ed tech innovators to compete to develop cutting-edge learning tools.

On Wednesday, as the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, or HELP, committee moves to overhaul No Child Left Behind, Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) is expected to introduce an amendment that would bring ARPA-Ed to life. If enacted, ARPA-Ed would put competitive grants and contracts in the hands of innovators seeking to develop technologies to revolutionize the way students learn. Because it kindles competition, ARPA-Ed is an interesting Obama initiative that has the potential to reverse the sputtering trajectory of the U.S. education system.

Education challenges

As it stands, the situation in public education is precarious. In December 2010 the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, announced that the United States ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math among 63 world nations in academic performance. Comparatively, Chinese students in Shanghai ranked first across the board, with Singapore, Korea, and Finland following close behind. This news has fueled concerns on both sides of the political spectrum that the United States is losing its competitive edge amid a crippling educational and economic malaise.

While our students are subject to global competition, U.S. schools are facing mounting pressure at home to conform to the standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB. Schools are scrambling to achieve proficiency in math and reading by 2014, lest they face fiscal penalties. The looming deadline for improved performance—and the fear that it will not be met—has prompted President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, to look into restructuring NCLB in a way that will be more consistent with his vision for education. Central to this vision is ARPA-Ed. ARPA-Ed is built on the same model as DARPA, the defense research program responsible for technologies such as the Internet and GPS.

Proponents of ARPA-Ed aim to exploit cutting-edge technology and developmental psychology in education to create a more efficient, individualized, and engaging learning regimen for today’s students. ARPA-Ed would follow its predecessors in adopting a bottom-up, rather than top-down approach to nurturing innovation. Instead of attempting to dictate what the most effective means of instruction might be, ARPA-Ed will reward learning about learning, researching research, and thinking about thinking.

Until now, the strategy for using technology in education has been to bombard schools with gadgets, sometimes at the expense of teachers’ jobs and to the detriment of art and music programs. The Kyrene school district in Arizona, for instance, touts state-of-the-art classrooms, spending $33 million on student laptops, display screens, and accompanying software. Yet despite all its high-tech bells and whistles, Kyrene’s math and reading scores have stagnated since 2005, even as scores in the rest of the state have risen. Further, it is unclear whether some modest improvements can be attributed to better incorporating technology into classrooms or better teachers using said technology. Technology for technology’s sake, it seems, is not a successful approach.

In light of disappointing results, such as in the case of the Kyrene school system, it would appear that a shift in the way we equip our classrooms is in order. A quick survey of the current landscape of public education, with its socioeconomic performance gaps that could be better characterized as canyons, would suggest that our current system isn’t working.

Is technology part of the solution?

Yet there is hope in ARPA-Ed, which holds promise of funding many exciting innovations that could not only produce innovative educational technologies but also transform the way technology is used. Areas of research include:

• Interactive digital tutors that can guide students through curricula and provide constant feedback.
• Adaptive technology that adjusts to students’ learning styles and rates, and improves as the student uses it more.
• Making learning software function more like video games do.

ARPA-Ed would expand upon efforts initiated by the “Digital Promise Center,” which Congress authorized but didn’t fund in 2008. Education Secretary Arne Duncan unveiled the Center in September, acknowledging that the institution represented an “incredibly important turning point.” A major aspect of the so-called “digital promise” is research into digital tutors.

Digital tutors seek to marry the virtual age with psychological principles of learning. One such tenet of learning is that immediate feedback and reinforcement strengthens the association between stimuli. For instance, when an amateur is learning the violin and plays a wrong note, for best results, an instructor should correct the mistake immediately after it is made in order to give the musician the best odds for not repeating the mistake. Hence the revised maxim, “Practice doesn’t make perfect—perfect practice makes perfect.” Yet musical instruction usually only occurs once or twice a week, leaving novices to correct their own mistakes—a difficult feat when you don’t know what you’re doing wrong in the first place. This was exactly the problem researchers at the National University of Singapore confronted when they developed a virtual violin tutor to help kids practice more effectively.

The Navy has also implemented digital tutors to teach recruits to become IT specialist administrators in just seven weeks. A healthy, all-American suspicion of technology—complete with fantasies of a dystopian future where humans are oppressed by Skynet—may inform skepticism as to whether such a program really works, and whether machines are even capable of educating. But Navy researchers found that these computer-trained specialists outperformed their traditionally educated counterparts with up to three years of experience.

New tutoring software will capitalize not only on advantages in immediate feedback but also in the realm of individualizing education. Analytics are already widely used in business to customize the content you see on the Internet. Analyzing online habits is how Amazon manages to recommend merchandise that you really want or how Netflix seems to have a handle on your taste in movies. Companies like Amazon and Netflix collect data from users’ personal choices and incorporate them into algorithms that filter their databases to formulate suggestions for your next rental or purchase.

Research into education software will employ similar tactics to gather information about how a student learns. One test prep company, Knewton, is already leading the pack. In just a few hours, Knewton’s software can collect 150,000 data points on a student—data points like how long it takes a student to answer a question or to learn a lesson, which kinds of modules are mastered more quickly, and where the student is lagging. The highly sophisticated software aggregates this information, determines a student’s unique pattern of learning, and adjusts accordingly. This technique allows for remarkably personalized instruction. Four major universities have already purchased the product for catching up incoming students on college-level math.

Medical schools have also implemented programs for adapted learning, as reported by the NIH. These programs allow for student control of pace and media, though students are quick to maintain that they view the system as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, instructor-based learning.

If ARPA-Ed led to developments in personalized software for students in grade school, the benefits could be substantial, especially due to the plasticity of the young mind. Yet children, as opposed to GRE test takers and medical students, are slightly less inclined to sit in front of a boring slideshow and answer questions about it. That’s where the next ARPA-Ed research area would come in. The National STEM Video Game Challenge aims to make learning more like something kids actually want to do.

Much like sneaking broccoli into the mac n’ cheese, the National STEM Video Game Challenge seeks to trick kids into learning. The 2010 winners of the Developer Prize, Dan Morton and Dan White of Filament Games, created a game to teach kids about the structure and function of pathogens. The game “You Make Me Sick!” compels players to build a virus or bacteria and infect a host. You can play the prototype here.

Engaging and challenging educational games, coupled with personalized curricula, could afford all kids the opportunity to learn skills to prepare them for higher education. Furthermore, integrating computers and other gadgets into classrooms will free up teachers to have more one-on-one time with students and better control disciplinary problems when they arise. A school in South Carolina that implemented iPad technology for all its students reported a noticeable decline in class disruptions.

But the advantages extend beyond the scope of monitoring class behavior and individual children’s performance. Currently, the mainstream model of education—boasting short class periods delineated by bells that signal it is time to herd students to their next room for structured learning—seems ill-equipped to absorb change. Due to images evoked of children on a conveyor belt, scholars have deemed this educational structure the “factory model.” The factory model sets teachers at the center of children’s education, relying on educators to produce material for students to consume, rather than focusing on the needs of the individual learning.

Making the most of technology

Some, like Forbes’s Clayton Christensen, hold that technology in classrooms will be the vehicle by which America’s schools transition from what Christensen termed “teacher-centric” to “child-centric” education. Christensen wrote in 2008 that students suffer from rigidity in the curriculum, which is influenced by state mandates, district regulations, and the expectation that all students will master the same skills to the same proficiency level by the time teachers conclude covering the material. These problems, he argued, must be addressed by shifting the education paradigm to a modular one where learning can be self-directed and tailored to students’ learning styles and paces. In this sense, the new educational technology promised by ARPA-Ed will not simply be an accessory to learning but rather will be crucial to changing the system itself.

Consider, for instance, one contemporary school of thought: the “flip model” of education. Inspired by Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, the central concept behind the flip model is that students listen to lectures for homework and come to class prepared to engage in deeper discussion and analytical activities. The Khan Academy provides clear, concise lectures on a wide breadth of subjects, complete with exercises to test students’ understanding—and most of it is free. All of it is online.

In Lawrenceville, Georgia, some teachers at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology have traded homework for lectures and use precious class time for dissecting difficult problems and engaging students in group activities like acting out the processes of a cell in a 10th-grade biology class. This line of thought is consistent with emerging research that suggests that even children who prefer to work alone do better when collaborating in groups. Critics of the system, however, are quick to point out that it is rendered useless in the absence of a basic technological framework for online instruction.

Even if ARPA-Ed fosters competition for the best, most exciting educational tools available, implementation in classrooms is another hurdle entirely. Said Bryan Goodwin, spokesman for Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, “Good teachers can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.”

The reality that those who don’t teach well won’t use technology well, either, exacerbates an underlying problem: Integrating technology into schools in such a way that decentralizes the classroom is incongruous with current pedagogical thinking. In fact, some studies suggest that even teachers who are well-versed in new technology tend not to use it in ways that encourage the aforementioned “student-centric” learning.

Like technology, however, the landscape of the teaching profession is evolving.  Programs like Teach for America are plucking talented college graduates from diverse backgrounds and honing their instructional skills in underserved communities. Notably, the Teacher Incentive Fund holds promise for attracting and retaining motivated young teachers in high-poverty schools by compensating better for better results—a concept not novel to most other professions in the United States. Having grown up, rather than having had to keep up, with technology endows this new generation of educators with an advantage.

Efforts on the Hill to close the comparability loophole, by which schools obtain federal funding by  over-representing teachers’ salaries in less affluent districts, should help alleviate the plague of low teachers’ salaries in schools that need good teachers the most. Finally, the age of teachers’ unions eschewing serious discussions about tenure and performance-based pay has come to a close, as leaders meaningfully engage opposition in the shared goal to protect teachers and secure the best opportunities for more students.

The outlook for ARPA-Ed

But ARPA-Ed still faces opposition from the right. Conservative pundits have called the initiative wasteful and “duplicative,” claiming that $90 million is too steep a price to pay, and that the Department of Education already spent $4 billion on teacher retraining. Advocates like Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, would rather see that money funneled to the states than appropriated at the federal level. The assertion that ARPA-Ed is just another teacher retraining piggy bank, however, grossly misrepresents the multifaceted, innovative program.

ARPA-Ed breaks with existing programs in that it focuses on research into learning, not teaching. Moreover, $90 million seems like a steal for educational investments designed to yield breakthroughs that could have positive social returns for decades. To put the figure in perspective, the federal government spent $1.34 billion—15 times the price tag of ARPA-Ed—in 2010 on its “Race to the Top” program, in which states competed for funding by implementing the best reforms, like adopting performance-based pay and promoting charter schools. For six times the cost of ARPA-Ed, we fund adult education; still more money is doled out for federal student aid. As it is, the federal government only spends a fraction of its budget on education, and ARPA-Ed’s cost would be a tiny fraction of that.

America’s children deserve the best education science can bring them. Sen. Bennet’s amendment to create ARPA-Ed would be a step toward escaping our educational malaise and helping our students climb back to the top of the ranks. It is through implementing a program that emphasizes core American values like independent learning, creativity, and the individual work ethic, that we can regain our footing in the international sphere and return to doing what we do best: pushing the boundaries of innovation.

Lauren Simenauer is an intern with Science Progress and a senior at the University of Virginia. She is finishing her degrees in biology and psychology. Sean Pool is the Assistant Editor of Science Progress.

A few months back, those who care about accurate climate science and energy education in high school classes registered a minor victory. Under fire from outlets like The New York Times, the education publishing behemoth Scholastic (of Clifford the Big Red Dog and Harry Potter fame) pulled an energy curriculum sponsored by the American Coal Foundation, which gave a nice PR sheen to coal without bothering to cover, uh, the whole environmental angle. The curriculum had reportedly already been mailed to 66,000 classrooms by the time it got yanked.

When it comes to undermining accurate and responsible climate and energy education at the high school level, Scholastic may have been the most prominent transgressor. But precisely because it is a massive and respected educational publisher, and actually cares what The New York Times thinks, it was also the most moderate and easy to reason with.

Although it’s hard to find online now, I’ve reviewed the offending coal curriculum, entitled “The United States of Energy.” In my view, it didn’t even contain any obvious falsehoods—except for errors of omission. It was more a case of subtle greenwashing.

What’s currently seeping into classrooms across the country is far, far worse—more ideological, and more difficult to stop. We’re talking about outright climate denial being fed to students—and accurate climate science teaching being attacked by aggressive Tea Party-style ideologues.

Science magazine just released a report on the state of affairs out there in this place called America, and it’s ugly. From the piece:

How to fight this?

That’s very difficult because, as the Science piece notes, you can’t use the First Amendment. It only bans teaching religion in classrooms, and it is hard to claim that climate change denial—unlike evolution denial—is fundamentally religious in nature. I wouldn’t want to have to argue that case in court.

But while not religiously impelled in a traditional sense, the conservative activists who are attacking the teaching of climate science at the grassroots do fit a familiar profile. We’ve gotten to know them very well by now.

They are hierarchical in outlook, and tend to deny all manner of environmental risks. They often believe that climate science is part of a global conspiracy to impose a statist economy. And of course, they are often conservative white men like Jeffrey Barke, the Los Alamitos Unified School District board of education member who has placed this school at the center of attacks on accurate climate science teaching.

These people are nothing if not highly politicized and emotional. Here’s Barke in his own words:

What is the case for not letting people like Barke influence young students?

Simple: When a political fight erupts at a school over the teaching science, students are effectively being taught to tie science together with emotional, politicized reasoning processes–the way the adults who are interefering in the curriculum have already done in their own minds.

That’s precisely the opposite of what we want to be instilling in young brains. Students ought to be learning to think critically, to be dispassionate and apportion their beliefs to the evidence.

Attacks on climate science in schools aren’t just interferences with teaching, then. By supplying teenagers with politicized misinformation, you’re prepping them to have the kinds of emotionally driven argumentative responses that make our public discourse at the national level so fruitless.

You’re not just instilling denial. You’re creating the next generation of political dysfunction.

You’re not teaching kids to think, you’re teaching them to shout.

Chris is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine, senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and author of the bestselling book The Republican War on Science, dubbed “a landmark in contemporary political reporting” by Salon.com and a “well-researched, closely argued and amply referenced indictment of the right wing’s assault on science and scientists” by Scientific American.

STEM jobs are disproportionately held by men at every level of educational attainment. Women only represent one-quarter of STEM jobs—the same level as 2000—though they make up approximately half of the workforce overall. Those women who do enter STEM careers, however, make on average 33 percent more than women in non-STEM jobs. The differential is just 25 percent for men.

The wage gap between women and men in STEM occupations is also smaller than in non-STEM fields. But despite that, women in STEM jobs still only make 86 cents to a man’s dollar, the report found. In non-STEM fields women make 79 cents to a man’s dollar.

Women tend to choose non-STEM majors in college and those that do choose STEM majors are entering non-STEM fields where the wage gap is higher, such as education and health care. Only 60,000 women with STEM degrees work in STEM jobs (26 percent), compared to about 2.7 million, or 40 percent, of men. In particular, women are much less likely to hold a degree in engineering; however, engineering, which is the most male-dominated STEM occupation with only one woman for every seven men, has the lowest wage gap (7 percent).

The report does not examine the causes of gender discrepancies in wages and occupations but it points to several factors that might lead to them, including career paths that “may be less accommodating to people cycling in and out of the workforce to raise a family,” lack of role models, and strong gender stereotypes.

These factors are consistent with the findings of a 2010 American Association of University Women report, “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” that examined barriers limiting women’s participation in STEM fields. AAUW recommends several efforts to counter gender biases and stereotypes such as focusing on achievements, providing role models, and encouraging girls to take classes in STEM fields. In addition, policies to retain female students are necessary, including actively recruiting women, mentoring, and fostering work-life practices.

The Commerce report concludes there is “definitive evidence of a need to encourage and support women in STEM with a goal of gender parity” and that there is “a great opportunity for growth in STEM in support of American competitiveness, innovation, and jobs of the future.”

As CAP has pointed out, strengthening our STEM programs and workforce training is essential for maintaining and enhancing the innovation that drives our economic growth and competitiveness. With unemployment and a lingering recession, we need to address the societal and structural barriers that are preventing women from fully participating in the STEM fields of the present and future.

Rebecca Lefton is a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress, working with the Energy Opportunity team.

You can’t throw a stone without hitting a STEM initiative these days, but most science, technology, engineering, and math initiatives—thus the STEM acronym—overlook a fundamental problem. In general, the workforce pipeline of elementary school teachers fails to ensure that the teachers who inform children’s early academic trajectories have the appropriate knowledge of and disposition toward math-intensive subjects and mathematics itself. Prospective teachers can typically obtain a license to teach elementary school without taking a rigorous college-level STEM class such as calculus, statistics, or chemistry, and without demonstrating a solid grasp of mathematics knowledge, scientific knowledge, or the nature of scientific inquiry. This is not a recipe for ensuring that students have successful early experiences with math and science, or for generating the curiosity and confidence in these topics that students need to pursue careers in STEM fields.

“No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America’s Education Schools” by the National Council on Teacher Quality, documented the need for more rigorous mathematics preparation of elementary level teacher candidates. And in the two years since its release, very little has changed—despite evidence showing that elementary school students have higher achievement in mathematics when their teachers know more about how to teach math well.

In this report, we focus on the selection and preparation of elementary school teachers, most of whom will be required to teach mathematics and science when they enter the classroom. It is elementary school mathematics and science that lay the foundation for future STEM learning, but it is elementary school teachers who are often unprepared to set students on the path to higher-level success in STEM fields.

In order to improve STEM learning, we must strengthen the selection, preparation, and licensure of elementary school teachers. We need higher standards for selection into teacher preparation programs—standards that include demonstrated proficiency in math and science at a level that is far higher than our current pool of teacher candidates. Elementary grade teacher preparation programs must include more—and more rigorous—math and science courses in both content and pedagogy, and teacher candidates must perform in these courses at the high levels that we would expect of our students.

Furthermore, states must strengthen their licensure requirements so that teachers cannot obtain a license without passing the math and science sections of the exams. Finally, alternative certification programs should continue to recruit candidates who were STEM majors in college or are STEM professionals, and their licensure should be streamlined in order to get them into classrooms as soon as they are ready.

These steps represent a dramatic departure from current policy, but serious action is needed now in order to improve the prospects for our future global competitiveness. We cannot wait any longer to get serious about STEM policy. Strengthening our elementary school teachers in math and science is the first critical step in the right direction. To that end, we make five specific recommendations in this report:

• Increase the selectivity of programs that prepare teachers for elementary grades
• Implement teacher compensation policies, including performance-based pay, that make elementary teaching more attractive to college graduates and careerchangers with strong STEM backgrounds
• Include more mathematics and science content and pedagogy in schools of education
• Require candidates to pass mathematics and science subsections of licensure exams
• Explore innovative staffing models that extend the reach of elementary level teachers with an affinity for mathematics and science and demonstrated effectiveness in teaching them

As we will demonstrate, improving the ability of our elementary school teachers to teach the facts, concepts, and procedures critical to success in STEM fields is required if our nation is to succeed in the globally competitive arena of the 21st century.

Diana Epstein is a Senior Education Policy Analyst and Raegen T. Miller is the Associate Director for Education Research at American Progress. This is cross-posted at American Progress.

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Download the introduction and summary (pdf)

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Recent surveys suggest that nearly half of all American adults do not accept human evolution and an even larger majority is open to the teaching of nonscientific alternatives in our public schools.

There was a time when such statistics could be accepted without much alarm. After all, one need not accept or even understand evolutionary biology to become an excellent aerospace engineer, a computer scientist, or even a heart surgeon. And besides, isn’t society in the midst of a period of secularization such that advocates for creationism will be an ever-shrinking and increasingly marginal minority?

These two arguments are undermined by recent research on the teaching of evolution, and recent trends in the politicization of science in America. As a result, scientific illiteracy with respect to evolution is better viewed as a symptom of broader weaknesses in science education and we can expect that the tactics used by evolution deniers will soon be applied to other issues such as climate change.

Our recent book on how evolution is actually taught in the nation’s public schools reveals a broader undermining of science that has the potential to breed distrust of sound science in mainstream American culture.

• We estimate that at least 13 percent of all public high school biology teachers flout U.S. federal court decisions by explicitly endorsing creationism or intelligent design in their classrooms.
• We find that even in states with very rigorous content standards with respect to evolution, teachers’ coverage of evolution is largely dictated by their own personal values and their desire to accommodate local community sentiment.
• To avoid controversy, many teachers disassociate themselves from the material—explaining that students need to learn it simply to pass the test.
• Other teachers who themselves accept evolution nevertheless encourage students to come to their own opinions about the validity of evolutionary biology—conveying the idea that it is just a matter of opinion.
• Still others focus only on microbiology. Not only do most avoid human evolution entirely but many omit fossil, genetic, and anatomical evidence of common ancestry of vertebrates—leaving high school graduates open to the common creationism argument that there is no real evidence for the emergence of new species.

It is not hard to see how these practices produce new generations of citizens who lack an appreciation for the nature of scientific inquiry and whose distrust of science will make them easy marks for those who see the findings of mainstream science as a threat to their profits or ideology (a phenomenon well documented by Oreskes and Conway in their book, Merchants of Doubt).

In sidestepping potential controversy, teachers are missing opportunities to explain how science actually works. For example, the field of evolution has many great examples of how scientists gain increasing confidence in hypotheses as replications and convergent evidence from disparate approaches cumulate in favor of the same conclusion. Teachers are missing opportunities to explain how modern science moves forward through the efforts and integrity of thousands of highly competitive individuals, all operating under the scrutiny of peer review.

In short, the current teaching of evolution represents an opportunity lost—the opportunity to prepare the next generation of citizens to play an informed and meaningful role in public debates that hinge on scientific evidence.

