Reaching the Critical Mass in High School Physics
DOI: 10.1063/1.881177
In the past decade a new wave of apprehension about public education—especially science education—has come to the fore. A spate of recent studies has heightened the sense of unease by suggesting a lack of improvement in science proficiency among succeeding cohorts of US students and a slippage in international standings in comparative tests of science knowledge. Such widespread alarm over the academic health of our nation is a relatively new development. Until two generations ago the United States was widely regarded as a pioneer in instituting and extending free and universal public education. Education was extolled as a national resource, and a literate populace was regarded by many as critical to the maintenance of political democracy, to the attainment of a society committed to equal opportunity and the reward of merit, to the pursuit of a robust and internationally competitive economy and to the preservation of a strong national defense.
References
1. See, for example, the Department of Education’s most recent National Assessment of Education Progress, The Science Report Card, Educational Testing Service, Princeton, N.J. (1988);
and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s second International Science Study, Science Achievement in Seventeen Countries: A Preliminary Report, Pergamon, Oxford (1988).2. E. B. Fiske, The New York Times Educational Supplement, 4 January 1987, p. 20.
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More about the Authors
Michael Neuschatz. American Institute of Physics, New York.
