Right, I haven't finished reading this yet, but the sentence I quoted is throwing up red flags. Is it true? Is it provable? I know quite a damn bit about science but, like all but a fraction of the population, the technical details of fracking escape me. Many of the people who believe that climate change doesn't exist were exposed to scientific proof that it does at some point -- but that doesn't sway their ingrained beliefs (and the ones who have the power to do anything about climate change all went to Ivy League schools anyway). Honestly, I care deeply about the environment, more than most, and even on my most bitter and cynical days I wouldn't claim that offshore drilling directly affects me (or that, if I'd learned its ins and outs in school instead of from Wikipedia, things would be different somehow). Shitty science education doesn't cause all those unplanned pregnancies; lack of available condoms does. There's a tie-in, but it's at a societal level, not in the classroom. The example she gives of a family who refused doctors -- that seems to me not a failure of the education system (although it undoubtedly failed that family in other ways) but rather just another example of superstition trumping knowledge. This happens everywhere, it happens to people who went to school ... and anyway I didn't learn a thing about vaccines or angioplasties in high school. It could be argued that I learned a certain respect for doctors and transitively an awe of science and medicine, but that's tenuous. Standardized tests don't matter or help, and this is ridiculous anyway. It smacks of elitism to maybe point out that while funding was being channeled toward kids who were struggling so they could pass tests and "keep up," it was being withheld from the brightest kids, the ones who might with a little pushing have gone on to Ph.Ds in biology and chemistry -- but it's true. Regardless, I don't want to get derailed shouting about NCLB; low-hanging fruit. So what's actually at stake when schools skimp on science? I think the worst result is that tons of kids go off to college not even realizing science is an option. It's not necessarily the knowledge they miss out on -- again, could go my whole life not knowing the amount of physics I do and it probably wouldn't matter -- it's the opportunity to be one of the few people to whom a deep understanding of physics is vital. It's well-documented, I guess, that America's losing the brain race these days, and this article right here points out why. You skimp on science and you don't grow any new scientists. (For the record, I don't agree completely with everything I've written here and I actually think this article is right in a lot of ways -- but part of it struck a jarring note with me. Clearly.)How well we understand science affects almost every aspect of our personal and civic lives: our health, our reproductive choices, our understanding of the news, how and whether we vote, and our interaction with the environment.
No Child Left Behind, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002, was my constant professional companion, rating the schools where I taught as adequate or inadequate and allocating resources accordingly. This frequently maligned law identified the subjects I taught—English, reading, and writing—as among the most crucial (along with math), and I received additional support so that my students could be successful on the standardized tests that determined my schools’ yearly progress.