The Washington Post ran an article today stating that a panel of prominent scientists and businessmen said that science and math education in America is not as good as it needs to be. Now, there are all sorts of comments to make about this article… from the recent court cases to put "Intelligent Design" into our science curriculums, to the notion that we can test for science knowledge on a multiple choice test, to the thought that classes with thirty or more kids in them don’t exactly lend themselves to the kind of experimentation and lab work that leads to good science learning or even that so many science classrooms are outdated and underfunded in this country.

And hey, I just made them in quick order, but the point of writing about this article is to think about the positive steps we can take… and some of those are the obvious next steps from the complaints:
1) Smaller class sizes — I can say from experience that a project-based classroom works better with twenty kids rather than thirty four. I have taught PHP to classes as small as sixteen and as large as thirty four. With thirty-four kids all working on their programs… even with group projects and peer tutoring, I couldn’t get to as many kids as I needed to in a period.

2) Spend the money to refurbish science lab classrooms. A proper science classroom should have running water and gas at every site, not just at a demonstration table. They should have probe-ware, they should microscopes that work, and they should be stocked with the stuff of the class they need, whether that is for biology, chemistry, etc…

3) Money needs to be spent for science lab assistants. Ever see a science teacher try to teach four labs in the same day without help in between to prep for them? It’s not pretty.

4) We need to let science teachers teach science in a way that makes sense. Science is hands-on, dirty stuff. It looks messy, but in reality it creates a very clean, analytical way of thinking. It’s lab-based, inquiry-based and project-based. For me, science is one of the ultimate progressive teaching tools. Let’s let science teachers teach that way.

5) And so let’s schedule science classes in a way that allows for that. School scheduling is a pedagogical tool, whether we want to think about it that way or not. The traditional high school class of forty-five minutes doesn’t help us learn science. Block scheduling can get us closer. Another model could be the way my old traditional high school did it when I was in school. Once a week, we had a double period of science so that we could do labs. Now, that double period was only an hour and a half long, but our science learning was hands-on in those moments, and it did work.

There are more, I’m sure… and the comments, as always, are open.

Clearly, this article hammers at a lot of the rationale behind the need for a school like the Science Leadership Academy, and this is a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot. (There is a post coming about my thoughts on science education soon… but I want to flesh out a few of the ideas I’ve been kicking around first.) What is interesting to me, as I think about the ramifications for SLA, is that a lot of the ideas I’m playing with above work for all classes, not just science. Again, science learning is good for any number of reasons and not just that we need more scientists in this country. Science learning trains us to think in a way that is valuable for poets, just as much as it is for scientists. And good inquiry-based education is every bit as important to a history classroom as it is to a science class. And, sadly, the flaws in our system that would cause a panel of experts to worry about science education are every bit as relevant in the other subjects too.

Let’s hope that we can start to really examine ways to improve. They don’t have to be new. I don’t think that Dewey, for example, would be surprised by anything I wrote above… These aren’t new ideas. Just, I hope, good ones.