George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 10 April 2019.]
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology tells us that in the next ten years the country will need, at a minimum, about 1M more STEM professionals than we will produce at our current rate. Today there are already more than 2.4M unfilled STEM jobs. It has been the innovators and workers in science, technology, engineering, and math who have made possible today’s quality of life, and it is they who will provide us the intellectual assets and infrastructure means to continue generating the wealth that, more than anything, will insure our future.
However, our public education industry is not doing much to support young people going into such careers. In fact, there is ample evidence that most of our education professionals are fostering a future that will soon relegate the US into second world status on the global stage. Today only one out of six high school graduates are proficient in STEM subjects and interested in a STEM career. However, out of this small cohort who then enroll in STEM programs, only 2 out of 5 actually graduate with STEM degrees. Most of our STEM students drop out because high school did not prepare them properly in science and math.
The cause of such deficits is now visible to all but the politically invested in Common Core, the latest whizbang curriculum to have come out of the mavens of progressive education. Federally mandated Common Core has turned much of K-12 education on its head, abandoning the teaching methods and means that accelerated post-war America into the world’s technology powerhouse. Today teachers are taught that they cannot teach science along with reading and arithmetic in the lower grades. New Common Core compliant approaches like ‘Everyday Math’ forbid memorizing multiplication tables and reject the use of common algorithms for solving problems in favor of new and counter-intuitive ones that are hard to understand.
In short, effective science and math education has become extinct in our union-dominated public schools in which unqualified teachers literally foil millions of kids in their efforts to understand and enjoy science and math. It is in such schools that kids are made to wade through dysfunctional instruction schemes in the early grades, after which they are not likely to stay interested in the more difficult subjects. Even as this predictable and visible tragedy unfolds, all the experts continue to noisily pretend they are solving the problem.
Common Core also induces schools to defocus what is left of their STEM curricula by piggybacking various arts subjects, thereby adding the ‘A’ and making STEM into STEAM. STEAM opens doors to further pedagogical perfidy and silliness by inviting courses like the recently announced “writing program for STEM students” developed by the University of Michigan. It is clear that, with these professional pinheads from the education schools, anything goes except straight-ahead, proven STEM teaching methods.
Things have gotten so bad that Bill and Melinda Gates have already pulled their support of Common Core, offering a veiled apology for being the early and major supporter of this disastrous approach to K-12 education. The Federalist reported that “Since 2009, the Gates Foundation’s primary U.S. activity has focused on establishing and implementing Common Core, a set of centrally mandated curriculum rules and tests for what children are to learn in each K-12 grade, with the results linked to school and teacher ratings and punitive measures for low performers. The Gates Foundation has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced $4T in US taxpayer funds (under the Obama administration) towards this goal. Eight years later, however, Bill Gates is admitting failure on that project, and a ‘pivot’ to another that is not likely to go any better.”
When we step back an take a broader look at what has happened to our ideologically-dominated public education from kindergarten through academe, it appears that things could not have gone more counter to America’s interests to continue as the global leader in technology, commerce, and maintaining the world order. In sum, to millions of Americans, our education system appears and performs as if it were designed for us either in Beijing or in the Kremlin.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] It’s also interesting and relevant to know some stats on how well our government schools are received by Americans.
- 62% of Americans think education has gotten off on the “wrong track”.
- 68% of middle-income earners vs 59% of low-income earners hold the ‘wrong track’ sentiment.
- A plurality (42%) of Americans would choose private schools over public schools in selecting among types of schools. 28% would select a public school, while 11% would select a public charter school, and 10% would rather homeschool their children.
- A solid majority (59%) favor charter school, and 23% oppose charter schools.
- A majority of Americans (56%) support school vouchers vs 28% who oppose such vouchers.
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