If this missed educational prospect was not cause enough for concern, it seems clear that instruction in earth science is likely to become embroiled in similar politics. Increasingly partisan and ideological politicians and activists are linking the two topics. Consider Ken Mercer, a former member of the Texas Assembly and current two-term member of the Texas Board of Education. When asked a question about his stance on evolution, he stated, “what we do have is the right for our kids to raise their hands in class and ask honest questions, especially in the areas of evolution and global warming.” As reported in a recent New York Times article, the joining of these two issues offers tactical advantages to each camp. Evolution deniers can claim that their skepticism of mainstream science is not rooted in religion because they also ask for teaching of “gaps” and “weaknesses” on climate change research, while climate skeptics can gain strength by allying with well-organized networks of socially conservative Christians who seem predisposed to doubt the conclusions of mainstream science.

These two trends—the cultivation of distrust in science generally and the convergence of interests of evolution and climate change deniers—signal a new chapter in the politicization of science. We can expect that mainstream science will be under attack in several venues. These include state boards of education that approve curricular standards, and local school boards that make choices among state-approved textbooks and instructional materials. But our research suggests that the most consequential arena will be the nation’s classrooms and the key players will be the nation’s science teachers. Moreover, the surest way to ensure teachers will not bow to political pressure is to arm them with a rigorous science education to complement their expertise in pedagogy and classroom management. If our research on high school biology teachers generalizes to science teachers more broadly, we can expect that many lack confidence in their ability to respond to politically motivated pressures with cogent explanations rooted in scientific research. Lacking such confidence, the sensible choice is to downplay scientific conclusions that generate controversy.

In this light, policymakers should review the rigor of science education that is typical of newly minted science educators and, where appropriate, elevate the expectations of what background is necessary to be considered well qualified. Such reforms have the potential to reduce the number of children who become casualties of the new science wars.

Podcast interview with Dr. Eric Plutzer conducted by Diana Epstein, a Policy Analyst at American Progress. Article by Dr. Eric Plutzer, professor of political science, and Dr. Michael B. Berkman, professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Penn State University Political Science Department. Dr. Plutzer and Dr. Berkman are the authors of the new book Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms. This article was cross-posted at Climate Progress.

References

Berkman, Michael, and Eric Plutzer. 2010. Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kaufman, Leslie. 2010. “Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets.” The New York Times. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/science/earth/04climate.html).

Newport, Frank. 2010. “Four in 10 Americans Believe in Strict Creationism.” Gallup (http://www.gallup.com/poll/145286/Four-Americans-Believe-Strict-Creationism.aspx).

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. 2005. “Religion A Strength and Weakness for Both Parties.” Washington.

Tuma, Mary. “Q&A | Ken Mercer, Republican Nominee for State Board of Education, District 5.” Community Impact Newspaper (http://impactnews.com/vote10/candidates/8633-qaa-ken-mercer-republican-nominee-for-state-board-of-education-district-5).

Indeed, totally absent from the document are the words “education,” “science,” “research,” or “technology” (“new technologies” is used once, but only to describe the use of computers and the Internet in the development of the Pledge itself). “Innovation” appears only once, in a section about government red tape, while “skill(s),” “training,” “export,” and “infrastructure” are all totally absent. Despite repeated calls for increased American “competitiveness,” nowhere in the Pledge is “sustainable” or “long-term” growth mentioned.

The words tell the story. The omission of so many of the essential prerequisites for sustainable and long-term economic growth makes the Pledge’s repeated calls for increased American “competitiveness” ring hollow. An economy that does not invent and commercialize new ideas quickly falls behind in the 21st century global economy.

Economists have realized that technological innovation is an indispensable driver of economic growth and job creation, and that “governments have a key role to play.” Multiple independent studies, including one by Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, have shown that that the “traditional” inputs of capital and labor can only account for at most 15 percent of measured economic growth, whereas the remaining 85 percent is driven by technological innovation.

The World Economic Forum’s “Global Competitiveness Report for 2010” also categorizes the U.S. economy squarely within the “innovation-driven” category, meaning that its growth is driven by the practical application of new technical knowledge, in contrast with the “factor-driven” or “efficiency-driven” categories. The report also warns that the relatively high wages and the associated standard of living that we enjoy in our developed, innovation-driven economy can only be sustained if businesses are able to compete by innovating new and unique products.

But as we pointed out last week, technological innovation is increasingly dependent on a robust science system, which in turn requires talented scientists, mathematicians, and engineers to function. Unfortunately, the United States is falling behind in educating the innovators who will power the American economy of the future.

Our students rank 21st in science literacy among 30 developed countries and 25th in math literacy, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This puts American 15-year olds on par with those in the Slovak Republic, and far behind students in Canada, Germany, South Korea, and Japan. In 2010, only 43 percent of U.S. high school graduates in 2010 were ready for college work in math and 29 percent were ready in science, according to Change the Equation, a network of U.S. chief executive officers concerned enough about our national competitiveness to band together in support of better science, technology, engineering, and math teaching in our elementary and secondary schools.

Indeed, less than one-third of U.S. eighth graders show proficiency in mathematics and science, according to a report prepared by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. And according to the World Economic Forum, the United States ranks only 48th in quality math and science education, far behind countries such as Canada, India, Poland—even Tunisia and Qatar. (see chart)

Figure: The United States balance of trade in advanced technology goods has been declining steadily. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau Foreign Trade Statistics, compiled by Science Progress.

As President Obama said in January, “Make no mistake: Our future is on the line. The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.” Unlike the “Pledge to America,” President Obama has put his money where his mouth is. While the Pledge refers repeatedly to the need to help businesses and entrepreneurs invest and invent, one wonders whether its authors have ever asked the companies they claim to advocate for what they really need to stay competitive in the 21st century.

In stark contrast stands the Obama administration’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign, which has set an ambitious agenda and partnered with the private sector to “elevate STEM education as a national priority essential to meeting the economic challenges of this century.” As part of this campaign, the White House has helped to convene over 100 major U.S. companies to found a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Change the Equation, which is investing more than $700 million in overhauling STEM education in the United States (STEM education stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math—four economically important skill sets where American students are falling behind).

These companies are supporting the president’s STEM education agenda and even putting millions of their own dollars into it because they know that without concerted action to keep America’s students competitive in math and science now, they will be unable to obtain quality employees to keep them competitive in the future. These investments will fund a growing array of public-private partnerships including:

• More than 350 science centers and science museums are pledging to offer 2 million hours of science enrichment to at least 25,000 youth in all 50 states.
• Intel Corp. has committed to a 10-year, $200 million campaign to support teaching in math and science.
• Raytheon Co. will leverage its unique expertise in modeling and simulation to expand its national “STEM Modeling Tool” to the state level, empowering policymakers to identify promising STEM education policies.
• In partnership with Lockheed Martin Corp. and Military Child Education Coalition, the National Math Science Initiative will announce a new effort to expand access to Advanced Placement classes in STEM subjects to public high schools that serve a large number of military families.
• A “Bridge to Science” Program with Nature Publishing will make a three-year, $5.5 million commitment to a series of programs to build stronger connections between parents, students, and scientists, including the creation of an online platform for parents and children to become “citizen scientists.”

Thanks in part to these public-private partnerships, President Obama announced this week the goal of recruiting 10,000 new STEM teachers in the next two years, a down payment towards the president’s goal of training 100,000 new STEM teachers by decade’s end.

These investments in science, technology, engineering, and math education are not only a good use of public resources, but they are essential elements driving of sustained growth in today’s global and innovation-driven economy. No pledge, plan, or platform for securing America’s long-term prosperity can possibly fulfill its goals without addressing these critical issues.

Sean Pool is Special Assistant for Energy, Science, and Technology Policy at the Center for American Progress. Austin Frerick, an intern with CAP’s Education Policy team, contributed invaluable research to this article.

A position paper recently issued by the Nature Publishing Group illustrates this point in the context of higher education. A significant majority, 77 percent, of the 450 faculty surveyed for the paper consider their educational responsibilities to be equally as important as research responsibilities. Only 6 percent consider research more important than education. Yet when asked to appoint a hypothetical candidate to an open tenure position in their department, the majority chose a star researcher with poor teaching skills over both a star teacher with little research background and a candidate equally skilled, though not notable, in both teaching and research.

The ripple effects of this mindset in the academy are damaging to the goals of universities. Faculty at most of our institutions are expected to both teach and conduct research; yet if they are selected largely on the basis of their excellence in research, why should be we be surprised if the quality of classroom teaching is often low, as many studies strongly suggest? Poor teaching has three regrettable consequences. First, many talented science majors who enter college with inadequate prior preparation switch out of science programs after a year of disappointing college courses. Second, many students who do stay in science programs never achieve sufficient levels of mastery in the field to launch a professional scientific career. Third, students for whom science is a side interest rather than a career don’t build the scientific literacy that will turn them into informed voters, parents, teachers, and policy-makers later in life.

There are thousands of individual superb teachers throughout higher education, to be sure, and hundreds of colleges that place great emphasis on classroom teaching. But, as the Nature Publishing Group paper illustrates, the structural incentives of the academy are in general stacked against teaching. Research brings far more funding and prestige to both universities and individuals than teaching does; no surprise, then, that university presidents and department chairs push a research agenda, and that science faculty are motivated to follow suit. The point is not that research isn’t important; on the contrary, research is the central purpose of science, and we must galvanize both investment and political will to support the needs of our research sector. But where education is weak, research has a rickety foundation. It may be thriving today, but who will perform meaningful research tomorrow, if sufficient numbers and a diversity of students are not well trained and guided through the education pipeline to the laboratory bench? Who will vote for increasing national investment in research & development if the average citizen has a poor understanding and appreciation of science? The scientific challenges our society faces are only growing, as crucial issues like climate change, diabetes, and food sustainability proliferate and intensify. Is our educational system keeping pace?

If we want to ensure that R&D prospers in the next generation, we must take a hard and candid look at the incentives that are built into the academy. Universities that profess to value teaching must ask themselves whether their department chairs and tenure committees are really asked to select excellent teachers as well as excellent researchers. If they are not, then a mandate to support teaching must be made explicit, and backed with financial awards, job security, and promotions. Funding agencies, both private and governmental, must continue their current trend of allocating increasing investment to excellence and innovation in teaching, to eventually ensure that a dedicated and successful teacher will receive comparable career rewards to those that star researchers can count on. And universities and funding agencies must work together to develop a much-needed system of evaluating teaching quality, similar to what is already in discussion in the engineering community. A reliable set of metrics will make teaching impossible to ignore. We believe that such a system, which can be produced by a concerted effort of the key players in higher education within a few years, would be a watershed in the reinvigoration of our national science capabilities.

Vikram A. Savkar is Senior Vice President & Publishing Director, Education Markets, for Nature Publishing Group. He is based in Cambridge, MA.

This attack on global warming was prefigured in the announcement last August by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it planned to gin up “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.” Senior vice president for the environment William Kovacs exulted: “It would be evolution versus creationism. It would be the science of climate change on trial.”

Kovacs later apologized, explaining, “My ‘Scopes monkey’ analogy was inappropriate,” as it undermined his insistence that the Chamber “is not denying or otherwise challenging the science behind global climate change.” However embarrassing and erroneous Kovacs’ description of the chamber’s campaign might have been, they foreshadowed the South Dakota legislature’s move toward its own version of a global warming Scopes trial.

The Scopes trial of 1925 grew out of the first great anti-science movement of the 20^th century: creationism. John Scopes was convicted of violating a Tennessee law forbidding teachers “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” Similar bills remained on the books until the 1960s, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. Creationists soon adopted a new strategy, with laws in Louisiana and Arkansas requiring “balanced treatment” of evolution and creationism. Both bills were declared unconstitutional in the 1980s.

Creationists have not given up. Some have recently partnered with global warming deniers to demand “academic freedom” for public school science teachers to depart from generally accepted science when discussing supposedly controversial scientific topics. In the last two years, a dozen states have considered such bills, some (including Louisiana’s—the only one to pass into law) naming global warming and evolution along with human cloning or stem cell research as especially controversial. These topics are notable for being subject to intense political dispute without any question in the scientific community about the underlying science.

South Dakota’s HCR 1009 is the first bill to attack global warming only, and is especially notable for its attempt to resurrect the creationist “balanced treatment” strategy of the 1980s. As it passed the South Dakota House on February 17, the resolution calls “for balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools of South Dakota.”

To make clear what that balance would entail, the 33 sponsors of HCR 1009 cited widely debunked claims of climate change deniers. They presented vineyards in Greenland as evidence that our modern warming is unremarkable; in fact, the Medieval Warm Period they point to appears to have been a local phenomenon and unlike the current warming, was not driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by human activities. They offer “shifting warm water currents” as an alternative explanation for the dramatic decline in Arctic sea ice; actually, such shifts are predicted consequences of global warming. They repeat the widely mocked claim that carbon dioxide is “the gas of life,” and therefore not a dangerous pollutant; this despite more than a century’s documentation that the gas traps heat in the air. They cite a deeply flawed petition organized by climate change deniers as if science were determined by plebiscite; instead they should have looked to published research, where researcher Naomi Oreskes has found near unanimity that global warming is happening and largely results from human activities.

The resolution invokes these fallacious claims in the service of four points: “That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact”; “That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect [sic] world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity [sic] of these factors is largely speculative”; “That the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global warming phenomena”; and that instruction about global warming should be “appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.”

When the bill reached the Senate floor on February 24, it was amended to strike most of the scientifically erroneous justifications. South Dakota’s teachers and even a few of its legislators know better than to repeat the creationist canard of equating a theory with uncertainty. As the state’s science standards explain, a theory is “an explanation for some phenomenon that is based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning”—a way to explain facts, which are merely “statement[s] or assertion[s] of verifiable information.” The stars were not aligned for the puzzling references to “astrological” and “thermological” explanations for global warming, and some legislator must have seen the irony of decrying politically biased science while seeking to legislate a scientific result. But the Senate strengthened the final line, insisting now that teachers offer a “balanced and objective” presentation of global warming. However reasonable such advice may be in the abstract, the effect of the law will be chilling to teachers on the ground. Science is not and should not be resolved through the legislative process, and the details of what teachers present as science should not be dictated by legislators with no experience as scientists or teachers.

If the revised bill passes the House, it will put the hardworking teachers of South Dakota in a bind. Will they bow to political pressure and misinform their students about global warming? Or will they soldier on, preparing their students to understand the climatic forces driving the breadbasket from Kansas to the Dakotas and expanding the market for South Dakota’s abundant wind power? If that is the case, it may take a latter-day John Scopes to shoulder the burden of public ignominy, defend the integrity of science education, and show the South Dakota legislature the error of its ways.

Joshua Rosenau is the Public Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education.

In my view, the picture here remains pretty dismal. But perhaps out of academic evenhandedness (and also in part by avoiding at least two very problematic areas), NSF paints a more mixed picture.

On the positive side, for instance, the report consistently shows that Americans are not so scientifically benighted as one might think, at least in comparison with the rest of the world. We go to science museums more frequently. We claim a higher level of interest in “new scientific discoveries” than citizens in South Korea, China, and many parts of Europe. And in terms of sheer factual knowledge, we perform pretty much on par with Europe, and ahead of other countries like Japan, China, and Russia.

Through such international comparisons, the latest NSF report suggests that if your preferred standard for judging a nation’s engagement with science is to see how it stacks up next to other comparable (e.g., developed) countries, then the United States really doesn’t fare so poorly. Furthermore, NSF emphasizes that Americans profess to have very positive views about science. They overwhelmingly think science makes our lives better and that it deserves federal funding. And they have an apparently abiding trust in the leaders of the scientific community.

All of which is certainly to the good. And yet  the image of an America little informed about science, and little engaged with it, still shines through in the latest report.

As Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 itself admits, seeing how the country fares on science in comparison with other nations isn’t the only possible means of judgment. If one’s standard is more ambitious—emphasizing, in the latest report’s words, “what a technologically advanced society requires (either today or in the future) to compete in the world economy and enable its citizens to better take advantage of science progress in their own lives”—then it is very hard to feel good about the current state of affairs in the United States.

For instance, just 13 percent of the public now claims to follow science and technology news “very closely,” and this number has been on a downward trend for the past decade, ending with the current low. So while Americans may profess great admiration for science in the abstract, they hardly feel compelled to pay it much attention.

Similarly, there has been little apparent improvement over time in Americans’ basic ability to answer factual questions about science correctly. Moreover, the vast majority of our citizens have scant familiarity with key emerging scientific fields that will dramatically shape the future, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology—and it is important to note that these are the only such fields that the NSF report focuses in on. Ask Americans about other coming scientific technologies or quandaries—say, geoengineering, or synthetic biology—and I imagine the responses would be even more dismal.

And then there are the egregiously politicized issues, like climate change or the teaching of evolution, where the gulf between the scientific community and the public is unbelievably vast. For instance, according to a 2009 Pew study, 84 percent of U.S. scientists think the earth is getting warmer due to human activities, versus 49 percent of the public.

Rather surprisingly, Chapter 7 of the latest Science and Engineering Indicators report doesn’t discuss evolution. Neither does it address another increasingly critical topic, and another central area of breakdown between science and U.S. society: vaccination. Americans are currently in the extremely dangerous throes of vaccine retreat, a growing movement that is based on little more than scientific misinformation.

The latest Science and Engineering Indicators report performs a great service—it gives us all the best data, and it frames it in such a way as to keep us honest. Not everything is rotten when it comes to the state of science in America, and we should remember that. But at the same time, there is much, much to worry about. One year ago, President Obama pledged to restore science to its “rightful place” in American life, and the administration has done much to achieve this goal—but as the latest figures show, none of us has any excuse to feel satisfied or complacent.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research
One of our most popular features ever, this interactive timeline marked key moments, beginning the in the 1970s, from the interrelated stories of human embryonic stem cell research and the policy governing that work. The piece collects research featured in the Center for American Progress report, “A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Research and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically.” The Obama administration’s final stem cell policy closely resembled the one recommended in the paper.

Dude, Where’s My War on Science?
By Chris Mooney
Conservatives tried to expose what they claim was a case of science suppression by the Obama administration—and in the process demonstrated how little they know about science in the first place. The attack on EPA’s policy process, Mooney explained, fails peer review.

The George Will Scandal
By Chris Mooney
When The Washington Post ran a column by Will rife with errors on climate science, Mooney asked: If a major media outlet can’t even correct facts about global warming, is it still socially relevant?

What Does This Generation Think it Means to be a “Scientist”?
By Chris Mooney
Many students don’t see a life of academic specialization as the best way to employ their scientific talents. They want to do something more to bring science to the rest of America. Changing definitions could entail a changing relationship between science and society, wrote Mooney.

How the Global Warming Story Changed—Disastrously
By Chris Mooney
Skeptics didn’t need good science to make another attack on climate change research. Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway, and not scientific exactitude or rigor, wrote Mooney, examining the fallout from the “ClimateGate” scandal. And the U.S. public, never overwhelmingly sure about climate change, has long been susceptible to their smokescreens and misinformation campaigns.

Throwing the Baby Out With the Amniotic Fluid
By Michelle N. Meyer
One important distinction that is not made often or clearly enough by either ethicists or lawyers is that between decisions to procreate and decisions not to procreate. Witness, for instance, the reaction to Nadya OctoMom™ Suleman.

Hold Off On Holdren (Again)
By Chris Mooney
Conservatives found another ludicrous charge to hurl against the president’s science adviser. It was just the latest attempt to distract from actual science policy.

Autonomous Contraception
By Lisa Campo-Engelstein
A recent discovery, wrote Campo-Engelstein, might open the door to an effective male contraceptive drug, a technology that could have been developed decades ago, were it not for social factors that enable women but not men to effectively regulate their fertility outside of sexual activity and without their partner’s participation or knowledge.

Regional Centers of Innovation 101
Regional centers such as Silicon Valley and Boston cultivate technology-based economic development through a dynamic mix of researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and infrastructure. Drawing lessons from their success can help revitalize the U.S. economy. This feature marked the beginning of our ongoing project developing policies that support innovation clusters around the country.

But the reason is not, as some people say, that young Americans lack the smarts or the skills to succeed in those fields. Instead, it appears that longstanding U.S. policies have destroyed the incentives that used to attract many of the nation’s best young minds into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM fields). And that means that as the United States faces increasing technological and scientific competition from abroad, the country isn’t getting the full benefit of the brainpower it is paying to educate.

“It’s a labor market story,” not an education story, says one of the report’s authors, Harold Salzman, of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Rather than staying with STEM for graduate studies or a first job, many of our most able college graduates are now opting out of the pipeline that the nation used to count on to carry gifted students into STEM careers.

The new findings contradict the argument that some high-tech employers have been putting forward for a decade now: that American education doesn’t produce enough high-quality science and math graduates. This purported talent deficit, they insist, means that the nation, to stay competitive, must import more technically trained workers and massively overhaul K-12 scientific and math education.

But the data suggest something completely different. They show no such deficit. Earlier studies by Salzman and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University establish that American schools turn out very large numbers of students who score at the very top of international math comparisons (while also producing large numbers who score at the bottom, resulting in mediocre averages.). Statistics from the National Science Board indicate, furthermore, that the nation’s colleges each year produce several times as many homegrown holders of STEM degrees as can find work in those areas. And among the STEM graduates of former years, unemployment of American engineers is at historic highs.

But the new study reveals an ominous trend among the scientifically gifted. Although the numbers of young Americans studying STEM in high school and college are as strong as ever, the very best of those students, as indicated by their SAT scores and college grade point averages, are less likely than in decades past to stay in STEM when they leave college.

But the answer to the problem may not be complicated. Higher salaries and more stable career tracks have lured these grads away from scientific jobs, and those same incentives, an author of the study suggests, could draw them back into STEM fields.

