Why we need to get rid of science class

This September has been unlike any other I’ve experienced. I’m living in a high-rise building. I’m wearing a suit to work. I’m traveling to a new city every weekend. And, for the first time in twenty-seven years, I’m not spending my days in a classroom.

It’s a step nearly all Americans take. Except for the few who choose a career in teaching or academia, time in the classroom eventually comes to an end. For some, this moment comes early: students lose interest in education or find new responsibilities at home, and their schooling ends before graduation. For some, the moment comes much later: many doctoral students spend twenty or more years in classrooms before ending their formal schooling. But eventually, the days in a classroom end and a new stage of life begins. For me, that moment came this September. My situation is unique, as I plan to return to the classroom next fall, but for the first time in my life, I have an outsider’s perspective on the role of school in society.

I look at our nation and think about the things that tie us together. History. Values. Culture. Should school be on that list? What role does school play in turning us into Americans? The enormous variety of educational systems across the country, and the wide discrepancies in achievement across those systems, makes finding an answer to that question nearly impossible. But we can start with a simple idea: most Americans under twenty have spent more time in a classroom than in any other place outside their home. Regardless of the quality of their school, regardless of graduation rates or AP scores or test results, being part of a classroom is something that is common to nearly all Americans.

Our nation loves to talk about school. It’s no wonder…we all have a personal experience with the topic. We might have little knowledge of international diplomacy or farm subsidies or multi-reagent analysis, but we all have firsthand knowledge of what happens at school and ideas for how our country might make schools better. For this reason, school, like no other concept in the United States, might be the thing that links us together. It’s not that we all learned the same thing at school…because we didn’t. It’s that each of us went to school. School, itself, is part of our national identity.

You would think that we would have long ago solved the problems facing American schools. After all, it’s a topic millions of Americans understand. We know what we liked about school, we know what we hated, and many of us aren’t shy about sharing our opinions. So why are our schools still struggling? It can’t be for a lack of good ideas. Educational reform has been a longtime political catchphrase, and many government leaders have worked hard to enact programs that would improve our nation’s classrooms. Yet we frequently hear stories about the failures of our public schools and how the programs we’ve enacted have seen little effect.

I think that’s all about to change.

Last week, I received my weekly copy of Time magazine and saw a cover story about American schools and strategies for fixing them. The lead story detailed a soon-to-be-released movie, titled Waiting for Superman, that chronicles the struggles of five public school students. (Lest you think a documentary about education won’t find an audience, keep in mind that this movie is the newest film by the producer of An Inconvenient Truth).

Last week, the National Science Board released a report that shows how we can improve our international competitiveness by identifying gifted students and targeting them for specialized instruction in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The goal is to train the next generation of innovators.

Last week, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released its own K-12 STEM education report with seven specific suggestions for how to improve American schools. Recommendations? Train 100,000 new STEM teachers and open 1,000 new STEM-focused schools throughout the country over the next ten years.

Last week, President Obama himself described developments in his “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a public-private partnership to improve STEM instruction in America’s schools.

Last week, I participated in a meeting that focused on inspiring students to seek careers in science. Researchers and professors talked about what it’s going to take to encourage the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Last week, I attended a live broadcast of NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” at the National Geographic headquarters, where experts discussed the science of the Gulf Oil Spill and addressed whether it’s too late to save our changing oceans. (Their answer? We need to inspire people, especially students, to take action).

We’re at a point in American history where citizens, media, teachers, students, and government are coming together, independently and jointly, to decide it’s time to change the way we teach American students.

Will we succeed? I don’t know. Schools are complicated, and even simple systems are difficult to change. Telling teachers they need to suddenly try something completely new is going to cause some resentment. But this is an opportunity for bold action.

So here’s my simple suggestion: get rid of science class. And not just science class, but math class and history class and English class, too.

I’m serious…we need to change the way we do school. The goal of science class should not be that students learn science. Instead, it should be that students learn how to solve problems. The goal of English class is not that students learn English…it’s that they learn to communicate. Calling it English or Science or History limits what our students can learn. We can be doing much more.

Any good teacher will tell you they teach students how to think. Why not let them do that, explicitly? There’s no need to compartmentalize learning with labels like English and science and drama. Course names like “Critical Thinking” and “Creativity” and “Social Responsibility” might seem too nebulous for a course offerings booklet, but isn’t that what we really want our students to learn?

The place that change like this starts is, of course, at the top. We have a federal law that requires annual testing in math and English if schools are to receive federal funding. With titles like math and English, can we really be surprised that schools are teaching math and English? No. So we need to change our federal government’s expectation of what happens in schools.

But change like this also works from the bottom. The school experience is common to nearly all Americans, and nearly all Americans attended a school that offered courses in specific subjects and disciplines. They remember going to sixth grade social-studies class, or tenth-grade English. They automatically expect that today’s students should have similar experiences. After all, it’s the only thing they know. So we need to change our citizenry’s expectation of what happens in schools, too.

