Does “No Child Left Behind” force the scanting of gifted STEM students?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0221
In the City Journal article “ The excellence gap ,” Sol Stern—a contributing editor at the magazine and a senior fellow at its publisher, the Manhattan Institute—charges that public schools “are shortchanging their best students” and thereby harming prospects for future American competitiveness.
Stern cites “mounting evidence” of academic decline among the best STEM students. He links this decline to No Child Left Behind, which he charges has “left the door wide open to the corruption of educational standards.” He writes:
Though I was among the education writers who enthusiastically supported No Child Left Behind, I should have realized that by focusing almost exclusively on the educationally disadvantaged, yet ignoring the country’s future scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, NCLB—despite its framers’ best intentions—would damage America’s competitiveness. As noble as combating “the soft bigotry of low expectations” is, America’s global standing and economic well-being are more likely to be improved by nurturing a culture of academic excellence and creating programs that support elite education in math and the sciences.
Stern brings in racial politics and sensitivities when he continues:
NCLB could easily have included reforms to benefit academically gifted students—for example, using financial incentives to encourage states and school districts to expand programs for gifted kids in the early grades and to create more merit-based science and mathematics high schools. The idea of strengthening elite education never entered the NCLB conversation, however; the civil rights agenda pushed everything else off the table. With Republicans trying to establish their civil rights bona fides, a bipartisan consensus formed to focus the new legislation almost exclusively on shrinking the racial achievement gap.
What went wrong with NCLB and its testing, writes Stern, is that to “look good to the feds and the public, education authorities unsurprisingly lowered standards and found other ways to game the tests.” He also laments that perhaps “the best indicator of the states’ neglect” of gifted STEM students “is that fewer than 100 science and math high schools currently exist across the country, and they enroll only 47,000 students"—which Stern calls “an absurdly low number.” He condemns prohibitions “against hiring instructors who, though they may have advanced science or math degrees, lack the useless graduate-level education courses needed to qualify for a state teaching license.” And he adds that the “single pay schedule mandated by the union contract is another obstacle to success,” in that a gym teacher at a top-rated specialized STEM high school “will earn the same salary as a colleague with a mathematics Ph.D. teaching college-level calculus.”
Stern declares that “Democrats and Republicans need to reunite and recognize that federal support for elite education—above all, in math and science—is essential for advancing America’s economic success.” He calls for amending NCLB to create federal “financial incentives to states to boost the number of competitive, specialized high schools” and to keep them “free of ... bureaucratic and union constraints.” He closes by quoting Thomas Jefferson, praising what he calls the “Jeffersonian belief that, though America’s schools should educate all children well, they should also nurture academic excellence for the good of our democracy.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for Science and the Media . He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.