A generation gap

In the new study, Lowell, Salzman, and co-authors tracked three cohorts of American STEM students through their educations and early careers. Using standard government data sets, they focused on what young people do at the crucial transitions of their lives. How many of those who study science and advanced math in high school proceed on to college and continue to study STEM fields when they get there? How many of those who earn a STEM degree get a job in a STEM field? How many are still in STEM fields ten or more years later?

The results show that young Americans are as likely as ever to major in science. “On average,” the new report states, “there has been no substantive change in the proportion of high school graduates who go on to complete or enroll in a STEM field of study.” And, encouragingly, “ the highest performers are significantly more likely to major in STEM than the lower performers.” But then, in the late 1990s, the percentage of the students in the top quintile of STEM ability who chose to major in STEM fields took a “striking” drop—from nearly 30 percent to under 15 percent, while the percentages of those in lower ability groups who chose STEM majors remained essentially unchanged. The percentage of the highest performers who earned STEM bachelor’s degrees fell from 43 percent in the classes of 1992 through 1997 to 29 percent in the classes of 2000 through 2005.

But if the drop in high-scoring STEM majors were not discouraging enough, the news from those who did get STEM degrees was even worse. The percentage of those holding STEM bachelor’s degrees who went on either to work in or study a STEM field rose steadily and sharply from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, from 31.5 percent of the 1977 through 1980 classes, to 52.8 percent of the 1997 through 2000 cohort. But, in the late 90s, the percentage begins to fall, particularly sharply among the most able, from 52 percent to 48 percent.

“Given what we know about the state of the economy and the exploding field of STEM occupations in the 1990s”—the period of the runaway tech boom—“it may seem puzzling to see a decline in retention,” the report states. “It is common knowledge that the STEM job market was expanding in the that period, so the drop in retention might seem surprising because the jobs were available for the taking.” And looking farther out along the career trajectory, the data show “declining retention among the top performers” in STEM careers ten years out from the bachelor’s degree. The late 1990s, they say, “marked a turning point…at least for the best students”—and the “decline seems to have come on quite suddenly.”

These results “strongly suggest that students are not leaving STEM pathways because of lack of preparation or ability,” the authors conclude. Instead, the data “suggest that we turn our attention to factors other than educational preparation or student ability” to explain what is going on.

The Rhodes advantage

And, as it turns out, STEM fields are not the only traditional employers of the nation’s ablest young people that appear to be losing their attraction. The Rhodes Scholarship is by far the most prestigious, and probably the most competitive, academic award that a young American can win. The winners, drawn from a broad range of college majors, study a subject of their choice at Oxford University and then return home “with virtually any job available to them,” writes the Rhodes Trust’s American secretary, Elliot Gerson, on the Washington Post op-ed page. For almost a century, these ultimate achievers “have overwhelmingly chosen paths in scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service, [reaching] the highest levels in virtually all fields.”

In recent years, however, increasing numbers of the consummately accomplished Rhodes alumni have eschewed those traditional vocations in favor of “Wall Street, finance [or] general business management”—fields previously considered rather beneath the horizon of America’s most promising young leaders, Gerson continues. Only three of the 320 American Rhodes scholars chosen in the decade of 1970s, for example, opted for the world of commerce. But fully 6 of the 32 chosen in one recent year made that choice. “This break in an almost century-old pattern coincided with great increases in occupational earnings differentials, which have continued to grow, seemingly exponentially,” Gerson continues. “It seems quaint, if not unfathomable, that just three decades ago the differentials in earnings—generally two- to fivefold between business leaders and doctors or lawyers, or five- to tenfold with professors, scientists and public servants—were often rationalized by Rhodes scholars as reasonable additional compensation to balance the lower standing of business jobs among their peers.”

The Lowell-Salzman team doesn’t yet have complete data to show that many of the ablest STEM students who abandoned the pipeline have followed suit, but Salzman strongly suspects that Gerson has at least part of the answer. “Go to top level schools and they’ll tell you of a huge shift at the school level into finance” and related fields, he says. Elite colleges represent a relatively small proportion of the nation’s students, he continues, “but they pull disproportionately from the very top,” presumably many of the students capable of doing topflight science. Meanwhile, he adds, “everything shows that wages and working conditions and career prospects have stagnated and sometimes gotten worse” in STEM occupations in recent years, “and there are other job prospects” for students able to do higher math.

Mathematicians, physicists, astronomers and others with advanced STEM training have, in exchange for incomes many times those available to postdocs or professors, or even to industrial engineers and scientists, become the “quants” (quantitative experts) behind the many elaborate investment vehicles of recent years. The financial collapse may have reduced the number of the ablest students headed straight to Wall Street, but even so, “management, law, medicine, all those fields pay better than technical and science fields,” Salzman says. They also provide greater career security. Students aiming for STEM careers in academe now face daunting prospects. Qualified applicants vastly outnumber faculty openings, and in many fields, a would-be researcher must first spend an average of seven years earning a Ph.D. and several more as a low-paid postdoc before he or she can even apply for one of the hard-to-get academic posts. And in a number of high-tech industries, students worry about work being moved offshore or, in many cases, the need to compete here at home with often lower-paid foreign workers on temporary visas.

Stopping the talent drain

How great a threat to the nation’s innovative capacity—and to its competitiveness—does the loss of these scientifically able students to other occupations represent? It’s impossible to say, Salzman believes. “Innovation is not well understood,” and “no relationship” has been demonstrated between the number of a country’s scientists or engineers and its ability to make major breakthroughs. “Innovation comes out of a small group of people…. if there are small areas of innovative activity, then these broad trends may or may not make a difference,” he says. Some major technical advances have been made by people who would not show up in statistics as scientists or engineers—including college dropouts tinkering with electronic components in their parents’ garages and bicycle mechanics convinced that they could build a machine that would fly. But it’s very likely that at least some of the high-caliber brainpower lately devoted to devising elaborate investment models could just as well have created advances in various scientific or technological fields.

If the nation believes that this threat is real, the answer, Salzman says, appears to be simple market economics. Increasing the size of the scientific pipeline is a highly inefficient way of getting more STEM workers, because the best students are falling off right at the end, not dropping off the middle. “To the extent that they’re leaving the pipeline, they’re leaving when they get to the labor market. It’s not high school or college.”

“Imagine a manufacturer is able to get only 60 percent of this product to market because 40 percent falls off the assembly line,” Salzman continues. “If you know that you’re getting sixty percent off the line, you’d say, ‘Gee how could we get 70 percent?’ ….We’ve got to get more of them coming out of college rather than trying to double the numbers going in.”

And an effective way to do that, he says, is also simple market economics: improve the incomes and careers that STEM fields offer the best graduates. “If the nation really values these fields, show them the money, show them the stable careers,” he says.

“This is one of the areas where we should believe that markets actually work. Let’s be capitalists about this, free market capitalists, and understand that we need to provide market incentives to get the results we want.”

Beryl Lieff Benderly, a regular Science Progress contributor and prize-winning Washington journalist, writes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column about scientific labor force issues for Science Careers, a feature of the website of Science magazine.

The more recent generation of women appears to be taking a different approach to planning their lives, more sensitive to the problems in maintaining a balance of work and family. In a controversial 2005 article in The New York Times, Louise Story reported anecdotal evidence that many women in elite colleges were thinking twice about combining careers and families, and there have been many other books and stories since then about women’s unhappiness in trying to do it all. This is true even in academia, which has generally been more accommodating to people with families, given the faculty’s relative autonomy and the flexibility of work hours. And the problem has been, most significantly, in the natural sciences, where the hours tend to be long and the competitive pressures unceasing throughout a person’s career.

Witness the recent report published by the Center for American Progress and the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic and Family Security on “Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences,” which asserts that “both men and women report a shifting away from the career goal of a research professor, with women’s moves being more pronounced.”

The report focuses its recommendations for institutions on creating more family-friendly policies, including stopping the tenure clock for bearing and caring for children, the provision of child care support and tuition remission, and even the construction of lactation rooms. There is no question that there must be a stronger institutional response of this kind before we lose a generation of American scientists, male and female. And as long as the burden of childcare and domestic life still falls mainly on women, it will be the women that we lose.

But from where I sit, as a dean who oversees the hiring and promotion of faculty across a school of arts and sciences, I see we will have to do more than provide childcare. There will have to be a change in culture in the assessment of academic productivity, which now privileges an unrelenting rate of massive amounts of work over time. Everyone recognizes that the expectations for academic productivity have escalated in the past forty years: what got you tenure in 1970 would certainly not get you tenure now, whether at an elite liberal arts college or a research university.

The CAP-Berkeley report does address the issue of time and work, for example, in its recommendation to “remove time-based criteria for fellowships and productivity assessment that do not acknowledge family events and their impact on career timing.” But what happens when people with and without such extensions are competing for jobs and tenure in the same pool? When at least some people can produce new results and publications at an exceptionally high rate, because they have no other responsibilities or demands on their time, should the same be expected of everyone?

As a dean, I am responsible for making sure that my school is hiring, tenuring, and promoting the very best faculty, who will serve the institution and their field of knowledge in multiple capacities: as scholars, teachers, and citizens over a long career. Science is hard, and it moves fast, and we do indeed want scientists who can handle the work and its pace. But we also want to have faculty who are well-adjusted and good colleagues: we want faculty, indeed, who know how to “have a life.”

I believe that having a family made me a better teacher and colleague, if only because it made me stop working every once in a while, and because it brought me to appreciate a world outside of the library, lab, and classroom. And it made me no worse a scholar. I want my daughter, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in high-energy physics, to believe that she, too, can have a family and follow the passion for science that has driven her since he was in high school. But what can I really tell her about the world she will enter in a year, as she tries to balance her work and personal life? Should she seek a post-doctoral position, or should she go on the job market?

Academic leadership needs to be clear about the signals that we send to our undergraduates, graduate students, and junior faculty—male and female—about what constitutes success and what we value in them as scientists but also as future colleagues and as human beings. We can do this with material support for them to be able to lead full and productive lives, but we also need to give our moral support to their personal as well as scientific dreams.

Dr. Rebecca W. Bushnell is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and the Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor, as well as a Professor of English, at the University of Pennsylvania.

When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was “when is a good time to have a baby?” For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.

In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39. “So it’s increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure,” she says. Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, “Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences,” co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline. Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between Ph.D. and tenured positions. “The leak is almost entirely, or at least due primarily to family formation,” said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

To discuss the report and the choices facing women scientists along their professional pathways, Mason, Goulden, who is Director of Data Initiatives in Academic Affairs at Berkeley, and Association of American Universities President Robert Berdahl joined Science Progress for a podcast conversation.

These decisions, influenced by the family-unfriendly policies at many research institutions, account for the fact that while women now receive more than half of the Ph.D.s in science and engineering fields, they are under-represented in comparison to men at in the faculty level of their academic fields. According to the report women comprised “63 percent and 54 percent of NIH and NSF’s predoctoral awards in 2007, respectively, but just 25 percent and 23 percent of the competitive faculty grants awarded in the same year.”

But both women and men agree that research positions at universities are the most family-unfriendly career choices among a range of options for scientists. “We have a process in which a large number of very talented scientists… are discouraged about a career in science because of some of the demands that it puts upon them,” said Berdahl.

The Obama administration has made investment in science an administration priority, and as Mason points out, losing those women scientists who are so far along the career pathway represents a significant loss of federal grant funding. Training for a young scientist from graduate school through a postdoc can total close to $500,000.

For those women who do decided to start families while moving through the career pipeline, their odds of winning tenure are significantly diminished in comparison to their male counterparts. Married women with Ph.D.s who have young children are 35 percent less likely to get a tenure-track position than men with young children. The necessary time off those mothers need for childcare responsibilities can put principal investigators in charge of research grants in tough positions. “They’re definitely caught between a rock and a hard place on this issue,” explains Goulden, “because if their researchers have children and go on leave, that results in a loss of productivity to their grant. And as it stands, for the most part, they receive no additional supplemental funding in that situation.”

So it’s the responsibility of both federal grant-making agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as research universities, to develop and share policies that remove the tension in hiring decisions for PIs and create family-friendly environments for scientists aiming for the top of their profession who also want to start families. The report suggests policies that provide responsive benefits for all classes of researchers, from graduate students up through full professors; supplemental funding to offset productivity losses when scientists go on family leave; and flexibility in the lock-step timing of the academic science career path.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

Consider an episode last month on “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC. The president of Caltech, Jean-Lou Chameau, went on the air to offer his provocative theory about why the United States fares so poorly in science and math education. Our science teachers don’t tend to have science backgrounds, Chameau argued, but instead tend to be trained in general education. That’s the problem-they don’t know their subjects intimately, and so can’t excel at teaching them.

Lehrer’s callers, though—all of whom had been screened to privilege those with science education backgrounds—quickly related their own experiences and complicated this narrative. Few disagreed directly with Chameau’s point, but they added in quite a number of complicating factors.

For instance, some callers pointed out that the necessity of “teaching to the test” often constrains the ability of science teachers to more creatively engage students. Similarly, others observed that many students are afraid of science and math, fearing it’s too hard, and simply not for them. It’s something I’ve heard as well from science teachers: That many of their students insist they’re not a “science person” or a “math person.”

And that’s just the beginning. Another Brian Lehrer caller sadly remarked that we don’t pay our teachers well, whatever their training. Another noted that we live in a culture that values celebrity and money, not intellect. And Lehrer himself pointed out the religiosity of the United States, and how that can impair science education, which of course is particularly notorious on the topic of evolution.

Is it possible that all of these things are true, and all of them are the problem? I would argue that is precisely the case—and indeed, how could it be otherwise? U.S. science education occurs in the context of an American culture that has very deep problems with science—problems that are manifested in many spheres other than the educational system, but are certainly reflected there, too.

What this inevitably means is that even as we fight off the creationists, and (hopefully) invest more in paying teachers and training them, we have to push for cultural change with regard to how we think about science. And at the core of that change must be the recognition that science doesn’t have to be something weird, different, and alienating. It isn’t just brainless memorization, and it isn’t useless stuff that you’ll never need. Rather, it’s fun, and it’s relevant—or at least it can be in the hands of a good teacher. At the middle-school or high-school level, any teacher who can convey this ought to be celebrated, whether or not he or she has a science background.

Since I am a person who was actually turned on to science at a particular point during my educational trajectory, perhaps my personal history is instructive here. Nothing against my high school teachers, but while I got A’s in science, I didn’t learn much of anything in a way that made it deeply resonate for me. That’s because I viewed the whole thing as a kind of game: memorization, which I was good at. The trick works especially well in biology, where knowing all the parts of the cell, or the stages of the Krebs Cycle, are the kinds of things you’re tested on.

It was only in college, when I started reading books by people such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson that science actually took on some meaning for me. In the hands of these literary scientists, science was no longer a body of facts. Rather, it unlocked who we were, where we were going, and why it all mattered. I’m too young to have been a watcher of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series, but this is a core reason why it, too, inspired so many people to get interested in science.

There’s almost a kind of trap when it comes to teaching an intricate topic such as science. If you lose non-scientists in the weeds of the information, they’ll never see why it matters. But scientists thrive in the weeds-that’s their job. Our science teachers, then, are a critical conduit between the two groups. They may or may not have scientific backgrounds, but if they can’t trim the garden, they are bound to fail.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

When Real was 13, both his parents were incarcerated and his two older brothers had already dropped out of high school. By sophomore year, Real was so distracted by his torn family that he was sure he would repeat his brothers’ mistakes. However, when a health care teacher introduced him to technology and his school gave him a laptop, his life began to turn around. Even when “home life was a mess,” Real could instant message his classmates and teachers after school to work on projects and ask questions through his computer, he said. The laptop program was a “portal to a new life,” in his words.

He used the laptop to access information ranging from virtual university tours to career options to how to tie a necktie. Before his school system incorporated technology into classrooms, the average college attendance rate was 26 percent, but when Real graduated in 2008, 94 percent of his class moved on to college. “Technology is not a luxury in society; it is a necessity,” he said.

The other witnesses echoed Real’s testament to the power of classroom technology. Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy, called incorporating technology into American classrooms a “policy priority of the president.” Virginia, where Chopra recently served as secretary of technology, is already using web-based tools to lower textbook costs and cover “areas key to Virginia’s economic growth,” he said.

When Governor Tim Kaine challenged a panel of scientists and engineers to evaluate Virginia’s physics, chemistry, and engineering curriculum in 2007, they found that topics such as simulation and nuclear physics were missing from their textbooks. About a dozen authors subsequently volunteered to write ten chapters on the topics in an open-source wiki to supplement traditional textbooks. Albemarle County schools purchased the virtual chapters, bundled as a “FlexBook,” along with low cost “netbook” computers for each physics student, Chopra said. Pooling teachers’ knowledge in supplemental chapters is more cost effective than purchasing new, updated textbooks. The flexibility of the virtual books allows teachers to choose content based on experience. As long as states “rigorously review” the content in an objective way, the marketplace can determine the best way to select and distribute the material, Chopra said.

Lisa Short, a science teacher at Gaithersburg Middle School in Maryland, uses a different tool to engage her students. After using an interactive whiteboard for one year, Short can no longer imagine attempting to captivate her students with a plain blackboard. She demonstrated how the whiteboard incorporates various learning styles—visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic—in one lesson for the committee. The whiteboard allows Short to embed video and audio clips, build maps, and record notes without wasting paper. On top of that, every student wants to go up and participate at the board, she said.

Activote, a multiple-choice question feature, helps her anonymously survey her students’ knowledge from their seats. The program records individual answers so the instructor can determine if particular students are consistently missing questions and may need extra help, Short said. Committee members tried Activote themselves and voted on the correct answer to a question about the proportion of classrooms that use interactive whiteboards: it’s 16 percent. American schools need to secure more funding and train more teachers to reach the United Kingdom’s level of classroom technology, Short said, citing the fact that 70 percent of classrooms in the U.K. use digital whiteboards. Classroom technology has the ability to not only motivate students like Real, but also to “truly change the profession of teaching,” she said.

So in dedicating this column of praise to Eugenie C. Scott—who for over two decades has headed up the Oakland, CA-based National Center for Science Education, or NCSE, the chief defender of the teaching of evolution in the United States—I want to make clear just how much I think such a departure is necessary and deserved.

Scott has been receiving a great deal of recognition lately; I merely want to lend an additional push. First, she recently won the Stephen Jay Gould prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution, in recognition of how her “sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life.” Perhaps an even bigger accolade came from Scientific American, which listed her among the top 10 leaders who have “demonstrated outstanding commitment to assuring that the benefits of new technologies and knowledge will accrue to humanity.” (The list includes other names you might know, like Bill Gates and Barack Obama.)

The opening to the Scientific American commendation is both amusing, and also provides a hint as to why Scott succeeds:

Thomas Henry Huxley was the 19th-century biologist known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his defense of the great scientist’s ideas. The 21st century has a counterpart in the woman who describes herself as “Darwin’s golden retriever.”

As this joke suggests, Eugenie Scott knows well what was obvious even in the Victorian era—there are already plenty of Darwinian bulldogs out there, fighting the creationist pitbulls daily, sounding off on blogs and attacking the religious beliefs of their foes. But being “Darwin’s golden retriever,” and staying friendly when tempers flare—that’s a lot rarer. The line shows both Scott’s genial humor and also the kind of pro-evolution advocacy we need more of: tolerant, strategic, accommodating, but always firm when necessary.

The National Center for Science Education is a clearinghouse for pro-evolution information, and a fount of unrivaled expertise on the complex and ever-changing stances and strategies of the creationists. It is also the leading source of advice and counsel to local communities whenever evolution battles crop up, as they do each year virtually without fail. NCSE’s goal is always to help communities resolve such conflicts without resorting to litigation. But when courtroom fights do arise, the group is also invaluable, and served as a scientific adviser on the historic Kitzmiller v. Dover evolution trial of 2005, which ended in a resounding victory for science and an equally resounding defeat for “intelligent design.”

Scott, an anthropologist by training, has been steering this ship since 1987, her career marked not only by Dover but by another key pro-evolution legal precedent, 1987′s Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, which banned the teaching of “creation science” in schools. She has been involved in pro-evolution advocacy longer still, since the year 1980.

And if you want some idea of how difficult the job is, just try the following. First, peruse the web for all the creationist attacks on Scott. According to Wikipedia, she likes to joke that sometimes she thinks her first name is “Atheist,” they call her “Atheist Eugenie Scott” so much. Then, when you’re done sampling the anti-evolutionist  barbs, flip over to this recent post by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, which takes Scott and NCSE to task for their “accommodationist” stance on religion, calling it “offensive and unnecessary—a form of misguided pragmatism.”

As this evidence suggests, Scott is regularly under fire from the culture war combatants on both sides. Not only does NCSE have to monitor the endless permutations of the creationists, who are constantly coming up with new ploys for attacking evolution. It also has to deal with the pugilistic evolutionists who want to make this battle about the truth or falsehood of religious belief, rather than the truth or falsehood of what science discovers about the world. In this gauntlet, Scott has remained an eloquent defender of the view that people of science and people of religion can and must work together to solve conflicts—and indeed, this is the best and only way forward.

I would be remiss, though, if I didn’t commend NCSE’s single best initiative: Project Steve. In riposte to creationists who are constantly promulgating lists of scientists who allegedly question evolution, NCSE created an even bigger list of scientists named “Steve” who support it. Yes, that’s right: Scott and NCSE made a statistical argument hilarious and memorable. How many people can you say that of?

I know Scott, although not particularly well. I’ve interviewed her, seen her at the typical conferences, and witnessed her on the ground in Pennsylvania during the Dover conflict. And for some time, I have been asking myself the following question: Given that we’re barely holding back the creationist tide as it is, what on Earth would we do without her? I sincerely hope these latest awards bring added recognition and support to the woman who is working every day in one of the toughest jobs imaginable: Keeping our schools, and our society, safe for science.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Sommers rightly points out that as of 2002, the proportion of women earning bachelor’s degrees in “humanities, social sciences, life sciences and education” was 60 percent, and that women also earned “at least half of the PhDs” in those fields, while men outnumbered women in “physics, computer science and engineering.” Part of this may simply have to do with the greater numbers of women in college compared to men.

