Education & R&D & Science Andrew Kun on 29 Mar 2008 04:46 pm
US must improve K-12 education and increase research funding
In the March issue of Spectrum, Robert Lucky writes about a report by the National Academies which indicates that the long-term prospects for US global competitiveness are threatened by trends in our educational system and our economy. Now the chairman of the committee responsible for this 2005 report, Norman Augustine, has written a shorter version of the report. You can download it here.
The trend in the US educational system that’s cause for concern is that our schools are not turning out sufficient numbers of students who have the math background to even consider engineering and science careers. The trend in research funding has been for industry to abdicate its responsibility for funding research and for the federal government to underfund research. According to Lucky, “industry now spends three times as much on litigation in the United States as it does on research.”
Why does all this matter? Because the prosperity we enjoy in the US is largely due to our economic power (I won’t get into discussions about political systems which clearly have a lot to do with prosperity). But our economic power is threatened by the troubling double trends of fewer engineers and scientists in the pipelines of our schools and pinched research funding. Our economic power needs nurturing and the way to nurture it is to improve K-12 education in math and sciences and to increase funding for research. (We at Project54 try to help out with K-12 education by hosting school groups: see e.g. this post and also this post.)
Btw, I think that one thing that our K-12 education could use is a decreased stress on organized sports. That should free up some money to pay good math (and music, English, science, art, etc.) teachers and time for students to study academic subjects. Physical activity is important and should be encouraged, but teams, cheerleaders, banners, away games… How exactly do they contribute to education? They’re pretty much just fun activities. Fun’s a good thing, but America’s K-12 students clearly need some help with their homework first.
Andrew Kun
