How to seize a 'Sputnik moment'

By Jonathan Zimmerman

In his State of the Union Address this week, President Obama pledged to help American schools recruit and train 100,000 new science and math teachers over the next 10 years. But he left out the scientists and the mathematicians - as well as the economists, anthropologists, political scientists, and historians.

That's a big problem. Since the 1980s, scholars in the academic disciplines have largely ceded the matter of K-12 schooling to professors of education. If we're serious about improving our schools, we need to bring the disciplines back in.

As a professor with one foot in each camp - a disciplinary department and an education school - I'm acutely aware of the divide between them. People in the disciplines generally dismiss education, and education professors disdain the disciplines. It's mutual.

It's also destructive. Too many ed schools still believe the myth that you can teach students "methods" of education without rigorous attention to the disciplines they will be teaching. And most disciplinary scholars still think anyone who understands a subject can teach it.

They're both wrong. We've all had teachers who didn't know enough about a subject to teach it well. And we've had teachers who knew their material backward and forward, but couldn't communicate it to others.

So, besides helping schools hire new teachers in science, math, and engineering, as Obama promised to do Tuesday, he should also establish incentives for collaboration between education schools and the disciplines.

Here we might learn from the burst of intellectual energy that followed the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. Panicked by the specter of Soviet superiority, the federal government plowed money into basic research and education in the sciences. But it also lured scientists into K-12 schooling, where they spearheaded a pedagogical revolution.

Consider the Physical Sciences Study Committee, funded by $6 million from the National Science Foundation. Led by Jerrold Zacharias, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the committee brought together practicing scientists to reform high school physics instruction. The first of four textbooks it produced presented physics not as a "mere body of facts," but as "a continuing process by which men seek to understand the nature of the physical world."

Likewise, the NSF-funded Biological Sciences Curriculum Study galvanized practicing biologists around K-12 instruction. Under the direction of Bentley Glass, a Johns Hopkins geneticist, it produced three texts that emphasized "investigative processes" over "authoritative content."

The NSF also funded curriculum projects in math, chemistry, earth sciences, and more. By 1977, nearly two-thirds of American school districts had adopted at least one of these programs. At one point, 19 million students were enrolled in a course that drew on an NSF curriculum.

I was one of them. In 1973, my seventh-grade science teacher used the NSF-funded Introduction to Physical Sciences program. I still remember it because it was the best science course I ever took. In weekly laboratory experiments, I explored volume, mass, solubility, and other basic concepts. And that, too, was thanks to scientists who took breaks from their own labs to develop the curriculum.

It was also thanks to my extraordinarily skilled teacher. Not all teachers had his ability or knowledge; indeed, many haven't studied the science they teach. In 2004, the NSF reported, only a third of physical-sciences teachers in American middle schools had majored or been certified in a physical science.

So it won't be enough to revise our curricula, as we did when I was a kid. We need scholars from the academic disciplines to work with education schools to transform the way we prepare the next generation of teachers.

In my own field of history, for example, too many high school teachers still present just "the facts," instead of a sustained inquiry and argument about them. That's because they haven't been exposed to the essential inquiry and practice of the discipline. I couldn't teach you chemistry, and it's not because I don't know enough about teaching. I don't know enough about chemistry - how it generates questions, what counts as an answer, and what's left to know.

So, by all means, let's invest more federal dollars in education. But we should do so in a way that brings disciplinary scholars into closer cooperation with the people who write curricula and train teachers. On Tuesday, Obama said we're in a "Sputnik moment." Let's seize the moment and get it right this time.