What she fails to mention is the fact that at each rung of the academic ladder from undergrad to professorship, more women leave science and engineering fields, leading to a dearth of female representation in the upper echelons. According to a National Academies report, “at the top research institutions, only 15.4% of the full professors in the social and behavioral sciences and 14.8% in the life sciences are women.” These are the circles where gender parity is a significant question.

Sommers then touches on the merits of “sexist bias” or “considered preference” as explanations for the imbalances. But if we’re going to focus on the top of the scientific profession, where the representational differences are real, then consider the results of a survey from last year of tenured investigators at the National Institutes of Health: “only 29 percent of the tenure-track principal investigators (PI) and 19 percent of tenured PIs—the NIH equivalent of assistant and full professors, respectively—are women.”

The major factors behind those numbers, according to respondents? A lack of childcare and flexible working hours for those women who wanted to raise a family. “Overt discrimination does not seem to be the issue,” Elisabeth Martinez, lead author of the survey, told Science. You can see the impact of family decisions on those who want to be principal investigators here:

In her conclusion, Sommers writes that the “fields that will be most affected — math, engineering, physics and computer science — are vital to the economy and national defense.” Which I read as an implication that because these areas are important, we shouldn’t tamper with the current level of diversity within them. But research indicates that more diversity can lead to better ideas. According to Scott Page, an SP Advisory Board member, more diverse groups have more problem-solving tools at their disposal, and therefore more power to design solutions to difficult problems. Put another way, diversity itself is vital to the economy and national defense.

So to suggest that gender parity is not a good idea because things are fine the way they are seems, well, inequitable.

Image: flickr.com/gregclarkephotography

Trower, a 27-year veteran of the software giant, has been motivated by a variety of technologies over the course of his career—from the BASIC programming languages that enabled the expansion of PCs in the 1970s and 1980s to the first two releases of Windows, which he managed. A few years ago, Bill Gates sent him on a fact-finding mission to figure out what Microsoft could do in the field of robotics. Since then, he’s learned that the machines aren’t just great educational tools. Indeed, the field of robotics may hold solutions to major problems in military transport, providing health care for an aging population, and keeping our floors clean.

Science Progress spoke with Trower about the future of robotics in the United States and around the globe. The interview has been edited and condensed; a recording of the full conversation is available in the sidebar.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Science Progress: How can robots can get students interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields?

Tandy Trower: I think it’s incredibly important because today, the U.S. is ranked about 6^th in engineering bachelors degrees, following China, the EU, Russia and India. It’s starting to look back up again, perhaps with the change in economy, but traditionally, in computer science in the U.S., there has been a steady decline in enrollment. It turns out though, that robots are just this marvelous motivating device. If you stick a robot—I don’t care if you’re talking about grade school kids or high school students—if you put a robot in the middle of the room, there is something captivating about the technology.

At Georgia Tech, for example, they have been able to use robots as a way to teach basic computer science. They’ve been able to stem the tides in the decline of computer science by using this technology. But even before the college level, you have a number of programs throughout the U.S. which are just tremendous in terms of their benefits. For example the FIRST organization, which was started by Segway inventor Dean Kamen. What he loves to talk about more than anything else, more than the things he’s created, is this organization where the primary competition is for high schoolers to build robots that compete.

I had the opportunity to welcome the students to the Seattle regional event that Microsoft sponsored, where they actually doubled the number of teens that participated from the previous year. They had this very complex competition where the teens had to build robots to distribute foam balls from one location to another, and the engineering was just incredible.

But the key thing about FIRST is its not just about the kids building the robot. It’s about teamwork, collaborative interaction. The teens not only get points for the competition itself, but also for collaborating with other groups. So you’ll often see one team help another team out; if one team is having trouble with their robot, another team will be motivated to go over and help them out and make sure they can compete. It’s about marketing also. I was led around by a student who was a senior at a high school in Spokane. She didn’t get to participate that much in the engineering of the robot—that wasn’t her area of expertise—but she was able to participate in the promotion of what her school was doing, what her team was doing, and she was so excited about that.

The results from FIRST are incredible when you look at the history, and they’re not the only competition. If you look at the statistics that the FIRST people provide, they mention that students that participate in their teams are 50 percent more likely to go onto college and four times more likely to major in engineering. They have some incredible stories about the different high schools and the benefits they provide. There’s even a high school in Denver, Colorado for convicted felons, students who got into crime early in life. The school is offered as an alternative to prison; only 13 percent of their students go on to do post secondary education. But of those that participate in the FIRST competition, 80 percent go on to post-secondary education.

So the impact of this technology is just incredible. It’s also very important, as the industry needs to feed itself.  If we’re going to see the breakout of this technology in the next ten years, what we really need is a set of engineers. The U.S. ranks behind much of the world population in terms of engineering students, so particularly in this country, it is important to have these kinds of motivating competitions to get kids excited about not just robots, but the whole idea of what it means to work collaboratively on an engineering project. Whether it’s on the side of the engineering software, or the hardware, or from the organizational principles, the presentational principles, or the marketing—the fact that you can use a robot to provide this sort of motivation is not only beneficial, but it’s critical for us being competitive in this technology.

SP: When people think about robots they have images from movies, TV, and science fiction—but in fact robots have been an integral part of U.S industry and manufacturing and other sectors for a long time. And a lot of robots like the Roomba don’t really fit the traditional molds of what robots are. What do you see the future of consumer robots looking like?

Trower: It gets down to the definition of what a robot is, and often that’s the hardest question I get asked. What do you think a robot is? How do you define one? And the difficultly is, as you point out, that there are so many different kinds of robots that it’s difficult to characterize it and put it all in one place.

Robots have historically been a real boon to factory automation and the manufacturing sector. Most cars that are produced today, go by and see several robots along the way. They’ve really been involved in what the industry calls the “three Ds”: the dull and the dangerous, and dirty kinds of work. But what I see happening right now an evolution of the technology where it’s moving out of the factory floors and starting to show up in our homes. You pointed out one of the excellent examples of that: the Roomba from iRobot. They sold between three and four million of those little vacuum robots; they’ve been extremely popular. There’s also an increasing number of very sophisticated robot toys that are on the market place, whether we’re talking about the little Pleo robotic dinosaur from Ugobe, or the LEGO educational robotic kit, or the latest version of Elmo from Sesame Street, which has become increasingly sophisticated over the years in terms of the abilities of what he can do.

What we’re seeing in that technology is two things. One is that the technology is becoming increasingly more sophisticated; it’s becoming increasingly more oriented towards interacting with human beings. The factory robots have been too dangerous for most people to interact with, they’re kind of like what the mainframes were like in the ‘70’s: they’re big and require specialty operators and really didn’t effect people in personal way, unless it was the university computer figuring out what classes they were going to take, or run their grades or running some accounting. People didn’t really feel the same way about them, and yet when PCs came to the market it really changed that dynamic. What we see is these technologies starting to creep in the door and not just in the obvious forms we’ve seen so far.

Take your car for example. If you have an anti-lock breaking system in your car, that really is a form of robotic technology; it’s a system that senses a slip of the wheel and adjusts the breaking, and really changes the behavior of how you drive. When I learned to drive they told me on slippery roads you have to pump your breaks. Well, when my daughter learned—and she learned in a car with anti-lock breaks—they told her just to apply steady pressure, because the system takes over, so that’s a robotic system.

I’m seeing an additional evolution where traditional PC technology is starting to get integrated. Japanese robots are an example, particularly the humanoids. Those are a very advanced form, a very challenging form of robots. I think we’re going to see generations of robots somewhere between the Roomba and those kinds of robots. They don’t all need to walk around to be useful. We’ll see a generation of these mobile robots that piggyback on top of the PC technology we see today and leverage the wealth of information and productivity we have. Then I think the next generation will be amplified. We’ll see manipulation come in soon after: the ability of the robot to safely manipulate things in a human environment, and to be mobile and function safely in a human environment.

SP: Bill Gates asked you to go out and sort of explore the state of robotics; you traveled all over the country and talked with people in the field. In the intervening years, what has changed since you went out exploring?

Trower: I’ve been at Microsoft for 27 years now, and I’ve had an opportunity to play around with and lead and manage a number of different projects with Microsoft. But this was a unique challenge that I got to go out and talk to the community. The first thing that I would say is it’s a very diverse community. There’s not just a single segment of it. There are people who are using robots in education; we talked about the industrial factory automation usage; there are people doing very intensive research out there in the university community; and there’s even this evolving, emerging generation of these consumer robots.

This diverse community in some ways parallels the early PC community. It wasn’t just a particular segment. It wasn’t just people who loved computer science. It was really quite a diversity of people who were interested in using the technology in a variety of different ways. I also discovered that it’s definitely a world-wide phenomenon. There isn’t just a single place in the world where this is happening. Traditionally Japan has been the hotbed of robotics development, and there’s defiantly still great work that’s being done in there. But what I see now is that it’s becoming more wide spread throughout the world in terms of the investments that are going on in this space. In addition, its not just the investments, but every major economic entity seems to have robotics on their list of significant technologies that they want to participate in and believe will be an important part of their future.

So there’s all this excitement and anticipation of something that’s coming, and that was actually the thing that motivated Microsoft, and me particularly, to show an interest in this. This community was communicating with us at Microsoft, saying “Do you realize that there’s something significant that’s starting to happen? Its not just the traditional factory automation, its really starting to blossom in a number of different areas.” And they invited Microsoft to participate. It’s also an area where there’s this tremendous amount of research going on, breakthrough research.

Ten years ago something like vision recognition technology was still a black art among many developers, but today you can find a number of examples where you can just go to the web and download several algorithms and put this on some of the simplest robots, like the little education robots that are on the market today. I found all these great things, and the technology was becoming more accessible and more affordable to a wider audience. But I also learned that it’s not all just rosy out there. It turns out that there are some development challenges. The difficulty is in trying to bring software from one platform to another, every robot is still kind of its own world unto itself—the technology still needs to go through a little evolutionary refinement. Using the PC analogy, it’s like we’re looking at the Apple IIs and the Commodore PETs and the Sinclair Micros that were available in the 1970s. It wasn’t until 1981, when IBM came to the market, that we started to see a more stable platform.

Those are still some of the challenges, and probably the biggest one that everyone identifies—again this is very analogous to the early PC industry—is the fact that there really hasn’t come to the front a compelling application. In the old days we used to call those “killer applications,” but that’s probably not the right term to use here. But it’s true that robots, just like PCs, need that kind of compelling application that really demonstrates their value, and I think we still haven’t seen that.  We’ve seen a tremendous amount of innovation in terms of the technology. With the DARPA Grand Challenge, we saw the ability of teams to build cars that could navigate through deserts or even on simulated urban roads with other vehicles running around and obeying the traffic rules. So we see the evolution and innovation going into the technology, but we still haven’t seen come to market yet that compelling reason, other than entertainment or education, for everyone to want to have one of these in their home.

SP: Can you explain the DARPA Grand Challenge?

Trower: DARPA set up what was originally called the “Grand Challenge,” and the second one was named the “Urban Challenge” because it was a different scenario. Teams had to build vehicles that could autonomously, not by remote control, navigate through roads in the desert. There was no one on board, just computers with sensor systems. In the first year that they ran the challenge, there were a number of teams that participated, and even the best team—which was from Carnegie Melon, led by Red Whittaker, who is a real pioneer in the robotics area—even they failed. They got seven and a half miles though the course. They had built their robotic car on a Hummer platform and it got stuck and they had to shut down because it couldn’t free itself.

DARPA did a brilliant thing. They just banked the money and held the challenge the following year and four teams finished within the regulation time. Even though he actually had two teams that qualified in the end, Red came back again and it looked like he was going to take it. In the end he got beat out by a former Carnegie Mellon professor, Sebastian Thrun, now at Stanford. Sebastian with his team narrowly beat out Red, and so you actually had five teams complete the course.

Then DARPA said, “Ok that’s great, the vehicles by themselves can navigate across desert roads. Lets up that again.”

They took over an old army base with streets and they set it up so that the vehicles had to navigate across these streets and had to obey the traffic rules. They had to stop at the stop sign; there were other robotic vehicles as well as human-powered vehicles traveling on the roads at the same time. Now the real incentive for all this was that they had a Congressional mandate to develop technology that will allow them to have a third of military vehicles be able to operate autonomously. What I believe will come out of this, even though it was done with kind of a military mentality, will be some tremendous innovations in even the way you and I drive safely on the streets.

In some ways that’s not so unusual, DARPA is the same agency that’s responsible for the ARPANET that became the foundation for the Internet that we have today. And so I think it’s a great way of using public money and while it may have had military purposes, the implications and the ramifications it may have down the road are tremendous in terms of pushing the technology. Here was an investment they made—a fairly modest investment—it was a million dollars, but it was still a modest investment overall when you think about that in terms of getting all these all these brilliant minds to solve a very hard problem. And what came out of it was not just one solution but many solutions to really advancing the state of the art in terms of technologies that will not only allow us to drive more safely in the future, but will really advance the state-of-the-art of robotics and effect our lives in a very personal way.

SP: What are some of the possibilities for those critical applications that new types of robots would be able to take on? One thing as well that you’ve spoken about are robot applications that can support citizens with disabilities, or help care for aging members of the U.S population.

Trower: Robotics still needs that compelling reason for why people would want to have one in their homes. Healthcare is one of the biggest opportunities and the biggest needs for technology, especially digital technology, which includes robotics but is not exclusive to robotics.

Today in the U.S alone there are over 40 million people over the age of 65, and that is expected to almost double in the next 20 years. Not only that, but the number of people over 80 is expected to triple. What this means is that we have more people that are going to be in the senior category and more of these people are living longer lives. At the same time what were finding is that already there is a gap in the care industry for being able to care for all of these people. So the question is how are we going to solve this problem in the long run?

Everyone knows that as we age, our physical and cognitive capabilities diminish and we become increasingly prone to chronic types of issues. For example, at age 65 your chances of getting Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease increases exponentially. So how do we deal with these problems? With the prospect of increased costs? We have a larger population and fewer people to take care of us. And it’s not just in the U.S—this is a world-wide phenomenon, and if you look at the population curves which traditionally have been this very nice pyramid where the smallest part of the pyramid was the oldest people and the largest was the young people, that’s actually flattening out and is expected to invert as we go into the future. Robots and other forms of digital technology are a great way of trying to address this gap, not as a replacement for care givers but as a way to extend the care network that’s there.

The ways that I think it can do that are in terms of providing communication, just as PCs have become great tools for communication as much as they are for productivity, whether its email or other kinds of communication. For example my daughter who is graduating from high school this year. She communicates more with her friends through her PC more than she does on her cell phone or on the house phone, so it’s been a great tool for communication. That’s particularly important because, as seniors, your social circle naturally becomes smaller as you age. Your friends may be there. It may be more difficult to get out and see your friends and family. So it’s being a communication aid, a connection with the care network to doctors and nurses, rather than having to make physical visits, helping monitor the state of how people are.

There’s also a role in terms of memory aids, whether it’s just remembering to take medication, which I think is a critical issue. One of the biggest problems that you find with seniors is they often have to be on a regime of several medications and applying some technology that reminds them, that doesn’t care how many times it reminds them, that never gets tired of reminding them and helps them stay on their regime, could be very beneficial as well.

Mobility is a significant issue for the seniors themselves, so if we talk about robots that are mobile devices, even if they don’t have manipulation. Robots with cup holders would be a valuable thing for moving things back and forth for seniors. There are valuable ways this technology can be applied to help solve what some people consider will become an epidemic in terms of how do we deal with this growing populations of seniors that are going to need assistance. We need to find some way to solve this, and while robots may not be a complete solution, they can be a part of that answer.

SP: Do you see a need for incentives or a specific public policy push to get people to do more work in robotics, say with healthcare applications or outside of the militarily driven ones that are happening now?

Trower: The military applications have been good. As I said, DARPA’s investment in the Grand Challenge and the Urban Challenge have been really great in stimulating the thinking, technology, and innovation that will have ramifications and implications in terms of improvements in the overall technology. I do think it would be useful or helpful. I’m concerned that in this country we may fall behind because in other parts of the world the focus isn’t just on the military side of things—its really more about care or other ways this kind of technology can be used.

In fact there are several agencies that are looking at that right now. There’s a consortium of U.S. professors led by Henrik Christensen at Georgia Tech, and it includes a number of the significant professors from all the U.S. universities who are trying to build awareness about the fact that we really do need greater investments in these other application areas. While we may derive benefits from the military applications, there are opportunities to invest in this other area and its not just a matter of research funding; it’s a matter of investing in the educational value. We really need to build up our own foundation of researchers that can really develop this technology.  It’s a matter of changing policy to make this technology more accessible to people. If we’re talking about health care, how can these devices be easily certified so that they can be covered by insurance? It’s also investments in other technologies that feed into this, that are not just robotics-centered.

For example, for a robot to be functional and operational in the home, it has to have a source of wireless power. In some ways its actually good that we’re facing this crisis and trying to build fuel-efficient cars, because it’s driving us to more creative and innovative ways of building battery power, whether its fuel cells or batteries or even wireless transmission of power, those kinds of things will be critical because robot technologies will benefit as well.

SP: You have been at Microsoft for about 27 years. How does this kind of work fit into a long career in the technology industry?

Trower: The success of the robotic industry as a whole is really dependent on contributions from a lot of people, not just the ones who have all the resources. It’s probably been one of the most exciting things I’ve worked on at Microsoft.

For me it’s a bit like deja-vu. I’m old enough that I’ve been through the PC evolution and I’ve seen it go from kind of toy computers on one end into very practical devices: From where friends and family would ask “Why do you have such a thing as an Apple II sitting on you desk?” to where they all have their own computers today. And I’m seeing this again in the same way in the robotics community. But it’s different in the sense that it builds on the already rich foundation that the PC and the web have already set before us so that the possibilities seem kind of endless.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, American youth spend more time watching television than they spend in school. Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of General Electric, once described the problem this way: “If you want good manufacturing jobs, one thing you could do is graduate more engineers. We had more sports exercise majors graduate than electrical engineering grads last year.” The number of American-born engineers continues to precipitously decline.

Fortunately, there are effective ways of getting high school students excited about technology and engineering early, and one of them will be on display in full force later this week in Atlanta, Georgia. The FIRST Robotics Championship will bring together thousands of teens from around the world to compete in a series of contests that emphasize ingenuity and teamwork. And these kids, many of who will go on to pursue engineering in college, will have a grand stage on the floor of the Georgia Dome.

The nations’ top scientists and educators reported in “Rising Above The Gathering Storm” that a host of countries were ferociously investing in scientific research and development and are catching up with the United States. This landmark report concludes:

For a century, many in the United States took for granted that most great inventions would be homegrown—such as electric power, the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane—and would be commercialized here as well. But we are less certain today who will create the next generation of innovations, or even what they will be. We know that we need a more secure Internet, more-efficient transportation, new cures for disease, and clean, affordable, and reliable sources of energy. But who will dream them up, who will get the jobs they create, and who will profit from them?

Well, it’s true: factories have moved to countries far away. Do students in America really need to know how to use a lathe or a milling machine? Why make a chisel by hand if you can buy one in a store for $1.50? Soldering irons can burn you. Spot welders, you betcha. You can take an eye out with this thing or that. Protect our children from themselves!

But what we’ve actually done is create an entire generation of young adults who don’t know how to weld, solder, fabricate, design, measure, create, tinker, or play. They don’t know what the inside of a radio looks like because it’s just cheaper to buy another imported one than to fix the old one. How can you design the products of tomorrow, create the innovations that will keep the country advancing, if you don’t learn how to make anything? I’m also suggesting that our litigious, liability-adverse nation has hobbled our children’s ability to learn how to innovate.

Central to the “American Idea” is our burning desire to innovate. Yet America no longer knows how to celebrate inventors or give “invention licenses” to the new crop of teenagers coming up. But instead of preserving the old economy, we must prepare our kids to lead this new economy. The solution is not to wall ourselves off but to insure that our teens have the tools, the training, to be the innovators to make and sell the new stuff to these new markets.

For several years I mentored high school robotics teams, working with the FIRST organization. In fact, the brilliant and relentless inventor Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST, talked me into it (like he has with literally thousands of volunteers.) Happily, I then talked my family and friends into mentoring teams as well, and my converts have been far more successful than I have been in guiding kids to build robots. A few weeks ago, at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center, dozens of high schools competed with a field of ball-gathering and ball-tossing robots…and the competition captivated thousands of students in attendance. Today, more than a thousand high schools around the world have robotics teams, and FIRST continues to grow.

Building robots is fun but it is hardly the point. Robots are just a fascinating focal point for learning science and engineering skills: robots must be designed, fabricated, programmed, coordinated, and collaborated upon. There is brilliant strategy involved in these team competitions, and students learn from mentors about tools, design programs, project management, and especially, gracious professionalism and cooperation.

Yet working with FIRST teams has given me some troubling insights as well. In New York City schools, and in schools across the country, machine shops, metal and wood-working shops, continue to disappear. Precious tools and expertise are still denied to students. “We figured we’d put in computers, instead,” one principal told me.

Scared of lawsuits and liability, many educators contend that manufacturing skills are no longer needed. In one school I worked with, an enormous milling machine was actually stolen and not reported missing for about three years. Five years later, it still has not been replaced.

I don’t think “doom and gloom” is an accurate prediction of the future of American technology: optimism is at the soul of American innovation. Nearly a dozen successful television shows that cater to the “How It’s Made” crowd signal a resurgence of public interest in science and technology. President Obama is significantly reinvesting in basic science research and plans to rejuvenate our frail technology infrastructure. Unleashing the power of America’s research and development potential has increasingly become a popular and unifying cause in Congress and even in some corporate boardrooms.