As citizens, we currently expect certain things from our schools. We ask schools to teach students how to read and write. We ask them to teach students how to use mathematics and science, how to complete assignments, how to work independently, and how to contribute to society. Some schools deliver. Others don’t. But amazingly, our set of expectations has changed very little over the past hundred years. Despite all the change in our world, despite technology revolutions and economic reforms and international trade, we still educate students using the same general philosophies we used in 1910.

We’ve tried many things to improve our schools. We’ve tried smaller classes, we’ve tried smaller schools, we’ve tried new curricula, we’ve tried computers and Smartboards and cooperative learning. But we still teach students English and we still teach them science, and we still do it separately. Some schools break the mold, mixing disciplines and courses, but even they must test their students with subject-specific examinations.

If we really want to effect change, we need to change our set of expectations. We need to define not the segregated subject matter we want students to learn, but the skills we want them to master. And yes, we need to test them on those skills. From parents to politicians, from school boards to teachers, across all elements of society and across all parts of the nation, we need to redefine what we want to school to be.

The No Child Left Behind act requires annual testing in English and math. But there’s a problem with the system: each state can define its own standards. Some states’ tests are rigorous; others’ aren’t. We’ve recognized the disconnect, and there’s a new national movement to develop Common Core Standards and an assessment system that would be shared across the states, so that a child in Michigan could be expected to learn the same things as a child in Maryland. It’s a smart idea that will help states work cooperatively and share ideas for improving instruction. But it doesn’t go far enough. The standards address only two areas…English and math. Our states are cooperating, but they’re cooperating to create a system that will not be meaningfully different from the one we’ve been using for the last hundred years.

Instead, we need to define a new set of expectations for what we want students to be able to do. These expectations need to reflect our current national economy, our current national values, and our current national interests. I’m excited that the National Science Board and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology are calling for major change in the nation’s schools. But our current national assessment system is going to prevent much of this progress. We can try to change the way we teach students, but if students are still going to be tested with subject-specific exams, then teachers are still going to teach them subject-specific knowledge.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has developed a set of simple, powerful expectations for what students should learn at school. Is theirs the only option? Of course not. But it’s a great example of what we can do to make school relevant, meaningful, and worthwhile for today’s students and today’s economy.

Communication skills. Creativity skills. Critical thinking skills. Interpersonal and Collaborative skills. Problem solving skills. Information and media literacy skills. Social responsibility skills.

These are the things we want our students to learn. These are the things we want our students to know. Why not make it explicit? Why not use these skills as the focus of a national assessment system? Sure, it’s tough to make a test that assesses creativity or communication, but we’re up to the challenge. Politicians and parents throughout the country are talking about education, in ways we never have before. We’re all interested in improvement. Why not start big?

So, get rid of “science” class, and replace it with problem solving class. Use science to teach students how to solve problems…but also use art, and history, and media studies. Get rid of “English” class, and replace it with communication class. Use English to teach students how to communicate…but also use journalism, and web design, and debate. We still want students to learn about natural systems, and we still want them to learn about writing, but we want them to learn about these topics in a different context. The goal is not that we create scientists and writers. The goal is that we create problem solvers and communicators. Science and English are just a strategy for getting there. Replacing our current national assessment system with one that measures communication, creativity, critical thinking…this will give us the freedom to prepare kids for citizenship in modern America. Science and English are just a pathway.

Speak with college professors. Talk to workplace leaders. Listen to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. It’s not textbook knowledge of science and math and English that makes our students competitive. It’s their ability to think. It’s their ability to create. It’s their ability to communicate. These are the ideals of an American education, but they’re so often an afterthought in our current system. Let’s make them our priority. Let’s be vocal about what we want from our schools and what we want to see in our students. Let’s be bold.

Why this is the year I become an American

For a little over thirty years, I’ve been a Washingtonian. But I haven’t been an American. At least, not yet.

There’s a difference. It took me a cross-country drive, a visit to Mount Vernon, and a meeting at the U.S. Capitol to see it. Driving through the rolling fields and prairies of the great plains, walking the path of George Washington along the Potomac River, and speaking with teachers from every corner of the nation, my experiences over the past several weeks have me thinking about my identity and what it means to be a citizen of this country.

Until I left for the nation’s capital, I had always considered myself an American. Now, I’m not so sure. There’s overlap, of course: the values of the nation radiate across the states, and my upbringing and my experiences have been similar to those of millions of others throughout the country. But there’s more to being part of this nation than merely living within it.

So who am I? A Washingtonian? An American? I’m not sure anymore. Here at the seat of our nation’s government, I’ve found myself thinking about my country in a way I never have before. It’s not just the marble buildings and the monuments and the museums. It’s something more.

We call it the United States, but I’ve never understood the concept until now. Here in the capital, I’m starting to recognize how the nation fits together. And I’m starting to learn how I fit in to it all.

On my journey East, I pass through Nebraska and Iowa. I’ve always imagined flat fields with endless rows of corn. That’s not what I find. Instead, small family homesteads with charming barns and silos dot the hills, groves of trees separating fields from each other. This was once the frontier, a land of opportunity and dreams.

