What will it take to improve STEM education in the US?
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, PCAST, released “Prepare and Inspire: K12 Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) for America’s Future.” The group is comprised of experts in curriculum development and implementation, school administration, teacher preparation and professional development, effective teaching, out-of-school activities, and educational technology. The report was strengthened by additional input from STEM education experts, STEM practitioners, publishers, private companies, educators, and Federal, state, and local education officials.
The report makes several key recommendations including:
- Standards: support the current state-led movement for shared standards in math and science.
- Teachers: recruit and train 100,000 great STEM teachers over the next decade who are able to prepare and inspire students.
- Teachers: recognize and reward the tip 5 percent of the nation’s STEM teachers, by creating a STEM Master Teacher’s Corps.
- Educational Technology: use technology to drive innovation, by creating an advanced research projects agency for education.
- Students: create opportunities for inspiration through individual and group experiences outside the classroom.
- Schools: create 1,000 new STEM-focused schools over the next decade.
- Ensure strong and strategic national leadership.
The full report details the steps PCAST recommends to create a nation with robust STEM education.
Hello, I hope to leave you with two concerns.
1. How does STEM plan to work with students who are not “cut from the same cloth.” I ask as I have grandchildren who have remarkable inate skills/talents that may not translate into the classroom but have gifts which are quite amazing. I would like to provide one example: a two year old who knows where they have been, and how to get home, up to approximately 20 miles distance. Meaning, the child can point to the right or left, directing the parent/driver of the automobile, how to get home. I have two grandchildren who can do this. It is absolutely uncanny. How can these abilities be used by the US, the state, the locality, business sector and the child’s life as an adult?
2. How to avoid “killing” the cheer and gladness of a child entering school for the first time when the child doesn’t count or read at a specified grade level. My thought here is, a child should not enter school hopeful and leave school damaged. My brother is a perfect example. He is 46 now, suffered with horrible dislexia his entire life yet can build from a set of blue prints as though it where as easy as skipping rope? The problem is, the insults and injury of his school “career” lead to encredible hurt and he never graduated….he left school, he hated it and went for a GED instead.
Most concerned,
Victoria