Despite tough economic times and cutbacks, Google still seems committed to stimulate innovation by allowing select employees to devote 20 percent of their work time to undirected research. Many at Google believe this freedom to explore directly results in the most exciting and profitable innovation emerging from their Mountain View campus. Beyond Google, American corporations need to figure out how to replicate this excitement and openness in stimulating creativity.

Risky? Sure. There is no reward without risk and innovation abhors complacency. But we have become worse than complacent: we have removed springboards for our next generation of engineers, chemists, and inventors to jump into the game and lead America and the world.

So here are some ideas that may ensure our teens will be the innovators of tomorrow:

• Grow talent: have your high-tech company mentor a FIRST Robotics team, for example.
• Reward innovation: As a nation we must celebrate inventors.
• Inspire innovation with challenges (like the DARPA Grand Challenge) and access to technology.
• Keep America a friendly place for foreign scientists and researchers to study and innovate so they’ll stay and grow our innovative infrastructure.
• Give innovators more time to play and focus on their own quests (i.e., the Google model).

Like it or not, welcome to the new environment: adapt or die. Technology is cycling so quickly, expertise will be redefined: not by what you know but how fast you think; how quickly you can process data; to find broad connections then turn it into something that you can market the hell out of. Learning how to build a robot with your classmates is a solid head start.

Dan Dubno is an Emmy-award winning TV producer, broadcaster, technologist, presenter, inventor, and “connector.” He is founder of Blowing Things Up (BTU) LLC., an international consultancy that brings innovative technology companies together to reach new markets and applications.

A version of this column originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

His focus on the UCSF survey data featured in SP advisory board member Bruce Alberts’s editorial in Science is an indication that from a policy perspective, the government could expand how it keeps tabs on this.

The National Science Foundation keeps extensive data on all facets of science and engineering in the U.S. and around the world, including information on career paths of science graduates. But the breakdowns aren’t extensive, as they currently track three broad sectors: education, government, and business/industry, as you can see in this chart after the jump:

(Source: National Science Foundation/Division of Science Resources Statistics, National Survey of Recent College Graduates, 2006.)

If we know more about the fields these students are considering outside of academia (Alberts points to “public policy, government, precollege education, industry, or law”), then students themselves will better understand the power and possibilities of a science education, and we can design better policy to support them in pursuit of these myriad careers.

Image: AP/Mahesh Kumar A

A recent survey of more than 1000 of these young scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), reveals an unusually broad range of career aspirations. Less than half select becoming academic researchers like their mentors as their first choice. One senses that we are reaching a tipping point, where students who prefer to work in the world of public policy, government, precollege education, industry, or law will no longer be viewed as deserting science. Faculty and students can then begin to talk honestly about a whole range of respected, science-related career possibilities. This is crucial, because we must promote the movement of scientists into many occupations and environments if our end goal is to effectively apply science and its values to solving global problems. [Italics added]

This paragraph resonates for me in part because I collaborate with a young scientist who epitomizes the trend Alberts highlights—my co-blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum. She has two MS degrees, but decided to go work on Capitol Hill, in pop radio, and now in journalism and communication, rather than getting her Ph.D.

What’s refreshing about Alberts’ editorial is that, no academic traditionalist, he isn’t objecting to or lamenting this career diversification trend. Rather, he’s celebrating and encouraging it. He’s glad we have more scientists out there like Kirshenbaum—and why?

Because such forsaking of the traditional academic path has the potential to greatly increase the points of contact between science and the rest of our society, to break down walls between the mythic “ivory tower” and the no less mythic “main street.” Alberts even calls for scientific training to “provide our students with the additional skills they will need to be successful as they interface with other professions.” Hear hear!

In this sense, Alberts’ editorial links closely to another recent one in Science—this time by Christopher Reddy of the Woods Hole Research Center—arguing that we must train today’s young scientists to deal with the modern media and to excel in communication. There’s a central overlap here: Those young scientists who forsake the traditional academic career path are very likely to find themselves in fields where “soft skills” such as writing and communication will be valued at a premium.

I agree with Alberts that there appears to be a paradigm shift out there, a generational change in the science world. It’s not merely that science grad students and postdocs don’t want to grow up to become their professors or advisers; it’s also that in many cases, they simply can’t. The academic opportunities just aren’t there; there has been a marked constriction of opportunity in the ivory towers. Furthermore, many students don’t see a life of academic specialization as the best way to employ their scientific talents. They recognize that specialization’s disadvantages go hand in hand with its advantages. They want to do something more, to bring science to the rest of America.

And America needs them.

Now, the critical step will be to ensure that such students aren’t punished for their unorthodox choices, but rather, that such choices open up a whole new field of opportunity to them. I don’t think there’s much worry about not having enough bench scientists; as already noted, the competition for those academic jobs is intense and there are far more young scientists out there than positions. But let’s make sure that we are also creating opportunities for this new generation of scientific innovators that Alberts highlights—if we channel their impulses in the right direction, the dividends will be enormous, not just for science but for all of our society.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

To recap: The Texas Board of Education was rewriting its science standards, both for Earth and Space Sciences and for Biology. In this context, the board got rid of language about teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, longtime creationist code for undermining it in the classroom. That’s a win. But at the same time, other language was inserted that create new opportunities for sowing doubt about the cornerstone of biology. For instance, students are now expected to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency of scientific explanations concerning any data of sudden appearance, stasis and the sequential nature of groups in the fossil records.” That tortured language can serve only one purpose: Help drag misleading creationist critiques and misinformation into the curriculum.

In the case of Texas, that’s particularly dangerous: The state’s vast size allows its educational practices to significantly influence science textbook publishers. The standards could thus have an impact on other states as well. We’ll have to see how it shakes out, but we can’t feel optimistic.

Granted, in broader perspective, one might view this latest stage in our ongoing evolution conflict in the United States as presenting reasons for hope. After all, in the space of thirty years, we’ve moved from the stupendous absurdities of “creation science”—the attempt to teach students about a biblical flood having laid down the fossil record, about humans and dinosaurs living together (on the ark, among other places), and so on—to Texas’s vague, poorly written agnotology. That’s progress, if it’s to be measured merely by the substantive positions that anti-evolutionists are now forced to advocate.

However, it’s important to remember that “creation science” and “intelligent design” alike were beaten back in the courtroom, not in the court of public opinion. Legal challenges, not popular ones, have whittled down anti-evolutionism to its current lawyerly state. And unfortunately, such progress has no parallel in public surveys about evolution. There are tons of polls out there, but I’ve always preferred to rely on Gallup because, as the National Science Foundation notes, they’ve asked the same question repeatedly since 1982. And there’s no movement: 46 percent of the public agrees with the statement, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

This is not merely anti-evolutionism; it is a specific and extreme form of creationism, the so-called “young earth” variety, which relies directly on biblical literalism. Such a stance rejects the past 200 plus years of science not just in the field of evolution, but in geology and, most assuredly, cosmology, where many of the same literalists question the Big Bang. This core anti-science swath of America wants far more than to have students “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency of scientific explanations concerning any data of sudden appearance, stasis and the sequential nature of groups in the fossil records.” It wants its children entirely shielded from the teaching evolution, even though it has already raised them at home to doubt and disbelieve in the first place. That’s why the current, sneaky creationist language will serve its purpose: For every kid brought up to equate Darwin with a full frontal assault on religion and morality, only the slightest semblance of doubt and questioning will be seized upon and do its own work from there. Biology class won’t have any impact; the beliefs of childhood will last throughout life.

It can be overwhelming, exhausting, and deeply depressing all at once to follow each subsequent stage in the anti-evolution whack-a-mole game, as attacks pop up across the country, state by state, and we go through the same rituals over and over again—sometimes a step forward, sometimes a step back. I must confess that I occasionally tune out, for precisely this reason: I’ve heard it all before. How can we keep fighting, and fighting, and fighting?

Only some kind of seismic change could alter this societal dynamic. It could come at the hands of a great political or religious leader, who finally breaks down walls. Or perhaps it could come from either of the core camps—the scientists, the creationists—if one changed strategy entirely. (Not likely.) Or, it could come if we vastly change the localized way in which we currently determine the content of American science education. (Again, not likely.) But barring any of these things, it will continue to be the scientists against the conservative religious, with powerful feelings on each side.

“Somebody’s got to stand up to experts!” said Texas Board of Education chair Don McLeroy during the latest proceedings, according to the National Center for Science Education. Some defenders of science and reason will find this statement hilariously misinformed.

I find it deeply, painfully sad.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

The truth is that during the current recession, some indicators don’t quite fit this predictable narrative. For instance, the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE (Graduate Record Examination), is actually estimating that fewer students (rather than more) will take the test by the close of this year. Similarly, the Council of Graduate Schools informed me this week that based upon an informal survey of its member institutions, there’s no apparent trend in the number of student applications. Some schools were up some were down, some were flat. “We have not actually seen the pattern we would have predicted,” explained council president Debra Stewart, “either in applications, acceptances, or enrollments.”

It’s worth pausing to think about the implications of this puzzle, because today’s economic downturn comes as the United States is scrambling to remake its energy system and deploy the clean technologies necessary avert the worst effects of climate change—a project for which we’ll need plenty of well-educated scientists, engineers, and other technical workers. Whether we’ll have them, though, remains to be seen. Certainly we can’t assume that the recession, like a bolt from the blue, will be the source of their delivery.

It’s enough to trouble anyone who thinks this country needs to be producing more scientists: The free market may well have other plans.

Typically, the growth of graduate students is a “lagging indicator,” following upon a recession rather than spiking right at its beginning. In 2002, for instance, graduate student enrollments went up sharply just after the last recession ended. However, the signs this time around suggest we’re not following that trend, and the possible reasons for that departure aren’t particularly pleasing to contemplate.

Stewart, of the Council of Graduate Schools, can think of three possibilities. Perhaps, she says, the credit crunch has hit the ability of students to obtain educational loans. Perhaps public universities, struggling due to the state budget implosions occurring across the country, are cutting back on teaching assistantships (which typically hold a graduate student’s body and soul together). Or perhaps young people fear this recession is so bad that they’d better cling to whatever job they currently have, lest there not be another. It’s all speculation, Stewart cautions—her organization plans to keep monitoring the numbers as more data emerges next year. But certainly it’s enough to trouble anyone who thinks this country needs to be producing more scientists: The free market may well have other plans.

Indeed, I couldn’t help thinking about the latest graduate student numbers in the context of another finding: In 2007, the last year for which figures are currently available, the total number of science and engineering PhDs produced in this country rose for the fifth year in a row. Since 2002, it has grown from 24,608 to 31,801, nearly a 30 percent increase. This might seem a hopeful development, but it’s important to note that it’s another “free market” result: According to Stewart, it largely reflects the fact that in the late 1990s, international student enrollment in U.S. universities boomed, and now many of those people are getting their degrees. And what the market gives, the market taketh away. If people are afraid to leap to grad school during the current severe recession, maybe a decade from now we’ll see a noticeable decline in PhDs.

The point is, if we really want to improve our scientific competitiveness and ensure that we can develop low-emissions energy technologies we can then share with less-developed nations, we need a concerted government effort. We need to fully fund the America Competes Act. We need the modern equivalent of the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which greatly spurred higher ed enrollments in science and engineering. We can’t just wait for it to magically happen on its own, or assume that it will emerge as a kind of silver lining from the current downturn.

My coblogger and scientific lifeline to pop culture, Sheril Kirshenbaum, likes to use a Simpsons clip to explain the meaning of higher education. Bart has just cut the ponytail off of the person seated in front of him in a movie theater, and is waving it around behind his head. “Look at me, I’m a grad student,” he says. “I’m thirty years old and I made 600 dollars last year.”

“Bart,” Marge scolds him. “Don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.”

Or have they? It may well be that individual graduate students out there, or potential graduate students, are making very rational life choices in the context of the broader economic environment that they perceive. If we want that to change, or for them to move in a particular direction, we have to take steps as a society to make it happen.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

But those who wish to be our nation’s leaders need to consider the implications for the 21^st century power of a citizenry that lacks confidence in science and indeed is taught to denigrate its most basic precepts. History teaches that the most technologically sophisticated powers have vast advantages even over more numerous and desperate adversaries, from Spanish conquests of Central America to Israel’s victories over its Arab neighbors.

Our ability to defend our freedoms is directly tied to our longstanding scientific and technological advantages, not just in the military arena but also in our economy.

This reality has not changed. Our national security is thoroughly bound up with our ability to maintain our lead in understanding and managing the world that surrounds us. Long-term threats to Americans could result if our elected officials decide to pander to antiscientific tendencies among their most forceful constituents. As an adviser to national security and intelligence agencies, I am impressed at the concern repeatedly expressed by military officials and scientists that the gravest threats to our country, and the most promising defenses in the 21^st century, lie in emerging fields of science, especially those related to biology.

One concern is that an enemy state or a terrorist organization could genetically modify a biological agent that spreads silently until timed to achieve maximum lethality in a large number of very mobile hosts. Even if the plot is detected early it may be too late to impose measures that minimize the damage very much. In any case, the psychological, social, and economic consequences would be immense.

There are many other nightmare scenarios for the production of biological and toxin weapons that could give an adversary a distinct tactical advantage in the new kind of asymmetric global warfare we face. These weapons are far less costly and cumbersome to produce than nuclear weapons. Largely useless on a traditional battlefield, they may be most impressive to a civilian population that frequents countless soft targets.

And what, besides a modest set of materials, many commercially available, is required to develop such agents? The main requirement is advanced training in modern biology, the organizing principle of which is, of course, evolution.

The same knowledge base can defend against threats from emerging biotechnologies. It may be possible to modify warfighters’ brain cells so that they are resistant to currently untreatable infectious agents like prions. New vaccines manufactured on powerful biotechnology platforms could better protect both soldiers and civilians from traditional bioweapons such as smallpox or new, genetically modified bacteria.

But if policymakers really doubt that the DNA molecule evolves, then they should urge their followers to disregard their military commanders’ decision to inoculate their soldiers against bioweapons. In fact, these extreme conservatives should ignore their doctors’ recommendation to get a new flu vaccine every winter for themselves and their family—a vaccine needed because of the swift evolutionary changes experienced by the flu virus. But those decisions would be poor choices for a country wishing to protect its military and keep its people safe against pandemics and biological weapons.

Then there are the economic costs of teaching “intelligent design.” Already there are alarming signs of a decline in America’s relative strength in science research and development. Although most people don’t usually think about national security in this way, our ability to defend out freedoms is directly tied to our longstanding scientific and technological advantages, not just in the military arena but also in our economy.

The world is becoming a much more competitive place in the global economy of science. We need successive waves of primary, secondary and post-secondary students of science learning about the efficacy of evolutionary theory and its practical application in our increasingly biotechnology-driven economy. The 21^st century will be defined by the ongoing biotechnology revolution. Our nation cannot afford to handicap its international economic competitiveness or national security by teaching unrelated religious beliefs in science class.

The nation we all love preserves and protects its citizens’ right to believe pretty much whatever they want to believe, or disbelieve. But in defending that nation we cannot afford to handicap good science. The stakes are higher than a single political campaign. The future safety and prosperity of our nation are on the line.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

Electronic Arts

Spore players can generate their own creatures and share them online.

Complex systems have inspired some of video game designer Will Wright’s most successful creations, including the popular SimCity series of computer games. In today’s NYT Science Times, Carl Zimmer profiles Wright’s latest game, Spore, which follows the evolution of new life forms from single-celled organisms to galaxy-hoping civilizations. Spore raises the possibility that video games could help illuminate for players the basic premises of the life sciences.

Several of the scientists Zimmer interviews for the article point out that the way creatures evolve in Spore bears little resemblance to the real-life biological mechanisms. But they still applaud the value of underscoring the importance of evolution:

These caveats notwithstanding, Dr. [Thomas] Near, [an assistant professor of Ecology and Evolutionary biology at Yale], hopes that Spore prompts people to think about the evolutionary process. “This may be totally off about how evolution works, but I’d much rather be dealing with a student who says, ‘O.K., I have no problem with evolution; I think about it the same way I think about gravity.’ If it does that, it’ll be great.”

Mr. Wright said he had been hearing similar reactions from other scientists. “I find that scientists are incredibly open and excited that we can portray this stuff in games, even if it’s not perfectly accurate,” he said. “It’s manure to seed future scientists.”

We recently covered the potential for better learning through video games here at Science Progress, writing about the newly authorized National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, which can leverage a host of untapped technologies and educational research for high schoolers, college students, and life-long learners.

Even if Spore take liberties with the science, it’s worth noting that what Zimmer calls “one of the most eagerly anticipated video games in the history of the industry” takes evolutionary biology as its starting point. When the Federation of American Scientists released its own science-driven game, Immune Attack, for teaching immunology, they observed that students who played the game expressed a higher interest in biology. Perhaps Spore could inspire an even larger audience of young scientists.

What do readers think? Does a game like Spore have the potential to raise the profile of a field like evolutionary biology?

Bioethics meets voting technology: Summer Johnson grabs a story on blog.bioethics.net on how mobile voting machines could empower those who cannot commute to a polling station.

Nat Torkington has thoughts on better tools for teaching evolution in high school science classes at O’Reilly Radar.

Sheril Kirshenbaum at Next Generation Energy dreams of New York…with wind turbines.

Center for American Progress Fellow Bob Sussman has a three part series on the Clean Air Interstate Rule and how to rebuild clean air policy.

Over at social-networking megasite Mashable, Paul Glazowski discovers scivee.tv, a new site that integrates scientific posters and papers with video commentary from researchers.

Liz Borkowski picks up news that California is taking product safety rules into its own hands with a Green Chemistry Initiative, over at The Pump Handle.

Earlier this year, the Federation of American Scientists released Immune Attack, a first-person, 3D computer game that puts players in control of a nanobot they must pilot through a woman’s immune system, warding off invading bacteria. FAS developed the game with a grant from the National Science Foundation and in collaboration with the University of Southern California GamePipe Laboratory. The game is free for educational purposes and available for download on the FAS site.

FAS

Immune Attack is a first-person, 3D computer game that puts players in control of a nanobot that they must pilot through a woman’s immune system, warding off invading bacteria.

For those who doubt the utility of teaching AP Biology with a video game, FAS argued in a press release that, “Preliminary surveys show that the students who play Immune Attack show an increase in knowledge when compared with students who did not play the game. After playing the game students also showed a higher interest in biology.”

Well-designed instructional games allow students to repeat challenges until they thoroughly understand a problem, and can can highlight skills that require improvement, much like focused tutoring. The video game model, which involves constantly testing and refining skills, FAS President Henry Kelly argued in a Science Progress column, is actually a better alternative to infrequent, high-stakes educational tests. “Surely it’s possible to create challenges in biology, history, or engineering that can capture and hold attention,” he wrote, going on to explain that the federal government should play a lead role in the development of advanced educational technology.

Fortunately, Congress recently authorized the creation of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, a stand-alone nonprofit organization that will support research, development, and adoption of digital learning technologies.

Unfortunately, Congress neglected to provide sufficient funding for the center.

Jeffrey Brainard reports in The Chronicle of Higher Education that, “Early plans called for a dedicated endowment of $20-billion, generating annual income of $1-billion for operations. Instead, faced with a tight federal budget, proponents are initially seeking only $50-million in the 2009 fiscal year, which begins in October.” But given the outgoing administration, it is unlikely that legislators will finalize the FY2009 budget until after next January.

Created by an amendment to the Higher Education Opportunity Act (H.R. 4137), the center has the potential to leverage a host of untapped technologies and educational research for high schoolers, college students, and life-long learners. In a Center for American Progress report, Tom Kalil and John Irons explain the chasm between the prospects for this technology and the dearth of effective applications:

One of the reasons that there is such a gulf between the potential of learning technology and its actual impact to date is that the federal government invests 0.03 percent of total kindergarten to 12th grade expenditures on research and development. The market for educational software and digital content, particularly at the K-12 level, is unattractive to private sector investors. School spending on software is only $10 per student, the market is fragmented and hard to reach, especially for new entrants, and the review and adoption process is lengthy. The home market for educational software in the United States has declined precipitously from $498 million to $152 million in 2004. [Emphasis added. For the source on the 0.03 percent education investment, see this report from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.]

Kalil and Irons go on to argue for growing the funding commitment for the center up to $1 billion annually, with an expectation that outside donations could bring in another $2 billion. The center’s charter allows it to accept money from any domestic sources, including corporations and private donors.

Fruitful work does already exist in this area, Brainard, reports, and it’s important with this issue to avoid the “technology trap,” or the assumption that the solution to the problem requires breakthrough research. Brainard consulted with Susan B. Millar of the University of Wisconsin, whose “research indicates that university scholars have already developed a wealth of better teaching methods, including ones using technology, but academic institutions and schools have failed to adopt many of them because of institutional and cultural roadblocks.”

That’s a legitimate concern, but the legislation does stipulate that one of the three pillars of the center’s mission is “to encourage the widespread adoption and use of effective, innovative digital approaches to improving education, teaching, and learning.” If Congress can come through with the funding, then perhaps the first project would be to identify the innovative approaches that already exist, like Immune Attack, and make sure that they end up in the hands of capable educators and enthusiastic students.

We have been sold—hard—on the idea that U.S. preeminence in science is now threatened.

The facts clearly say otherwise, no matter how you slice them. According to the National Science Foundation, in 2006—the last year for which data is currently available—the nation produced a record number of science and engineering Ph.D.s: 29,854 in total. This was the fourth year in a row that the total doctorate number has increased, and a 6.7 percent increase from the year 2005 (the previous record).

And what about less advanced degrees? It’s the same story. “The numbers of S&E bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded reached new peaks of 466,000 and 120,000, respectively, in 2005,” reports the NSF in the 2008 edition of its Science and Engineering Indicators report.

