All (U.S.) Children Left Behind

These Chinese students are kicking our butts in science.

New test results confirm what many of us have feared: U.S. students suck at science. These new numbers are not only bad for our reputation, they spell trouble for the future U.S. economy and possibly the world. Maybe President Obama is right and we are in the middle of another “Sputnik” moment.

The most recent test results put us on par with France, the Czech Republic and Hungary and miles away from the likes of China, South Korea, Finland and Australia. The top countries will be producing the best scientists who will drive economies forward. Those of us in the middle of the pack will either fall behind economically or stay competitive either by attracting good scientists from elsewhere or by changing our education system to match the Finns or the Aussies.

Of course this is only true if these results hold for top performing students, too. Since most scientists come from this group, if the top performing students in the U.S. hold their own against their counterparts in other countries, then we may be OK.

The testing folks provide this great tool, the International Data Explorer, that lets you parse the data in lots of different ways. And no matter how I sliced the data, we are in the middle of the pack. If I look at wealthy folks, or students who have educated parents or students that have scientists as parents, each category is still behind lots of different countries.

So we can’t blame the test results on immigrants, the poor or any of our usual convenient scapegoats. We are simply doing a poor job of teaching science. Such a poor job that our economy is going to be in real trouble in the not so distant future.

And it isn’t just our economy that is threatened. A general U.S. public that is not up to snuff scientifically might just put our world at risk too.

A scientifically illiterate public will fear vaccines and GM foods, won’t understand and so won’t believe in global warming and so on. This could mean a spread of disease, starvation and environmental catastrophes just to name a few.

It is important to remember that none of this is inevitable. We can ramp up our science education so that we train the best scientists in the world and maybe even create a scientifically informed and savvy public in the process.

In fact, Massachusetts has done just that in the last 15 or 20 years. If it were a country, Massachusetts would now be in the upper ranks of countries. We need to look to Massachusetts for how to improve other states' failing education systems.

Massachusetts shows that with the will and money to do it, we can turn our educational system around. Sadly, though, I am not sure most of the country will. Sputnik came with the fear of nuclear holocaust. Our current crisis comes with the fear of future irrelevance and a decreased standard of living.

The current risks are not life and death and so it will be much harder to mobilize the government, the public, and the unions to transform our education system. I guess our dominance economically and scientifically was good while it lasted.

A fun interactive that lets you compare math, science and reading scores between states and different countries.

State by state math scores compared to other countries.

Why this crisis will be harder to overcome than the Sputnik crisis.

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