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The Task Before Us

The task before us is large. It is complex, and it will be expensive to deal with adequately. This might not be true if we had not allowed the system to become dilapidated and inefficient. Restoring its capability means not only addressing modern demands but also making up for more than a decade of neglect. In what follows I will address only the part of the problem that deals with youngsters in the preschool, elementary, and secondary school years. There is much to be done for our institutions of higher education and for continuing adult education, but because of its urgency, I prefer to focus on the earlier years.

I would like to suggest that there are six kinds of things that need to be accomplished.

1. The first condition for action is public awareness that, given our times, science education is important for everyone as individuals and to the nation as a whole. Our citizens must understand that this is so for very practical reasons. That is because it is connected to job opportunities, a healthy economy, and to our national security. Furthermore, it is necessary that this public awareness be maintained for the long period of time it takes to bring about lasting change in our system. Promoting hysteria will not work because it will not accomplish our goals.

While statements by public figures can help, the most powerful way to raise public consciousness is to begin to undertake direct, clear actions. When the people see their Federal and state governments begin to take action, they are likely to believe that an emergency exists.

2. We need to ensure that the teachers of science and mathematics in our elementary and secondary schools are well-trained specialists. Current public and legislative attention has largely concentrated on the supply and demand of teachers and on teacher quality. Federal and State initiatives are trying to address both the upgrading of teachers already in the system and the preparation of new ones. (Later in my testimony I will point out that, in spite of current proposals, aspects of this problem are still being missed.)

3. The effectiveness of science and mathematics teaching must be increased greatly in our elementary and secondary schools. This means updating the content, modernizing the materials and techniques, and restructuring the system, if necessary. In other words, good teachers are essential, but they are not

enough.

4.

We must systematically search out young people who are highly interested and talented in science and mathematics and continually motivate and challenge them. We should start with very young children and continue through the high school and college years. Scientific talent has always been a precious commodity and now it is becoming even more necessary in a world of technology based on science. In this regard it is especially important that we develop effective programs for reaching girls, minorities, the handicapped, and the economically disadvantaged; otherwise, the potential pool of future

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scientists and engineers will be much too small.

5. Alleviating problems in precollege science education necessarily calls for aggressive emergency measures, but in the long run, building and sustaining a capacity for the conduct of research and development on learning in science is critical. The argument for R&D is based on simple necessity: all other domains, from transportation and agriculture to health and defense, predicate progress on a solid base of scientific knowledge. In the long run we can progress in science and mathematics education only if we are able to understand the learning process more deeply, and to develop better teaching materials and techniques.

6. Finally, it is clear that substantial resources must be allocated and brought to bear in a way that will make it possible to upgrade and maintain our system of science education. Just how much this will be is difficult to say, but surely in the aggregate it will cost of the order of a billion dollars a year for many years, more if we are not prepared to sustain the investment for many years. Even that is a modest amount in comparison to the magnitude of the enterprise. Education in America is about a $120 billion a year investment, and research in the nation costs a few tens of billions a year. As nearly as one can tell, the funds earmarked for restoring science and mathematics education in the Nation are no more than a few hundred million at most. Thought of as capital investment in our country's scientific and technological future, the current and proposed expenditures are small.

The Federal Role

It is a truism that the cost of education must be borne by many institutions and parties. It is difficult to assign costs and responsibilities in any precise way. It is possible, however, to define the Federal role. I would suggest that Federal leadership is appropriate whenever:

о the necessary action is Federal by long and accepted tradition;

the costs are beyond the resource capabilities of the States and the private sector;

O Federal manpower needs are at stake;

achieving national equity is an issue; or

the main value comes by virtue of being Federal.

By those criteria, it makes sense now--as it did in the past--for the Federal government to take the lead in the following kinds of activities that by and large are not being provided for at all, or at a sufficient level, in the current bills:

talent identification and motivation, especially among girls and minority youth;

science television programs for children at all grade levels;

public understanding of science efforts of science centers, public
libraries, and the media;

the design and testing of new courses and materials for science teaching
and learning;

the expeditious but sensible exploitation of new information and commu

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nication technologies in behalf of better science and mathematics education; and

research and development in science education.

Teacher Preparation

How science and mathematics teachers go about their work and with what resources may change in the future, but nothing on the horizon even suggests that their role will be diminished. Thus, it is urgent that some legislation be passed in this Congress so that we can begin to deal with the problem of helping the teachers upgrade their subject-matter knowledge and their ability to teach it.

Viewed in the long run, however, there are, I believe, several shortcomings in proposed legislation that remain to be dealt with. Some of these are:

0 The aggregate authorization in most proposed bills, whether matched or not by state agencies and private sources, is small compared to the magnitude of the need. A few weeks of summer study once every decade or so is not enough to bring teachers up-to-date and keep them there. The cost of seeing to it that all of the unprepared, the poorly prepared, and the formerly prepared teachers of science and mathematics are brought up to standard, and then that they all receive additional training periodically, is many times higher than the sum total of what is now being proposed.