And as for graduate student enrollments in science and engineering? This figure, too, has increased—for eight years running. In the most recent tally—again, these are 2006 numbers—only enrollments in computer sciences and agricultural sciences declined: all other fields were up.

So how is it possible that so many people appear to think otherwise?

We have been sold—hard—on the idea that U.S. preeminence in science is now threatened. A central factor has been the now-famous Rising Above the Gathering Storm report from the National Academy of Sciences, which announced a deep concern “that the scientific and technological building blocks critical to our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength.” As one of its recommendations, the NAS committee called for dramatically increasing the “number and proportion” of U.S. students who earn science degrees.

That may well be a very good idea. After all, while we still lead the world in total science and engineering Ph.D. production—and while our total number of Ph.D.s produced is also increasing, at least for the moment—China’s rate of increase is far greater as it approaches us from behind, a fact suggesting that may be ceding our lead and that it (and other nations, like South Korea and India) are catching up.

All of which is a good reason for concern; but it’s never a good idea to support concern with misinformation. Indeed, getting the facts right about current trends in high level U.S. science education matters a great deal, because in doing so, we can achieve a far more nuanced view of the kinds of changes that university-based science education in American needs right now—changes that simply cannot be captured in the phrase “more is better.”

Consider several factors that don’t fit the dominant “we need more scientists” narrative very well at all:

Attrition: A recent study from the Urban Institute suggests that while we produce large volumes of science and engineering students with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, we do a terrible job of keeping them interested in these areas. As the study puts it: “One to two years after graduation, 20 percent of S&E bachelor’s are in school but not in S&E studies, while another 45 percent are working but in non-S&E employment (total attrition of 65 percent). One to two years after graduation, 7 percent of S&E master’s graduates are enrolled in school but not in S&E studies, while another 31 percent are working but in non-S&E employment.”

Why do these students leave? The Urban Institute study cites other research suggesting that “the quality of instruction, the ‘culture’ of the discipline, and other curricular issues” turn students off. Hmm, could it be that while we’re trying to produce more scientists, we might also want to get more professors to focus on teaching, make being a graduate student less of a financial straitjacket, and broaden what’s learned so that students don’t feel like they’re just being inducted into a narrow caste of hyper-specialized experts?

Supply and Demand: Also according to the Urban Institute, “S&E occupations make up only about one-twentieth of all workers, and each year there are more than three times as many S&E four-year college graduates as S&E job openings.” It is simply wrong for public policy in this country to seek the production of more scientists without a commensurate effort to ensure that the job opportunities for them are also expanding. Right now, by contrast—and as my colleague Sheril Kirshenbaum recently wrote for Science Progress—large numbers of postdoctoral students find themselves in holding patterns, unable to advance into steady tenure track jobs because there aren’t enough of them. Indeed, according to the latest NSF Science and Engineering Indicators report, increasing numbers of scientists are having to spend longer and longer stints in these poorly paid, career-delaying positions.

Catering to Industry’s Needs: If there’s a supply-demand gap in the production of scientists—a gap where the imbalance currently lies on the supply side—then isn’t it the duty of universities to train scientists so they’re better candidates for the job market as a whole, so that they have broader opportunities? Today even S&E employers aren’t necessarily complaining about the lack of technical skills on the part of the applicants they see. As the Urban Institute report puts it: “In our interviews with engineering managers….rarely, if ever, do they say they are unable to find graduates with the requisite technical skills but rather the ‘shortage’ is of engineers with communication, management, interpersonal and other soft skills.” And yet it remains an un-won struggle to get more communication courses into graduate level science curricula.

I certainly don’t want to argue that we ought to slow production of U.S. scientists, any more than I would idiotically argue that we ought to worsen U.S. K-12 science education. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious, both to me and also to many experts surveying the U.S. science pipeline and workforce data, that any debate over it requires far more nuance than we’ve seen from the dominant “decline” narrative so far.

And what’s more, the foregoing considerations—which complicate the “decline” narrative—might perhaps be seen as an opportunity in disguise. If we are producing more scientists than we currently have jobs for, why aren’t policymakers passing laws and enacting policies and budgets that will create jobs for these talents—jobs that serve core national needs, such as, for instance, creating and deploying innovative and clean sources of energy?

That’s a very good question indeed.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Prominent labor economists who have examined the problem from a different perspective argue that poor STEM education isn’t the problem at all. In fact, they believe there are far too many qualified student-scientists. Rather, it’s the perverse financial incentives that American society (and specifically the U.S. government) provide wannabe American scientists that lie at the heart of our nation’s science and technology competitiveness crisis.

At first glance, though, the scientist-shortage supporters make some valid points. It’s true that fewer top students from the demographic that long provided the bulk the nation’s technical and research professionals—native-born white males—are pursuing graduate studies in science. Ditto that a growing percentage of the scientists-in-training at the nation’s universities are foreign-born.[1] And the average performance of U.S. K- 12 students on international standards is indeed undistinguished.

It’s the perverse financial incentives that American society (and specifically the U.S. government) provide wannabe American scientists that lie at the heart of our nation’s science and technology competitiveness crisis.

But these facts do not add up to the crises that critics describe. Rather, according to a number of distinguished economists, they reveal a labor market gone seriously awry. In the first place, average test scores tell nothing about the supply of students capable of becoming scientists. Such youngsters are not average for their age group, but outstanding, and the U.S. produces them in large numbers. One frequently cited international comparison, for example, shows that the United States had far more top-performing science students than any other nation tested, as well as a big lead in the number of top-performing readers, according to Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University.[2] Americans also came second only to Japan in the number of top scorers in math.

What pulled down the U.S. average was not any overall deficit but the very poor performance of the students at the bottom, largely products of inferior schools serving poor minority communities. These disparities are a national disgrace that must be ended, which in turn would result in an even more qualified and more diverse pool of talent to improve our nation’s competitiveness. But our poor test scores say nothing about the quality of America’s best schools, which rank among the world’s finest.

An Enticing Promise, An Elusive Goal

The top performers from those excellent schools then proceed to study at some of the world’s best universities, also conveniently located here. Professors at these universities encourage the most promising to continue on for science PhDs, in preparation for careers as academic researchers. The students who take this advice hope for satisfying careers resembling those their senior professors have enjoyed, pursuing their best ideas as independent researchers, heading labs amply supported by federal funding, and enjoying job stability and comfortable upper-middle class incomes as faculty members in secure tenured positions.

But the world that nurtured today’s senior professors, with PhDs earned in four years and appointments as faculty members and lab heads in their 20s, has vanished. What the great majority of today’s young scientists find instead is a penurious decade or more working in university labs, first as graduate students and then as postdoctoral researchers earning a “trainee” wage comparable to what a new liberal arts BA graduate makes.[3]

Their search for the faculty post essential to starting their own academic research careers overwhelmingly ends in frustration, as they futilely compete for every advertised faculty opening against hundreds of other qualified applicants—all of whom sport good degrees and lists of publications from their graduate and postdoc years. The odds that a young PhD will ever land a faculty job at any four-year institution are now less than 25 percent, and at the kind of research university where big-deal science is done, well under 15 percent.[4]

Across the United States, therefore, professors are bemoaning the choice by many of their brightest undergraduates to eschew science graduate study in favor of medical, law, or business school. These students don’t reject science because they’re bad at math, but because they’re good at it. Anyone bright enough to get a science PhD is bright enough to run the numbers showing that an average of seven years of graduate school, followed by five or more postdoc years, followed by long odds against getting the job one was ostensibly preparing for, add up to a lousy investment.

For foreigners, however, especially those from developing countries, grad school or a postdoc in America is exceedingly enticing. Why? Because the virtually unlimited visas that universities can supply make such training an otherwise largely unobtainable ticket into the country.

Built-in Perversity

Labor economists including Paula Stephan of Georgia State University and Richard Freeman of Harvard University believe this excess of young American scientists unable to start their academic careers results from “the perverse funding structure of science graduate education,” as fellow labor economist Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation put it in congressional testimony last November.[5] Stephan adds that we “staff our labs primarily with graduate students and postdocs” who as a condition of participating in their educational programs, do the overwhelming bulk of the labor needed for the academic research that the federal government funds to the tune of more than $70 billion a year.[6]

Research grants to individual professors from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and other agencies finance the great bulk of graduate students and postdocs. To get the grants and renewals needed to keep their labs going, professors must produce steady streams of journal articles. That, in turn, encourages them to have as many grad students and postdocs as they can possibly afford to do the bench work. This highly skilled cheap labor makes American research very economical, but produces as a byproduct “so much pressure on the system to absorb the continual new cohort” into mostly nonexistent jobs, Stephan says. “We haven’t had much luck in absorbing it.”

Shortage proponents counter that low unemployment among early career scientists proves there is no glut. But in fact the postdoc pool, now numbering possibly 90,000, is more than half foreign-born (the actual numbers are unknown),[7] and functions as disguised unemployment, holding “trainees” off the market. The United States, meanwhile, annually produces 30,000 new science and engineering PhDs, about 18,000 of them American-born, although faculty openings at research universities in the most glutted fields number probably in the hundreds (again, the number is unknown).

The tiny minority who do land research-based faculty jobs have spent so much time “training” that, in biomedical science, for example, they average 42 years of age when they finally launch their independent research careers by winning their first competitive federal grant.[8] At that age, scientists of previous generations—Albert Einstein, Marshall Nirenberg, Thomas Cech—were collecting Nobel Prizes for discoveries made in their 20s.

“I try to keep my best undergraduates away from my postdocs,” one professor confided, because meeting them would reveal what really lies ahead on the grad school track. But talented young Americans would flock to science study if it offered them the kind of career opportunities that previous generations enjoyed. Instead of a needless general overhaul of K -12 education, or an increase in graduate fellowships, which would only make things worse, the United States needs to overhaul what Brown University biochemistry chair Susan Gerbi calls the “pyramid paradigm.”

Instead of paying universities to use grad students and postdocs as very smart migrant laborers, the U.S. government needs a funding structure that provides large numbers of them a solid career ladder into the life that so many were implicitly promised. The jobs on that ladder need not compete financially with corporate law, medical specialization, or investment banking, because science offers intellectual riches so much more dazzling than money that they long enticed the ablest young Americans to accept more modest remuneration in exchange for the chance to do great research. But the futures we provide to the young people we ask to devote their lives and talents to learning and doing science must match those other careers in providing at least a reasonable likelihood that hard work and devotion can attain their goal.

At present, the United States does not give them that opportunity. One way to start doing so could be to structure funding to encourage universities and lab chiefs to create jobs for permanent staff scientists who receive professional-level salaries, benefits, and status within the university and employ them rather than grad students and postdocs. Another could be requiring universities to limit the graduate student and postdoc positions they create to the number of people who could reasonably be expected to find career-level employment after they leave their professors’ labs. Another could be requiring universities and lab chiefs to track their grad school and postdoc alumni and report on their employment experience to new applicants, as professional and business schools routinely do.

When the nation once again provides its young scientists a decent shot at the life they hope for, our best youth will race to answer science’s call.

Washington, D.C. science journalist Beryl Lieff Benderly contributes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column on labor force and early career issues to the website of Science magazine and articles to other major magazines and websites.

Notes

[1] National Science Board, “Science Indicators 2008” (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2008).

[2]H. Salzman and L. Lowell, “Making the Grade,” Nature 543 (2008): 28-30.

[3] G. Davis, “Doctors without orders,” American Scientist 93 (2005) (3, supplement), available at http://postdoc.sigmaxi.org/results/.

[4] National Science Board.

[5] Michael Teitelbaum, Testimony before the House Committee on Science and Technology Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation, Committee, November 6, 2007, available at http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/Commdocs/hearings/2007/tech/06nov/Teitelbaum_testimony.pdf.

[6] Intersociety Working Group, American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS Report XXXIII: Research and Development FY 2009 (Washington, D.C., 2008).

[7] National Science Board.

[8] Committee on Bridges to Independence: Identifying Opportunities for and Challenges to Fostering the Independence of Young Investigators in the Life Sciences, Board on Life Sciences, National Research Council of the National Academies, Bridges to Independence: Fostering the Independence of New Investigators in Biomedical Research (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2005).

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Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) knows that scientific research, along with science and math education, are long-term investments in our future. A physicist and businessman, Foster made his way from the 14th district of Illinois to the House of Representatives in March, after a special election to replace former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. He joined Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), the two other physicists who bring their scientific knowledge to the House. In this video message, Foster outlines what he sees as the three largest challenges facing federal science policy: rational decision making, balancing basic research and commercialization, and ramping up STEM education.

At a hearing before the House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education held after the release of the report, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala called for an intercollegiate organization like the NCAA to hold institutions accountable and eradicate barriers preventing women from reaching the top of their fields.

But what if cultural bias and institutional barriers don’t fully account for the disparities in the number of women and men in advanced research—particularly in the hard sciences? What if it was instead the case that women have the opportunity to pursue advanced careers in a full range of technical fields, but simply don’t want to in the same numbers as their male counter parts? That’s what John Tierney’s reporting suggests in his article today in the The New York Times‘s Science Times. He quotes clinical psychologist Susan Pinker:

“Creating equal opportunities for women does not mean that they’ll choose what men choose in equal numbers…The freedom to act on one’s preferences can create a more exaggerated gender split in some fields.”

The discussion isn’t a general one over a lack of women in science. Indeed, the the ranks of women on scientific career paths have swelled:

In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.

Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences. They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering.

Women represent approximately 45 percent of the postdocs in biomedical research at U.S. universities and research institutions, but a far smaller percentage of women hold the top level positions of professor or principal investigator, according to a National Institutes of Health Survey released last year. The survey found that “only 29 percent of the tenure-track principal investigators (PI) and 19 percent of tenured PIs—the NIH equivalent of assistant and full professors, respectively—are women.” Science went on to point out that in that decade that included the doubling of the NIH research budget, “the share of women among its 900 tenured investigators has barely budged,” inching upwards “from 18 percent to 19 percent.”

The new research featured in Tierney’s piece indicates that personality is a stronger indicator than gender of an individual’s career path into “inorganic” or physical sciences, which have a smaller proportion of women, or “organic” life sciences, which draw more women.

But experts who testified at the hearing last fall on the “Beyond Bias and Barriers” report did not confine their discussion to advancing women in scientific careers. As National Science Foundation Deptuty Director Kathie Olsen pointed out, fostering better environments for advancing women improves possibilities for other minorities and for men as well.

Women and minority researchers who are underrepresented at the top of scientific fields should, as Pinker points out, be there because they want to work in that field. Her research indicates that young women sometimes feel pressured to go into technical fields when they display aptitude in science and math at a young age. But the intense competition for PI and professor positions weeds out the uncommitted early. Barriers like a lack of access to childcare or family leave time should obviously come down. But it’s also worth remembering that there is evidence that diverse groups of workers have powers beyond the sum of their individual abilities.

According to Scott Page, Science Progress adviser and professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan, argues that diverse groups composed of people with different backgrounds have a larger collective pool of problem-solving skills. Less diverse groups, or presumably university departments and laboratories, may include many smart individuals with the same problems-solving methods, or heuristics. Page argues that investing in research alone will not unleash the full capabilities of the U.S. science and technology workforce. As he told the Times in an interview earlier this year, “Breakthroughs in science increasingly come from teams of bright, diverse people. That’s why interdisciplinary work is the biggest trend in scientific research.”

The conclusion begs the question: would a greater ratio of women to men in fields where they are underrepresented not just represent a victory for gender equity, but could it also unleash more bright ideas?

In the aftermath, however, I’m highly enthusiastic. I sense a strong hunger among young scientists (and especially graduate students and postdocs, who stare down a highly uncertain job market) for better training in dealing with the media—not to mention in learning how to explain and share their research with friends, family, and other people very close to them.

Plus, it turns out that creating productive collisions between scientific content and media formats can be a heck of a lot of fun–particularly when we got to talking about sheep (but more on that later).

Scientists have long held to a kind of classroom-oriented, one-way model for the dissemination of their knowledge—e.g., they know the science, they tell it, the public understands it and accepts it.

Working with Nisbet, we started off the boot camp on a fairly scholarly footing—assigning the students a list of readings about science, media, and the public from top journals like Public Understanding of Science and Science Communication. Interestingly, these were not the sort of readings that the students (ranging from undergraduates to postdocs; we also had several participants who worked at Caltech) seemed to have encountered before.

This set the stage for a morning session in which Nisbet outlined the progress made in the fields of communication and science studies over several decades as scholars have parsed how scientists interact with different segments of the public and seek to communicate. A core issue: Scientists have long held to a kind of classroom-oriented, one-way model for the dissemination of their knowledge—e.g., they know the science, they tell it, the public understands it and accepts it. And everybody’s happy. Except, that’s not what really happens out in the world.

In contrast, evidence from the latest installment of the National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering Indicators report—whose seventh chapter traditionally focuses on public attitudes and understanding of science—suggests that while Americans share a broad respect for science, they don’t unquestioningly accept what it tells them, especially if they perceive a conflict between that information and personal values or experiences. This Nisbet illustrated, in part, with some revealing polling data culled from the NSF report: Only 42 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals”; but 74 percent agreed after the following wording change: “according to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” In short, people know very well what the science says—but they also reserve the right to reject it.

A similar point came across when we surveyed one of the classic studies concerning how different publics interact with and apprehend scientific information. British science studies scholar Brian Wynne has written extensively on the experience of Cumbrian sheep farmers who, in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, found government scientists suddenly ordering them to stop moving and selling their sheep due to radioactive fallout risk. The sheep farmers rely, for their livelihood, upon raising lambs high in the British Lake District’s famous uplands—think landscapes out of a William Wordsworth poem—and here came the experts telling them they had to put their business on hold to wait for sheep and soil radiation levels to go down.

At first, the farmers took the scientists’ advice and waited. But the government experts’ confident predictions that contamination levels would quickly clear up proved incorrect, and the ban on the sheep trade was extended indefinitely—threatening farmers with ruin. Meanwhile, the scientists began to set up experiments on the sheep, but ignored the farmers’ specialized knowledge of how they behave; consequently, the experiments failed. (Here, feel free to imagine startled and upset sheep jumping all over nerdy researchers.) It didn’t help matters that a nearby nuclear reactor was known to have undergone a previous accident and caused radiation contamination in the area—and there were longstanding suspicions in the community that this had been covered up.

We need a “paradigm sheep” in how scientists think about interacting with the public.

In short, the sheep farmers became increasingly distrustful of the arrogant assertions of government scientists who didn’t seem to credit their own sophisticated understanding of all things sheep-related. And they had every right to be. The scientists weren’t communicating or even taking their audience seriously, and so kept making fairly bone-headed mistakes. Hence the joke that came up later with the Caltech students, over beer and dinner: We need a “paradigm sheep” in how scientists think about interacting with the public.

The afternoon at Caltech was my turn: I had to lead a more hands-on media training for scientists who might someday find themselves being interviewed for print or radio or even sitting in front of the camera. So I started out by showing students examples of scientists involved in mass communication that I’d referenced in previous Science Progress columns—Brian Greene on The Colbert Report, several scientists appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America. I then moved on to lists of do’s and don’t for dealing with the media—do challenge journalists’ angles and incorrect reports; don’t tell them things you wouldn’t want to see appear on the front page of The New York Times.

The final segment then focused on teaching the scientists how to draw up and deliver a “message.” One commonly suggested approach is to outline a triangle-shaped diagram with your simple message written in the middle, three supporting points at each point of the triangle, and along each side, three talking points (expressed in “sound bites”) that support those points. I made the scientists break into teams, come up with messages, and appoint one of their number to appear on “The Mooney Report”—a mock interview program for a general audience—in which I sought to knock them off message.

The scientists did a great job, in general, but there were certainly moments when it wasn’t hard to drag them away from talking about what they wanted to talk about. At one point a scientist seeking to explain advances in cell reprogramming referred to research using “mouse models.” I asked her if they were attractive. When another scientist tried to explain how ice discovered on Mars can tell us about past climates on the planet, I asked about Martian canals and then we spent much of the time discussing extraterrestrial life (off message!). And then came the scientist designated to explain nanotechnology—I asked him “How small is small?”, and pretended to be obsessed with nanotech’s fashion implications. Not at all what he was expecting.

From all of this, I learned that I’m a bit of a smart aleck. But I’m confident the students learned something much more important: The language and approach they use to talk with their peers just can’t dominate their approach to communicating with everyone else, least of all the media. That’s a message that seems to strike home these days among many, many young scientists—but the question remains, will broader scientific institutions embrace it as well?

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Even the most promising young scientists, those with the natural ability and discipline to fulfill their potential and become tomorrow’s leaders in innovation—and eventually upon which the nation’s future depends—are struggling.

Appearances, though, can be deceiving. Mounting evidence suggests that looming institutional shortcomings are eroding the ability of the so-called “science pipeline” to produce a healthy future national science infrastructure—and unless we shift the traditional paradigm rapidly, the consequences could be dramatic. Two recent studies underscore this point: One, from the National Institutes of Health, reports that the current generation of young scientists may be turning away from careers in research due to funding issues and the need for institutional change. Concurrently, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ new report, “ARISE: Advancing Research In Science and Engineering,” concludes that early-career researchers face greater challenges today than ever. The continual and grueling search for funding, the Academy suggests, fosters overly conservative decisions about laboratory research directions, which in turn impede the impact of government-funded science and thwart the careers of younger talents.

It’s no secret that many young people who otherwise might nourish an interest in science—or in academia generally—get drawn away from the ivory towers to pursue private sector opportunities promising higher salaries and better possibilities for family and lifestyle. For those still hoping to advance in science, the practical barriers that our system currently creates are tremendous; and what’s more, all signs suggest they’re getting worse.

