The good news in 1995 was that American students performed better than Austrian students in advanced mathematics among students finishing highschool. The bad news was that Austria as the only on eof 16 countries American students finished ahead of, and in physics they didn’t even do that. They were dead last. A couple of weeks ago Science magazine reported that the Bush administration wasn’t going to let that happen again:
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), says it is bowing out of 2008 TIMSSA, an advanced version of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study given quadrennially to younger students, because it can’t fit the $5 million to $10 million price tag into its flat budget. Officials also question whether the target cohort–students finishing secondary school who have taken advanced mathematics and physics courses–is comparable around the world.
But many leaders in the mathematics community believe that the Administration opted out because it feared another poor U.S. performance would reflect badly on its signature education program, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. (Science, Vol. 317. no. 5846, p. 1851; subscription required)
Mathematics educators, from the American Mathematical Society to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, are pissed. The budgetary amount is so tiny in the federal budget (amounting to about 30 minutes worth of the cost of the War in Iraq) that it is a laughable excuse. The real answer is obvious to everyone. We’ll do badly. Again.
You don’t make a problem go away by refusing to acknowledge it. And you won’t make the country more able to take its place in the world community of scientists and engineers by undereducating its students. It’s not just the teaching of evolution in biology classes or pursuing stem cell research or political interference in climate science. The US is falling farther and farther behind in the bread and butter educational infrastructure for high school students: pre-calculus and calculus, modern physics and chemistry, concepts of biological information, computer science.
Science won’t be hurt. Science based in America will.