Many of the proposals call for state and private matching of funds.
This is a reasonable idea conceptually, but it is clumsy in operation
and it favors the wealthy states and those that have a profitable indus-
trial base. It is as important for the teachers in the poor states,
perhaps even more so than in the wealthy ones, to receive intensive
and periodic training.

Proposed legislation does not distinguish between two related, but
quite different dimensions of the problem: (1) the recognition and
advanced training for the very best teachers, and (2) the general up-
grading of the entire science and mathematics faculty in individual
schools. For the former teachers, NSF institutes of the kind that
used to be held in the nation's greatest research universities and
in which the participating teachers were selected in a national compe-
tition and paid stipends, are especially effective. They bring to the
teacher the prestige of NSF, the satisfaction of having been select-
ed on the grounds of merit, and the reward of attending great institu-
tions, however far they might be from one's residence. But to improve
the quality of science and mathematics instruction in a given school
requires that all teachers of those subjects receive full attention.
This can be accomplished best through the kind of instruction that
is operated through the states and local school districts as part of
a systematic multi-year plan, with the Department of Education serving
as the major funding agency.

O The proposals are not facing up to questions of effectiveness and effi

ciency. If we are really to serve the continuing education needs of
our teachers, year after year, we must develop an electronic capability
to supplement and implement traditional study opportunities. This
is to say we should now invest in a system for delivering teacher educa-
tion to the teacher at his school or home that uses video tapes, audio
tapes, computer programs, and the like. Such devices will make it
possible for teachers to stay up-to-date in content and techniqu
through personal study and, if necessary, demonstrate this through
periodic external examinations. Such a modern system could have associ-
ated with it periodic university study and experience in industry and
science museums. To accomplish this, it would be necessary to invest
not only in the delivery system, but also in the creation of effective
teacher training materials. There needs to be, therefore, legislation
authorizing grants to universities, science museums, and scientific
societies to provide these materials.

Mobilizing Resources

Like it or not, it will cost billions of dollars to restore vitality to the nation's science education enterprise. Proposed Federal legislation calls for only a few hundred million. Some States are making investments, but many are not, and many in fact are reducing educational expenditures. Where, then, are the funds to come from to do the job, and how can the job be managed?

The management question comes up because there are so many players in the game. On the Federal side there are several agencies (the Department of Education and NSF are the most prominent, but not alone) and several Congressional committees that have a legitimate interest in helping to upgrade science education. After that, we are dealing with 50 states, many of which divide the responsibility in smaller regional units, and some 15,000 separate school districts presided over by independent school boards. Private business and industry vary greatly from place to place in what they are doing to assist education. The foundations, public libraries and science museums, colleges and universities, numbering in the thousands, have a part to play in science education, as have the nation's scientific, mathematics, and engineering societies. How, then, are we to marshal resources and achieve national purposes, given such dispersion of authority?

As a start in finding an approach that acknowledges the capital investment character of the problem, the need for Federal leadership, and the crucial reality of State and local implementation, I would like to suggest that Congress consider creating what I will refer to here as the Corporation for Educational Assistance. This, or some such organization, might have the following

features:

o It would be quasi-governmental, modeled after such predecessors as
the Reconstruction Finance Corporation instituted by President Hoover,
the Municipal Assistance Corporation which provided a mechanism to
get New York City back on its feet, and the World Bank. It would be
conceived of as a stable, Federally backed financial agency prepared
to help the States design and implement hard-headed plans for strength-
ening science education.

Like such organizations, and perhaps also the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, CEA would serve purposes defined by Congress, but would
be managed by a board of trustees made up of distinguished leaders
from business, labor, education, and science. It would be headed by
a chairman and a CEO equivalent to the most distinguished business,
financial, and educational institutions in the United States.

It would itself be capitalized with funds from several sources. These might include:

a fixed annual appropriation from Congress,

the issuance of interest-paying bonds,

contributions from the private sector that would qualify for special tax credits,

revenue from an ear-marked tax on electronic arcade games. (This alone might provide something like several hundred million dollars a year, and would not be onerous.)

The Corporation would review plans to improve science and mathematics
education of the individual States, regions, and cities. The emphasis
would be on long-term planning by the States and would necessarily
take into account local circumstances, financial and educational. The
Corporation for Educational Assistance, through its lending authority,
could help provide States with improvement capital.

Since the focus of CEA would be long-term investment and making capital
available, the functions of other Federal and state agencies could
continue unabated. The NSF would still fund R&D, merit teacher fellow-
ships, science museums, and the like; the Department of Education would
provide funds for the development of national television programming
for children, teacher training institutes, dissemination, etc.; the
NIH would underwrite the development of instructional materials relating
to health, and so forth.

The second idea I would like to present to you has to do with the quality and availability of continuing teacher education. The nation's teachers, as has already been suggested, and the nation's children need to have available a modern system for learning. Such a system would have several elements, including:

a dedicated satellite (EDSAT), available for 24 hours a day exclusively to serve the educational needs of all of our students and teachers.

a combination of land stations and cable connections that would
link every school and college to EDSAT.

the development in many different universities, schoolrooms, televi