Science graduates intent on the journey to a professorship must first get through a postdoctoral appointment (or three), and sometimes a multiyear probationary period. In a 2005 survey, the average amount of time for holding a postdoctoral position was 3.8 years. All the while, salary is low and work hours are long. There is tremendous pressure to publish….or perish. And only then does the search for a faculty position begin—a search that keeps growing tougher.

The National Science Foundation reports that between 1972 and 2003, the share of recent doctorate holders hired into full-time faculty positions fell from 74 percent to 44 percent. During the same period, the number of science and engineering Ph.D.s in postdoctoral positions rose from 13percent to 34 percent. Even as we’re producing more advanced science graduates than ever, the traditional academic trajectory affords fewer and fewer options.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the difficulty of winning tenure. Between 1993 and 2003, the number of faculty-level jobs at research universities without the possibility of tenure increased from 55 percent to 70 percent. Most foreboding of all, the probability that a Ph.D. recipient under 35 years old will obtain a tenure-track job fell to 7 percent. In short, we’re shutting down opportunity for the vast majority of young American scientific talents.

And it’s not just happening because of a dearth of faculty positions, tenured or otherwise. Trends in the availability of research funding show a similar constriction of opportunity. Since 2003, the rate of funding for independent grants has fallen dramatically, and young scientists have been most affected. Today, less than three percent of the main independent research grants go to scientists under the age of 35, and the average age of first-time awardees is 43. And so at what should be the most productive period of their careers, new faculty must dedicate an enormous amount of time to submitting repeated grant applications. In fact, according to the ARISE report, new investigators are submitting twice as many proposals as established investigators and typically receive substantially smaller awards.

All of which means that at a time when they should focus on learning and honing their skills, young scientists must instead compete with senior scientists for funding. Indeed, given that an investigator’s scientific status derives in part from how many grants he or she obtains, it may not always in the best interest of mentors to pass on all their accumulated knowledge to students—for fear of losing future funding opportunities themselves.

In some cases, one can even single out an apparent hoarding of research funds. In 2007, two hundred scientists received six or more NIH grants, and a single investigator won 32 grants, while many others got close to ten. An NIH advisory panel has recommended that grant awardees devote at least 20 percent of their time to each, but these numbers show a clear disconnect between intentions and reality. These multiple awards are going to established investigators—who are certainly not spending one fifth of their time per study—while younger scientists would probably devote more energies to the work. Thus, laboratories around the country are fostering a “survival of the oldest” dynamic.

Particularly in the biomedical field, this opportunity gap between young and old is a quirk of politics. When NIH funding doubled between 1998 and 2003, many new Ph.D. positions were created, which in turn allowed established investigators with more students to submit better proposals. But then in 2003, NIH funding leveled off. Older scientists now had a successful history based on the funding boom, and fallout today reveals significantly more scientists over the age of 70 finding support compared to those under the age of 30. Perhaps the situation is best summed up by NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, who wrote in a recent Science magazine Policy Forum article, “Like farmers during difficult times, we should not ‘eat our seed corn,’ but protect it.”

Thus, the frustrating pursuit of funding in science severely constrains productivity and creative departures—and the United States will suffer from the loss of a healthy research enterprise if job market, tenure, and funding patterns continue to prevent innovative young researchers from pursuing their most daring ideas. While we obviously need to create some hurdles so as to identify the most gifted and dedicated minds, our current model goes far beyond a reasonable winnowing process. Even the most promising young scientists, those with the natural ability and discipline to fulfill their potential and become tomorrow’s leaders in innovation—and eventually upon which the nation’s future depends—are struggling.

Sheril Kirshenbaum is a marine biologist at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke. She blogs at The Intersection with Chris Mooney.

So it should come as no surprise that I was flabbergasted at first, and then practically apoplectic, when I saw recent news about the Louisiana legislature’s latest effort to undercut the teaching of evolution in that state’s schools. State Senate bill No. 733, purposively misnamed the “Louisiana Science Education Act,” calls upon the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to “create and foster” a school environment that promotes “objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”

How long does this fight need to go on? Do we need to teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of the theory of gravity?

Setting aside for now that global warming and human cloning are not “theories” at all—a concept that Louisiana’s legislators should have learned in school—the new state legislation has a familiar ring. It resonates with similar efforts now underway in Texas to have schools teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of the theory of evolution. Both are examples of the ongoing efforts by indefatigable religious fundamentalists to spike science classes with a dose of creationism, which relies on supernatural explanations for the origin of Earth and the life that lives on it.

If you thought that maybe this battle had already been won, you’d be wrong, though your error would be understandable. ‘Twas five days before Christmas, 2005, when the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania delivered its highly anticipated decision in Kitzmiller vs. the Dover Area School District. At issue was the legality of a 2004 Dover Area School District decision to inform all students that they should “keep an open mind” about evolution and to encourage students to peruse Of Pandas and People, which the school district gamely referred to as “a reference book,” to gain an understanding of a competing view of how life came to be, known as intelligent design.

Judge John E. Jones III did not pull his punches. He found that the testimony of school board members who favored the teaching of intelligent design in the schools “was marked by selective memories and outright lies under oath.” He labeled intelligent design as “a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory.” And he stated plainly that intelligent design was “the progeny of creationism.” That’s important, because in a previous ruling the U.S. Supreme Court had banned the teaching of creationism from science classes.

Indeed, Jones highlighted a secret game plan written by leaders of the intelligent design movement that made clear the real goal of these various academic battles. The “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary,” known to fundamentalist insiders as the “Wedge Document,” states that the movement’s goal is to replace science as currently taught and practiced with “theistic and Christian science.” The group’s “governing goals,” according to this document, are to “defeat scientific materialism” and to “replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”

In one of the more gratifying parts of the trial, Judge Jones dissected what he called the “historical pedigree” of the book Of Pandas and People. Not only is it published by a group registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a religious, Christian organization, he noted, but a look at the various versions it went through over years of editing reveals something rather amazing. Early versions of the manuscript, written before the Supreme Court’s creationism decision, refer throughout to creationism. Later edits, completed in 1987 after the Court’s ruling, are virtually identical but for the substitution of the words “intelligent design” wherever the word “creationism” had previously appeared. “This compelling evidence strongly supports Plaintiffs’ assertion that ID is creationism re-labeled,” Jones concluded.

Now America’s schools find themselves under assault by yet another relabeling of creationism, which this time is making its cowardly run for the academic goal line under the linguistic guises of “strengths and weaknesses” and “objective discussion of scientific theories.”

How long does this fight need to go on? Do we need to teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of the theory of gravity? That’s right. That’s all it is. A theory. But I don’t see any creationists defiantly jumping off cliffs.

Do we need more “objective discussions” of the atomic theory? C’mon, it’s only a theory. So why aren’t more of these activists moving next door to nuclear power plants?

I don’t see hordes of scientists beating down church doors to teach rationalism to parishioners in their pews. In a fair world, supernaturalists would similarly refrain from foisting their beliefs on kids in science classes.

But I have a theory that this is not about fairness. Of course, it’s just a theory.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

The House Education and Labor Committee passed the bill, H.R. 3036, on June 18. It includes provisions for increased funding for environmental education programs and teacher development. No word yet on how, if passed, NCLI will effect national testing standards or the disproportionately small amount of time focused on science in many elementary classrooms.

Those were the days of the “Science Wars” in the academy, a clash between literary post-modernists (“po-mos”) and scientists over whether the scientific process could lay claim to any truly objective means of describing reality. And thanks to people like Gould and Dawkins, I had slowly been turned. I was a mole within the humanities. That’s not to say I’d stopped loving literature, but I felt I had to flee a ship that seemed without a rudder—and in the decade since then, it appears I’m hardly the only one.

Writing recently in The Nation, none other than a Yale English professor—William Deresiewicz—painfully bemoaned the “dying” state of literary studies. Colleges are hiring fewer and fewer English profs to teach fewer and fewer English students. Meanwhile, observes Deresiewicz, university priorities are “shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money.”

Remake literary studies with a firmer scientific foundation, so that the field can generate reproducible knowledge rather than running around in theoretical circles.

In this atmosphere, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find another literary scholar, Washington and Jefferson College’s Jonathan Gottschall, unveiling a seemingly radical proposal: Remake literary studies with a firmer scientific foundation, so that the field can generate reproducible knowledge rather than running around in theoretical circles. In the process, perhaps the study of literature can share in one of the most exciting and appealing aspects of the sciences—the sense of optimism, progress, and accumulating knowledge as one attacks a truly conquerable problem.

Writing in the Boston Globe ideas section, Gottschall describes in detail what his science of literature would look like, something he can do because he and his colleagues have already performed some early experiments. They’ve crunched data comparing Western and non-Western literatures to determine if one is more sexist than the other (in the sense of constantly describing whether female characters are attractive). Result: There’s no difference. They’ve used statistical methods to determine whether reader reactions to the personages described in great texts, like the works of Jane Austen, are completely variable or confined within a fairly small set of responses. Result: The latter.

And then there’s one of the most impressive literary scientific techniques—“stylometrics,” which uses computers to pore over massive texts, compare their phraseology, and thereby determine whether or not they had the same author. We all have ticks in our prose, favorite phrases and flourishes, “stylistic fingerprints” that give us away and make it possible to put literary sleuthing on a firm empirical determination, so as to really determine the authorship of contested texts.

Ultimately, if literary study travels down the road proposed by Gottschall, it won’t be long before it intersects with the burgeoning field of cognitive science. After all, I suspect there is a core biological reality underlying our powerful responses to certain types of narratives. That’s not to say that literature or art can simply “reduce” to biology, because there’s a lot more going on. It is to say, however, that the course of study that Gottschall proposes might have helped a disillusioned young English major, like myself ten years ago, get excited again.

However, in the course of that past decade, as I’ve buried myself in science writing, I’ve learned that literary scholars aren’t the only ones who have their ivory tower foibles. Their chief weaknesses appear to be three: failing to produce really firm knowledge; often disguising left-wing politics as scholarship (something else Gottschall condemns); and writing in impenetrable jargon. The sciences, in contrast, do a very good job of producing progressive knowledge and weeding out biases—but they do not avoid the final weakness. Rather, science also fails to communicate broadly beyond a few specialized disciplines, and connects neither with English departments nor with the rest of society.

So while I find Gottschall’s proposal enticing, I think it must emphasize more strongly a critical component. The new science of literature needs the help of the sciences, the direct importing of statistical, computing, cognitive, and biological expertise to focus on literary mysteries and problems. After all, there’s a lot of data to crunch, and scientists could benefit greatly by having to study a very different kind of research object, e.g., the great text. Minds might open on both sides, and at long last we could realize, as Gottschall puts it, that “The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities has no substance. We can walk right through it.”

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

But, this year, and indeed, this week have delivered plenty of remarkable news that put the astounding science that surrounds the double helix in a special context that probably can’t be adequately resolved in a science classroom in a day and don’t begin to treat the sickness of scientific ignorance in the U.S.

For example, yesterday the U.S. Senate passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, after Senator Coburn (R-OK) lifted his curious block on the bill (he voted in favor of it twice before deciding to block it from even being considered). As much as I would like to pump my fist in victory, we shouldn’t pop the champagne (or Freedom Suds for the jingoistic sect) yet, as the bill is slightly different from the one that passed the House twice this Congress, leaving wiggle-room for more Coburnesque obstructionism. The blocks on GINA were not a science issue, but are at least in part the result of a lack of understanding and appreciation of the fact that genetic predisposition to disease is not a diagnosis. The opposition was mainly about greed and business interests.

Teachers might not be equipped with the knowledge to explain where Watson was wrong, or Ben Stein, or what a genetic predisposition is, or how it could be used to discriminate against someone.

We can drop Ben Stein’s magnum crapus, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in the same category of non-science issues, but for different reasons. Now widely discredited as manufactured controversy in the name of creationist activism, Mr. Stein managed to make a fool of himself by displaying a lack of knowledge and intellectual honesty that will likely spell the end of his unusual career (and might be equally indicative that he should seek some professional help for his case of the crazies). That Mr. Stein is attacking scientists does not make his movie or his aggressively ignorant point of view part of science. But that isn’t going to stop it from coming up in classrooms today.

The unfortunate fall of Jim Watson last October will probably stick in my mind for many years to come. Patently racist comments made in a scientific context effectively ended the career of the world’s most famous living scientist, and we are not better off for it. I am still baffled by Watson’s comments and torn on the fate of one of my science heroes. For sure, students are looking at his Wikipedia entry today and learning that he was forced into retirement for falsely linking race and intelligence.

I worry that teachers might not be equipped with the knowledge to explain where Watson was wrong, or Ben Stein, or what a genetic predisposition is, or how it could be used to discriminate against someone.

The truth is that scientific advances have always brought controversy, most often because of a lack of appreciation and understanding of actual achievements or their implications, coupled with fear of change. Expelled and the opposition to progressive legislation like GINA are symptoms of an ignorance of science and a fear of change, not vice versa. Such misunderstanding is certainly not limited to evolution and human genomics either. The only way to combat that fear is to eliminate it, and the only way to do that is to dedicate a serious effort to revamping science education in the U.S. starting with minimum standards for science education, radically improving science teacher literacy and retention, and making a solid science education compulsory for all students. Let’s not beat around the bush; that is going to cost a lot of money and effort. But there are few measures that the next President and Congress could take that would be more worthwhile for securing our future.

We are in the unfortunate position of having to discuss controversy in classrooms because we have done an inadequate job of creating a scientifically literate public. We lie in this bed because of inaction on creating national science education standards, because of decades of educational decay, and an unwillingness to address the roots of fear and ignorance.

The National Human Genome Research Institute deserves a lot of credit for successfully using DNA Day as a tool to have genomics and basic genetics taught in schools, and there seems little doubt that other groups should expand upon their efforts. But let’s not mistake DNA Day as any kind of solution to the kind of societal and education changes we will need to remain competitive. Each of the Presidential candidates and every candidate for Congress should put their cards on the table for revamping science education. Anyone who doesn’t think that is a prerequisite for their jobs is probably not prepared for them.

Michael Stebbins is the Director of Biology Policy for the Federation of American Scientists, President of the SEA Action Fund and author of Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science’s Taboos Confronted.

Due to mounting pressure from tech companies calling for an increase in visas for skilled workers, and with studies finding less foreign graduates choosing to stay in the U.S., DHS called the shortage of H-1B visas an “emergency” and introduced a new rule allowing students to stay an additional seventeen months in the country for “Optional Practical Training,” up from the previous twelve.

The new rule may help those like Mohammad Sajid, a researchers profiled by The Scientist, who was barred reentry into the U.S. twice and is now moving his research on anti-malarial drugs overseas. But it is only one step in fixing a outdated and counterproductive immigration policy. Science Progress advisory board member Tom Kalil has recommended the creation of “fast-track” employment-based visas for foreign students who receive advanced technical degrees from U.S. universities.

Analyzing student achievement data from around the industrialized world, the report finds U.S. students consistently finishing in the middle of the pack on both math and science tests. According to the report, students did not fair well on the federally-sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress math and science tests either. The report also takes a look at public school STEM teacher’s backgrounds and finds nearly four out of ten 7-12th grade math teachers do not have a college major in the subject they teach.

The report maps out progress trends in STEM education among public school students and grades different states on their use of technology in the classroom.

All is not lost. States and the Federal government are starting to pay more attention to the challenges of STEM education. According to the report, schools have begun employing new strategies, from raising the bar on math and science coursework to adopting new technology-based approaches to STEM teaching. The Federal government is stepping up as well, coordinating the efforts of disparate agencies to improve best practices in STEM education and research stronger teaching methods.

The research may go a long way in plugging holes in the STEM system and better-preparing students for technical careers.

Image: Education Week

The United States faces a shortfall of scientists and engineers who can help develop tomorrow’s promising technology he warned, citing the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 report, which found a fifteen percent decrease in the number of science and engineering undergraduate degrees awarded between 1985 and 2005, with the numbers showing little signs of improvement in recent years. With statistics projecting two million job openings in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-related fields by 2014, the decline in students pursuing STEM-related careers could stifle innovation and economic growth, he said.

One reason for the decline, Gates said, is STEM education in high school, which fails to prepare students for the rigors of science and math at the college level. On math and science tests given to high school students among the industrialized world, U.S. students scored near the bottom. The problem may be the lack of qualified STEM teachers. Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) pointed out that 63 percent of math teachers and 93 percent of physics teachers in public schools have no certification or degree in the field.

Gates called for the design of new metrics to both measure the progress of students as well as to identify effective STEM teachers so as to codify their methods and help other teachers implement the successful techniques in their classrooms. When questioned about how to alleviate the shortage of science and math teachers in U.S. schools, he suggested increasing wages for teachers in STEM education. Gates also suggested creating science and technology-themed schools as a possible way to improve education and spark student interest in science and math. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds the creation of such schools and helps other schools incorporate STEM projects into the curriculum to improve education.

Many of the committee members were curious to know how to motivate students to study science and math, citing the space race and moon landing as events that inspired a generation of Americans to take up careers in science and engineering. Gates said that the fields of artificial intelligence, opportunities to fight devastating diseases, and the hope of striking it rich were just a few modern day motivators, but that it mostly fell to teachers to bring the subject to life. Rep. Vernon Elhers (R-MI), a nuclear physicists and strong advocate of science education, said at the hearing that he offers this advice to high school students: “You have a choice, be a nerd, or work for a nerd.”

Gates also addressed U.S. immigration policy, stating that current Federal approaches hurt the U.S. by keeping top talent out of the country and driving down job creation. Foreign students now comprise 60 percent of graduate school students in science and engineering programs. Gates told committee members to make it easier for those foreign students to stay in the U.S. after they finish their studies. He argued that the Federal government, which pours money into basic research in these programs, is essentially subsiding the education of foreign students and then losing their talent when they cannot stay in the country after graduating.

The economy also suffers, he said, claiming that for each H1-B visa (a temporary U.S. employment visa) hire Microsoft makes, an average of four additional employees are added to support them. He said other technology companies have similar experiences, making it all the more important to allow top talent to stay in the country. Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) questioned Gates’s stance, saying that allowing more H1-B students into the country will increase competition, deterring U.S. students from studying science and engineering. Gates countered, saying that U.S. students will have to compete either way since companies will open offices abroad, forced to go where the talent is. He compared the new globalized atmosphere of competition to the Olympics, were Americans will have to compete with the best from other countries in the job market. He advised Congress to increase the visa cap, streamline the path to permanent resident status, and do away with per-country limits.

Perhaps the field we have truly fallen behind in is history. We forget that in the early 20th century German was the lingua franca of science. Germany was where young scientists went to study, and where top scientists presented, and often had done, their cutting edge work.

U.S. science leadership is not natural and inevitable, but the loss of that leadership may be.

Far from being natural or inevitable, the United States’ science leadership is an offshoot of this country’s preeminence in the system of world governments that emerged after the defeat of Germany in World War II. This system was built on the rewards to science innovation in a vibrant capitalist economy, and on WWII- and Cold War-impelled needs to develop our science and engineering capacity. It uniquely benefited from immigration, especially from Europe in the Nazi era and immediate post-war period. And it could not have happened without the wealth and vision that allowed the United States to not only generously subsidize basic science but also to establish an educational system that was broad-based at the bottom and unparalleled in availability and quality at the top.

If these advantages were not enough, the competition for science leadership was weak thanks to the devastation that Europe suffered in two world wars and the slow rebuilding of European economies in the post-war era. The upshot: U.S. science leadership is not natural and inevitable, but the loss of that leadership may be.

Countries much larger than the United States, most notably India and China, are experiencing economic growth that outstrips ours, and as they grow in wealth they are rapidly improving their educational systems and basic science infrastructures. Moreover, as globalization leads companies born in the United States to move research and production capacity abroad, market demand for trained scientists and engineers is increasing elsewhere while it is being dampened here.

Even if the United States retains a per capita education and investment advantage over India and China, population differences alone mean that the number of trained scientists and engineers in these countries will soon dwarf the number in America, with differences in the quantity and quality of science innovation likely to follow. Added to the Asian challenge is a Europe that can no longer be seen as a set of discrete countries when it comes to science. Rather, cross-border research teams are being encouraged, and European Union-wide funding mechanisms are being established.

In short, several decades from now we may find that we are not the world’s number one country when it comes to science, however measured, but perhaps no. 4 behind China, India, and the EU. We may also find that being in fourth place is not altogether bad. When children in China are vaccinated against polio, they are not worse off because the vaccine was invented in the United States. When an Indian inventor draws on two decades of U.S. government-funded research to achieve a technological breakthrough, her accomplishment will not be lessened because it would not have happened had research in the United States not paved the way.

As the world no. 1 in science, U.S. science investments have had substantial spillover effects, improving the quality of life in other countries and enabling scientific, technological, and medical accomplishments that have benefited people abroad. As other countries improve their science, the progress of American science and the lives of our people will increasingly benefit from educational and infrastructure investments made elsewhere and from research supported by currencies other than the dollar.

Thanks to the preeminence of U.S. science for more than half a century, English is second only to mathematics as the universal language of science.

Acknowledging the inevitable and seeing a bright side does not, however, mean we should regard what is happening as an unalloyed blessing and passively allow American science to slip. There are substantial costs should U.S. science capacity sink absolutely, and real costs even if slippage is only relative. Scientific advances create intellectual property, and wealth creation through intellectual property has become an increasingly important part of the U.S. and world economies. What’s more, the world remains a dangerous place, and it may become more so should countries like China develop expansionist ambitions. Science for security must remain a high national priority, and although we may not be able to keep other nations from catching up, we do not want to be surprised by their achievements or surpassed.

In devising policies to maximize the strength of U.S. science, our nation has two unique resources it must not squander. The first is English. Thanks to the preeminence of U.S. science for more than half a century, English is second only to mathematics as the universal language of science. Scientists around the world speak and write English. This gives American scientists a leg up in communicating with scientists across national boundaries and makes many of the most important writings of foreign scientists easily and immediately accessible to Americans.