I walk to work in Virginia, and many of the license plates on the cars that pass me note the state’s 400th anniversary. This is where the idea of America began, the home of our nation’s earliest European settlement. I pass by George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon and recognize I’m in the presence of one of the world’s most extraordinary men.

I board the subway and cross underneath the Potomac into the District of Columbia, and I enter a city with laws and government unlike anywhere else in the nation, where residents couldn’t even vote for President until 1964, and where they still don’t have the right to elect a voting representative in Congress. At its heart sit the centers of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government. The decisions made here define our national experience.

I drive north into Maryland, home of soft shell crab and the Chesapeake Bay, to a place where a Civil War battle bloodied the earth and the nation’s history was forever changed. This land has been part of two American revolutions.

The other Einstein fellows come from Hawaii and New Jersey and Florida and Illinois, from California and Connecticut and Texas. Each brings a different perspective on education, but not just because we all work in different types of schools or with different types of students. It’s because we’re each literally bringing our State’s values and ideals with us to Washington. We, collectively, are America.

I’m starting to see the United States as it literally is: states, united. Until I moved to Washington, DC, I thought I was an American. But I know now that I didn’t start becoming an American until I sat in a room with thirty other teachers from throughout the country and spoke about education. When people come together, that is America.

This year, I’m becoming an American, but I’m starting from scratch. In a way, it’s my turn to be an adolescent again. I thought I knew who I was…a Washingtonian, a teacher, a husband. Those labels are still true, but now I’m becoming something else, too. I’m forming a new identity. Just like the students I teach, I’m trying to figure out who I am, and, indeed, who I want to be. I’ve lived here in the capital for just a few weeks, but I’m starting to recognize that my experiences this year won’t be much different from those of the students I left behind in Spokane.

I’ve begun work in a brand new setting, far from the world of school and science education. The National Science Foundation is not a classroom. But it might as well be. I’m in a new environment, with new responsibilities, and little expertise. At its heart, the experience I have here will be much like that of my middle school students. I need to learn a new vocabulary. I need to develop new relationships. I need to create products that show my knowledge and understanding. I need to figure out what it means to be an effective worker in the NSF environment. And, here in the nation’s capital, I need to figure out what it means to be an American.

I haven’t thought this way about my own identity for many years. Not since high school, in fact. But the path I’ll take this year mirrors that of countless American students. In schools across the country, kids will spend much of their day figuring out who they want to be and how they’ll fit in. For many students, forming an identity trumps everything else. Kids decide every day to try on new personalities. They change their clothing, they change their hairstyles, they change their friend groups. This focus on identify formation has big implications for the way we approach education.

The most important thing we can do in middle school and high school, far beyond teaching any scientific principle or language arts skill, is to give students an opportunity to learn what type of person they want to become. Adolescence is about identity development, pure and simple, and we teachers need to key in on that if we want to make a difference. Effective schools and effective educators are deliberate about giving kids opportunities to see what it means to be an actor, or a politician, or an engineer, or a businessperson.

And the best educators don’t stop there. We give our students opportunities for social interaction, where kids can try out different personalities and learn, in real life, what it means to be a responsible citizen. We teach students how to communicate, how to solve arguments, how to contribute to teams, and how to relate to others. We focus on social development just as much as career or college preparation. We give kids a chance to find out not just what they want to be, but who they want to be.

When schools teach about character development, it’s usually done almost exclusively at the elementary level. We teach kids about diligence and respect and integrity, and we do a good job of it, but then we suddenly stop once kids enter secondary school. We transition to social studies and science and music, and we hope that the principles students have learned in their elementary years stay with them for the second half of their schooling.

But this is exactly opposite the way we should be approach our curriculum. The critical period for identity development is not the elementary years…it’s when kids are in middle and high school. It’s important to set a good foundation, and I would never argue that we should remove character education from our elementary schools. But the true emphasis on character education should be during the middle and high school years.

Parents and politicians would likely say we’re dumbing down our schools, that character education has no place next to AP Physics or English Literature. And maybe they’re right…school should be challenging, and since most character education programs were created for elementary schools, they don’t have the level of rigor our communities expect for middle or high school. Yet, most students would probably benefit more, later in life, from an intensive focus on character education than on geometry.

Whether we focus on incorporating character development into our existing classes (discussing concepts like integrity as students analyze literature, or teaching cooperation techniques when students work collaboratively on a biology project), or whether we incorporate stand-alone character education classes into our course catalogs, it’s important that our middle school and high school students have an opportunity to learn not just what they want to be, but who they want to be. It’s important that we offer some direction as students make those decisions. Teaching students to be responsible, contributing citizens should be the paramount duty of every school in the nation.

So, students, you thought I’d left you this year. But I’m starting to realize that even though we’re 2500 miles away, our experiences will be similar. I wish you the best of luck as you begin your new classes. For maybe the first time ever, I know what you’re going through.