Lederman replies: It is a pleasure to assist Rustum Roy, who is equally renowned as a science educator and a materials scientist. Roy has usefully summarized the criteria that scientists should satisfy in order to be effective in the K–12 domain.
The reform of science education must be for all high-school graduates, future citizens, consumers, family members, and voters. Perhaps never before has this nation needed voters with the qualities of a science way of thinking (see my Reference Frame column “Revolution in Science Education: Put Physics First,” Physics Today, September 2001, page 11). 1 Therefore, I work on a core science curriculum designed for all K–12 students. The goal is a seamless math—science curriculum, for students from pre-kindergarten through grade 12, taught by a well-trained, well-paid, and well-respected teacher corps.
Roy insists that scientists know something about the students they want to educate. Teaching Physics 101 to graduates of the Chicago high schools helps me, as has helping organize the Teachers Academy for Math and Science, a K–8 teacher development program, for the past 14 years. TAMS has learned that if it stays with teachers for three years (some 200 hours of science, math, and technology), the K–8 student scores on standardized math tests zoom up. This is true for deep urban Chicago. We may not know how the children get to school daily, but we know that they can be successful high-school graduates. Better nutrition, health care, home nurturing, and such do help, but schoolchildren also need good, lively, provocative teaching.
Genetically optimistic, I believe the K–12 system can be fixed so that it produces a science-literate population (see Physics Today, May 1992, page 9, and Physics Today, April 1995, page 11). 2 Roy and I agree that this is the goal of high schools and that, if the goal is achieved, many “apparently average” students will become stars and cure senility and find grand unification. There are just too many examples of successes in urban poor schools not to believe.
Roy makes the point that physicists are so parochial that they would replace English and music with theoretical astrophysics and quantum string theory. Oh, come on!
Scientists, Roy insists, must take the time to absorb the vast literature produced by education professionals. One can start with Johann Pestalozzi, proceed to Jean Piaget, John Dewey, Robert Gagne, Jerome Bruner, Theodore Sizer, and pause at Howard Gardner. Useful? Yes. Essential? I’m not so sure.
I share Roy’s alarm at the state of US science literacy. I argued that the near future may leave all children behind but that ultimately the mandate will be to give the highest priority to the war on ignorance and pay the cost of providing a 21st-century liberal arts education to all children. Roy’s neuro-nonsensical pessimism is where he and I part company, but we can’t be expected to agree on everything.