Additionally, American students are not dissuaded from pursuing science careers nor do they have their science studies delayed because of the need to master a foreign language. Short of eliminating federal science funding, nothing, I venture to guess, would harm American science as much as a need to read Chinese to keep up with the latest science developments.

One goal of our national science policy should be to maintain English as the global language of science. This might entail subsidies or other incentives to promote the publication of English-language online science journals, aid to enable the acquisition of English-language science materials (including print journals) by universities and libraries abroad, and programs to train foreign scientists in English, either in their own countries, online, or by bringing them to the United States or Britain for science internships or language instruction.

The high subscription price of leading English-language science journals is a particular threat because it means that for financial rather than science reasons market forces are likely to promote a proliferation of lower priced foreign-based journals in languages other than English. These journals, started for reasons of cost, may become science journals of record in their home countries, meaning that cutting-edge overseas research may become less easily or immediately available here. The short-run solution may be U.S. subscription subsidies for foreign scholars and institutions, but the only viable long-term solution is to bring costs down, most likely by electronic distribution that through competition reins in the profit-oriented publishers who now mediate between the creation and distribution of science knowledge.

Students who had planned on doing their advanced science studies in the United States went instead to Europe, Australia, Japan, or Canada.

The United States’ second great advantage is our system of higher education. We are still the preeminent nation when it comes to science training, and we benefit from this in many ways. Foreigners who come to study here learn English, and they build relationships with U.S. scientists that endure after they return home, if they return home. Study here can also lead to an appreciation for the United States and its values, including especially the values of democracy and free inquiry. Perhaps most beneficial of all are the foreign-born scientists who stay to take jobs here or who return periodically to work collaboratively with U.S. scientists. They add to our science workforce and scientific productivity and go a long way to make up for inadequacies in the production of U.S. born scientists.

Ironically, the threat to U.S. science dominance is in part due to our willingness to educate the world. Some of the foreign scientists trained here have returned home to become leading researchers or educators in countries such as India and China, while others have returned to Western Europe and reinvigorated their graduate science education. Thus, our leadership in science education, although not as vulnerable as our overall science leadership, is also ripe for challenge.

Rather than rise to the challenge, however, we have aided the challengers. Short-term political and security concerns have trumped longer-term interests in science strength along with longer-term wealth and security. Responding viscerally to the attacks of 9/11, we made entering this country more difficult for foreigners whatever the reason. One result was that students who had planned on doing their advanced science studies in the United States went instead to Europe, Australia, Japan, or Canada. Or they pursued advanced degrees in their home countries.

More recently, the Iraq war and attitudes toward immigration have made the United States less attractive to educated foreigners. Difficulties in entering the United States have also affected the location of and attendance at scientific conferences as well as the ability of universities and companies to employ foreign researchers. Although the U.S. government has become sensitive to the harms that some of its post 9/11 policies caused and has tried to ameliorate problems, it could be doing much more—including proactively encouraging more foreign students to study science here and making it easier for them to work here when their studies are concluded.

The downside of replenishing our science workforce with the foreign born is that it diminishes pressure on industry and government to stimulate domestic science training. Yet few dispute that improving domestic education must remain a high priority, especially as opportunities for science workers abroad grow sufficiently attractive as to not only lure foreign-born U.S. science workers back to their home countries, but also to entice native-born American scientists to work abroad.

A virtue of science progress is that it cannot help but create free riders.

Essays, and indeed books, can and have been written on what stimulating domestic science training will take, and I shall not attempt to canvass the suggestions that people more knowledgeable than I have made. But I will reiterate one point. We cannot afford to leave undeveloped the talents of minorities and the poor by failing to provide the nutrition, health care, preschool training, and later education that will allow these youth to realize their potential. It is no longer just personal accomplishments we are talking about; it is the national well being.

A virtue of science progress is that it cannot help but create free riders. New discoveries and inventions fuel other new discoveries and inventions and raise everyone’s quality of life. Even if intellectual property laws allow innovators to secure fortunes for themselves, exclusive rights last only for period of time, and rarely can all profits be captured. We, along with other nations, are made better off by new vaccines discovered in Britain, cell phone technologies born in Finland, robotics breakthroughs from Japan, and the development of disease-resistant plant varieties in the United States.

Americans love to rank things, whether it is football teams, law schools, or most livable cities, and we love to identify with or be “Number One.” For many it is a matter of national pride that the United States is acknowledged as the world’s leader in science. Hence it is a matter of great national concern when it appears other nations are catching up or that we may be slipping. But the two ways of reducing disparities in the rankings are quite different.

If other nations are doing better in supporting science and producing more scientific breakthroughs, then we are likely to benefit from their successes. But if our lead is slipping because we are losing capacity and failing to invest in the physical and human capital that produces outstanding science, then there is substantial cause for concern; not only the United States but the world will be worse off as a result. In short, we should focus more on how we are doing and spend less time worrying about whether other nations are catching up to us in science.

If our youth are well-educated in science, if our science workforce has the highly trained staff it needs, if we facilitate the international exchange of scientific knowledge, and if our educational establishments and industry remain fountains of innovation, then we need not worry whether other nations are doing as well or better than we are. We will be strong. But if our lead is lost because we squander our advantages and fail to educate our youth, then slippage in the ranks of nations doing science may indeed signify crisis.

Richard O. Lempert is the Eric Stein Distinguished University Professor of Law and Sociology at The University of Michigan Law School and a Research Professor in the George Washington Institute of Public Policy.

Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, which supported the inititative, argues in a Science Progress article posted today that public investment in developing educational software could redefine both the way students learn new skills and the way tests assess those skills. According to Kelly, the antiquated testing methods mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act fail to provide the information needed to assess the progress of children in the public school system. His proposal? Video games, which can hold a student’s attention for hours, can present challenging goals that continuously test aptitude, and can assess newly acquired skills interactively in real time. Unfortunately, the market for educational technology is stagnant because universities and schools are unlikely to bet on innovative, untested approaches to educational learning technologies, and past failures of the educational software market have many investors wary about pouring money into costly development. Either the government can fund research on educational technology, he argues, or we can “continue to fool ourselves that our education system can be fixed with ad hoc testing standards.”

Traditional tests measure performance in situations that will seldom, if ever, occur in an actual job.

Instead, we should first engage in a national debate about the expertise students need to acquire in order to prosper in the 21^st century, and only then settle on how best to measure their progress. The interactive methods used in computer games represent some of the most powerful ways to test newly acquired skills, but understanding why they are so useful requires a clear recognition of why our current testing procedures are thoroughly outdated.

Despite all the complaints about the numerous tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, the problem is not too many tests but too few tests. High stakes, standardized tests are an artifact of a mass production model imposed on education out of necessity during the last century. Traditional tests measure performance in situations that will seldom, if ever, occur in an actual job. Someone trained to solve problems working in isolation, with no access to reference material and no ability to consult experts, is largely useless in today’s economy—however many facts they may have mastered. We use such tests because they are inexpensive to implement.

But consider the ideal classroom scenario: An instructor able to spend plenty of time with each individual student, constantly challenging them, asking probing questions, and presenting increasingly complex challenges tailored for each student. By the time a test is taken the student should have run through the material enough times that they and their instructors have high confidence in success.

These powerful methods aren’t used in standard classrooms for two obvious reasons—they’re unaffordable and we continue to think of the classroom the same way they did 200 years ago. A solution, however, has emerged from an unexpected source—computer games.

The average U.S. teenage boy spends about 14 hours a week glued to computer games.^[1] Yet, we aren’t taking advantage of that. Most adults can’t imagine how the lessons of Super Mario could be applied to high school science or history. But consider that a good game will capture and hold a player’s attention with a series of compelling goals, each slightly beyond the player’s current abilities. A great game draws players in what designers call “the flow.” Once in it, they will try, fail and try again, working for hours to master the skills needed to win.

Surely it’s possible to create challenges in biology, history, or engineering that can capture and hold attention.

What’s striking, of course, is that they’re also being continuously tested. Tests are an integral part of winning, and players accept the fact that they will fail before they master the skills needed to move on. If you keep crashing your simulated aircraft you know that you’ve got to work harder—and want to. Winning at the most advanced levels of game play requires players to draw on a huge body of knowledge and experience.

Winning many games, moreover, often requires more than mastery of specific skills. They require precisely the skills that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills recently reported are in greatest demand in today’s economy: gathering evidence, making decisions under uncertainty, evaluating options, and (in the case of multiplayer games) working effectively as a member of a team.^[2]

The U.S. Department of Defense, which unlike most organizations is completely unembarrassed about having its employees play games (war games), has come to appreciate the power of simulation-based games to teach and test individuals and teams. They have convincing evidence that skills acquired through simulations translate into performance in the field.^[3]

Simulation-based instruction can reproduce the complexity, confusion, and tension of field conditions so faithfully that the success a soldier gains in the simulation translates directly into reliable performance during first real combat experience. This powerful transfer from simulation to practice has also been demonstrated for pilots and several areas of surgery.^[4] Surely it’s possible to create challenges in biology, history, or engineering that can capture and hold attention.

Building software to teach and test complex skills is expensive. Several billion dollars were invested and lost in education technologies towards the end of the dot-com boom a decade ago, and investors have been wary ever since. Schools and universities are a notoriously poor market for innovations, in part because of an understandable reluctance to take risks with unproven approaches. But as a result, an enormous opportunity is being lost.

We’ve confronted this kind of market failure before. The federal government has been able to fill gaps by funding basic science research, development, testing and evaluation that can be picked up by private investors. It can do this in new technologies for learning as well and create significant markets for robust new products…or we could just continue to fool ourselves that our education system can be fixed with ad hoc testing standards.

Henry Kelly, Ph.D., is the President of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, DC and Chairman of the Board of Directors for Scientists and Engineers for America.

Notes

[1] Martin, Suzanne and Oppenheim, Koby. Video Gaming: General and Pathological Use. Trends & Tudes. Volume 6, Issue 3 March 2007 Harris Interactive Inc. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/newsletters/k12news/HI_TrendsTudes_2007_v06_i03.pdf

[2] Beyond the Three Rs, Voter Attitudes toward 21^st Century Skills. October 2007. Partnership for 21^st Century Skills.

[3] Fletcher, Dexter. Advanced Technology for Defense Training. Institute of Defense Analysis. June 2006. http://www.digitalpromise.org/newsite/Resources/Research/Dexter_Fletcher_Jun14.pdf

[4] Boosman, Frank. Simulation-Based Training: The Evidence is In. July 2007. Chief Learning Officer Magazine. http://www.clomedia.com/content/templates/clo_article.asp?articleid=1874&zoneid=162

Aside from funding and grant-making, the NSF is also in the early stages of coordinating these state and local efforts through an upcoming “Science and Innovation” website, developed as an “experimental tool for decision-makers and users in the states.” The prototype version that premiered at the conference featured an interactive map of the U.S. along with different categories of programs according to grade level and subject area. Designer Joni Falk, Co-director of the Center for School Reform at TERC Inc., noted that the website features program “highlights with replicable knowledge and contacts…so [educators] don’t have to re-invent the wheel.” She also said that the prototype version currently has 60 projects, but that the final website will have thousands. She boasted that the project makes the NSF the “first federal agency to actually document impact.”

Dr. Jan Kettlewell, Rosalind Barnes, and Sheila Jones of the University System of Georgia highlighted the University System of Georgia Math and Science Partnership, which created a public awareness campaign called “math + science = success.” The campaign grew from market research demonstrating that the strongest influence on children’s educational choices comes from their parents. This led the program to disseminate a free parent’s guide with information about science and math education. They also aired TV commercials and advertised on billboards about the impact of science and math education in preparing students for the workforce. Mini-grants enabled schools to hold “Math/Science Family Nights,” and provided incentives for scholars from higher education to research and work with elementary school teachers. Since the inception of this program, Georgia has seen higher test scores, a higher graduation rate, and a lower dropout rate.

Ruth Wooden, of the research firm Public Agenda, also presented findings from her report, “Important, but Not for Me,” which noted an “immense” gap between the beliefs of policy-makers who say that STEM education needs improvement, and the general public that thinks things are fine. Wooden said that “parents’ concerns about math and science have fallen since the 90s.” A bright point from the study found “no significant difference between boys and girls” in terms of numbers of students claiming they wanted to go into a math or science-related job. She also echoed the team from Georgia when she reported that “parents have a much greater influence on students than they think,” especially “parents of youngsters in grades 4 through 8.”

Image: MSPNet

But precisely what would we be producing more scientists for?

Now come indications that history might be about to repeat itself. Just as in the late 1980s—and as epitomized by the National Academy of Sciences’ deeply influential Rising Above the Gathering Storm report—the science community has been clamoring of late for a greater investment in research and development. The new argument (much like the old) asserts that current educational and industrial trends bode ill for U.S. competitiveness, especially given the increasing production of scientific talent in emerging powerhouses like India and China. But precisely what would we be producing more scientists for? After all, as a recent report from the Urban Institute finds, “each year there are more than three times as many S&E [Science and Engineering] four-year college graduates as S&E job openings.” Do we really have enough jobs for all these new scientists and engineers that we supposedly need? Who’s right, the NAS or the Urban Institute?

I must admit that as a science writer with far more experience writing about flagrant political attacks on science than on more nuanced matters of funding levels or educational policies, I wade into these waters cautiously. However, I’m well aware of a persuasive literature suggesting that at times, the scientific community falls into a rather alarmist mindset when peering at educational and workforce trends. Greenberg’s Science, Money, and Politics, and the Urban Institute’s latest report both fit into this “the world isn’t really ending” genre—one whose writings usually emerge as rejoinders to workforce-related jeremiads from the scientific community.

At the same time though, I certainly wouldn’t argue against broad improvements to U.S. science education (who would?). Perhaps the middle way in this debate—a stance articulated by commentators like Nature‘s David Goldston and Vivek Wadhwa—lies in pointing out that if we are going to train more scientists that’s fine, but let’s make sure they come away with a much more diverse set of skills so that they can fill a broader range of workforce positions, including nontraditional ones.

Some young scientists aren’t going to be working in purely scientific positions.

How might we achieve that? Well, sadly, an innovative piece of legislation introduced earlier this year by Rep. Doris O. Matsui (D-Ca) might have helped do the job—but in the process of becoming law it lost considerable potency. Matsui’s legislation, originally the “Scientific Communications Act of 2007” and later interpolated into the America COMPETES Act, would have directed NSF to start making grants that would help graduate students in science obtain training in communication. But in final form the legislation wound up being pared down to a mere “Sense of Congress” without any dollars attached to it. That’s unfortunate. After all, if we don’t have enough science and engineering jobs for all of our scientists and engineers at present, doesn’t it make sense to institutionalize new training protocols for young scientists so that they’ll have more diverse workforce skills? And indeed, it’s widely known—to the point of being a cliché—that scientists don’t always know how to talk to non-scientists.

The numbers presented by the Urban Institute lead to an uncontestable conclusion: Some young scientists aren’t going to be working in purely scientific positions. There simply aren’t enough jobs for them. Instead, some will be going into fields like journalism, or advertising, or politics—and if so, they ought to be learning more than simply scientific skills.

Learning about science is wonderful—but in today’s complex world, it’s rarely enough. Sure, it helps in any number of occupations, ranging from law to business, to know something about science. But it helps even more if you also know something else (like, say, how to speak in public or write, or design a website). Knowing how to think scientifically is pretty good on its own; but in combination with other skills, it’s truly sublime.

In fact, we can go further. If the core concern is ensuring U.S. competitiveness, doesn’t interdisciplinarity—the ability to combine scientific skills with another type of expertise—both enhance creativity and also give someone an edge? Doesn’t a scientist who also speaks Spanish or understands patent law have a leg up in the global marketplace?

If so, it follows that not only do we need more scientists, we need more scientists with additional skills to boot. Why can’t the scientific community release major reports stating that?

Chris Mooney is the Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Personhood for embryos is a popular issue for ballot initiatives (blog.bioethics.net).

Joe Romm calls the Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists a “must read” (Climate Progress).

Nature considers genome research fundamental and important enough to make published work in the field open access (Open Access News).

One physics professor isn’t too worried about the state of U.S. science education (Uncertain Principles).

“If your project is disease-related, health-related, you should not submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation.”

At an Institute of Medicine panel on global health yesterday, an argument over the effect of climate change on the spread of infectious diseases (via the KSJ Tracker).

“We did not propose cutting out entire pages….after they [the Office of Management and Budget] received our comment, they sent back a recommendation to the CDC that they simply drop whole pages from the beginning of the testimony.” An interview with John Marburger (National Journal subscription), Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

How hard is it to assemble an FDA advisory panel free of experts with conflicts of interest? Not as hard as the FDA makes it seem, reports the Center for Science in the Public Interest (via The Scientist Blog).

The NSF-funded Discovery Corps Fellowship grants scientists $200,000 for two years to run outside-the-box scientific outreach projects. But stigmas against outreach work, as opposed to dedicated research, may have kept applicants numbers so low that the program may dissolve (Science subscription).

Christopher Mims, of the new Scientific American site 60 Second Science explains Evolutionary Developmental Biology in 123 seconds.

News outlets are eager to frame the results as U.S. backsliding in the international economy. The Washington Post quoted former Colorado governor Roy Romer: “How are our children going to be able to compete with the children of the world? The answer is not well.” The Associated Press likewise presented the ranking in a dim light: “In math, U.S. students did even worse — posting an average score that was lower than the average in 23 of the other leading industrialized countries.”

In the Urban report, Into the Eye of the Storm, Harold Salzman and B. Lindsay Lowell acknowledge that policy makers often cite the results from PISA and TIMSS, another international exam, “supposedly showing U.S. students lagging the performance of most other countries.” But using the results to make such sweeping comparisons “stretches the PISA far beyond its appropriate or even intended use.” They go on to make several critical points about the test.

Achievement varies significantly by socioeconomic class and race

The majority of U.S. students, who are white, “actually rank near the very top on international tests.” But minority and low-income students face obstacles to such achievement because of differences in the quality of educational systems and household income. Salzman and Lowell conclude: “The test results indicate that, rather than a policy focus on average science and math scores, there is an urgent need for targeted educational improvement to serve low performing populations, such as recent immigrants and some minorities.”

The diversity of the U.S. population both contributes to economic competitiveness and lowers the average score of students on the test

They point out that the United States “has a large population and the most diverse demographics of any industrialized nation,” and that averaging across such a mixed group of students ignores the size of the population and the distribution of student performance within that population:

What does one infer from comparing the average test score in a nation of over 300 million with that of a nation of 4.5 million (Singapore) or using educational performance as an indicator of economic performance? We would expect India’s 39 percent illiteracy rate and its secondary school enrollment rate of less than 50 percent (World Bank 2007) to make it an inconsequential global power. Of course, that is not the case because rather than average performance it is the small percentage of high performers in a nation of 1 billion that is the more important indicator of its relative science and engineering strength. The use of average rates across a diverse group of nations and diverse populations is of limited use in drawing conclusions about global standing economically or educationally.

The rankings are not a comparison of education systems

They quote the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: “If a country’s scale scores in reading, scientific or mathematical literacy are significantly higher than those in another country, it cannot automatically be inferred that the schools or particular parts of the education system in the first country are more effective than those in the second.” Rather, the test measures the cumulative impact of all factors effecting a student’s abilities in the subject areas, including their experience outside the classroom and at home. In the United States, both experiences are closely related to race and class.

The rankings do not indicate the magnitude of difference between average scores in each each country

Salzman and Lowell: “Without knowing the magnitude of the actual raw score differences on the PISA, we can use the test results to rank countries and populations but not know the importance of differences in rankings.”

Worries over the decline in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education propelled passage of the America COMPETES Act, which authorized $44 billion for research and education. More resources for better STEM education, properly allocated, is a good thing. But merely decrying a loss of competitiveness in U.S. students means willfully ignoring the inequities in our education system and in our economy. Smart science and education policy will close the gaps in each.

As Vivek Wadhwa points out in a BusinessWeek editorial, the findings of authors Lindsay Lowell and Harold Salzman run counter to those of the widely influential National Academies report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm.” He goes on to say that the findings of the report, titled “Into the Eye of the Storm,” reinforce previous work dispelling the myth that shortages of engineers are forcing U.S. companies to look for qualified workers outside the country.

While it may be good news that there is little reason to worry about the state of U.S. science and engineering education, taking the findings at face value is unproductive. Accepting the interpretation that the U.S. science and engineering cohort is smart and competitive and then resting on one’s laurels is easy if the only measure of importance is global economic competitiveness. That viewpoint accepts the status quo, smacks of nationalism, and fails to address the underlying concerns Lowell and Salzman raise about the shape of the U.S. workforce.

They write in the introduction:

Workforce development and education policy requires a more thorough analysis than appears to be guiding current policy reports. The available evidence points, first, to a need for targeted education policy, to focus on the populations in the lower portion of the performance distribution. Second, the seemingly more-than-adequate supply of qualified college graduates suggests a need for better understanding why the “demand side” fails to induce more graduates into the S&E workforce. Third, public and private investment should be balanced between domestic development of S&E workforce supply and global collaboration as a longer-term goal. Policy approaches to human capital development and employment from prior eras do not address the current workforce or economic policy needs.

The findings should offer a new vantage point from which to hold policy discussions about how science and engineering education and the economic sectors it fuels can continue to grow and improve the quality of life for U.S. citizens. The most pertinent question with regard to educating scientists and engineers may not be, “How can we improve performance and increase numbers in order to stay ahead of other nations?” but instead, “How can we create and maintain a dynamic economy that takes full advantage of the scientists and engineers graduating from U.S. schools to benefit all of our citizens and collaborate effectively with other nations?”