Crazy U.S. science education

Amazingly inflated credentialism. A REDUCTION in government funding is needed

Recently, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) wrote an editorial titled "'Global' Science Advocacy." He calls for scientists to be advocates not only on Capitol Hill through their professional societies, but also by recruiting friends, neighbors, city council members, etc., to the cause of science advocacy. This is written in response to the proposed FY2009 budget request Bush made to Congress in which some agencies "such as the NIH, are slated for flat funding or worse." After reading this, I decided I must heed the call and do a little science advocacy.

Before I go on, there is an interesting aside. Mr. Leshner (the CEO of AAAS) states that "US research will see its fifth consecutive year of decreased support (in inflation-adjusted constant dollars)." Basically, US research hasn't received a cost-of-living raise in 4 years: it's feeling the inflation tax, and it hurts!

From 1998-2003, the NIH budget was doubled. I started graduate school during this time period, and things were booming. The way I heard it, Bill Clinton doubled the budget, but Mr. Leshner writes that John Porter, Arlen Specter, and Tom Harkin led the effort. Regardless, a lot of this doubling actually went to Big Science - large budget, long-term projects usually requiring a lot of infrastructure. This is as opposed to individual scientists (called Primary Investigators, or PI's) at universities receiving the money through research grants. In fact, the fraction of money going to PI's fell during this period.

Since 2003, however, the funding has remained stagnant in terms of actual dollars, and has decreased in terms of what those dollars can buy. But the Big Science research centers haven't been closed, of course, so PI's and universities have had their funding cut. Actually cut. Not just "not increased at a fast enough rate." Grants are not getting renewed, or are getting renewed at a lower level than before.

It makes things tough. Stress is high and scientists are pessimistic. To add to the woes, this large influx of money between 1998-2003 had to be spent. So universities built new buildings, hired new faculty, and recruited more students. The buildings will require continuing revenue to maintain and the new faculty are applying for their own grants (in competition with the existing faculty). So it's been a typical Boom-and-Bust (the bust is still forthcoming...I'd say we're in a science-recession).

My incoming class to the Berkeley biology program was the largest class to date. And all of the ones that followed my class were even bigger. In my view, this was incredibly irresponsible, although unavoidable when grants are inflated. Thousands of biologists are graduating with PhD's every year and they need jobs. But, we've all just been kicked out of the nest and told "Good luck. You'll need it."

Over the course of the last 30 years, a PhD has become essential to climbing the ladder at a pharmaceutical company. And now, one or two postdoctoral fellowships (2-4 years each) are needed to land almost any job in biology. This is inflation of education. Try getting a job doing completely mindless work at your neighborhood biotech with a high school diploma. Those jobs are reserved for people with Bachelor's degrees from good universities. Do you want to actually apply the knowledge you learned in your senior-level lab course and develop an experimental plan? You'll need a Masters or PhD for that. From Harvard.

At the AAAS national meeting last week, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sent representatives to address the scientists that had gathered. Not surprisingly, they call for "big boosts to research funding." This sounds a lot like a stimulus package, and it's typical pandering to a special interest group by promising more money and everything will be free. Of course, this is welcomed by many scientists: the outgoing President of the AAAS reportedly stated that Congress has passed "a budget that does not meet the needs of American Science." An NIH budget that is 100% higher than the one ten years ago does not meet our needs. Whoops! I mean: A budget that is 0% higher than last year does not meet our needs.

If you watched the MTV presidential candidate forum last month, you'll recall that students are all going to get a lot of federal money from Hill-bama to pay for college (you'll also recall that the entire studio audience was college students, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence).

I think we already have too many college graduates in this country, but soon there will be more. Then they, too, will get PhD's when they find out that their B.S. is just that. At some point, 15 years as a postdoctoral fellow will be the norm, which means scientists will start their first job at age 42 (as opposed to 30 currently: diploma at 18 + 4 years for college + 5 years for grad school + 3 years for postdoc).

This is a terrible system, and inflating it with evermore funding is not going to fix it. Last year, the NIH funding was not increased (3.8% cut accounting for official inflation). We need more of this, and by "this," I mean NIH budget cuts. That means universities will have to train fewer PhD's, and they will be hiring fewer research professors. Private industry as well as academia will have to start giving people with less education more responsibility. It will be painful, but healthy. Who knows: maybe the next biotech innovation will be that they will start promoting people with good college educations (but no additional letters behind their name) to managerial positions, allowing them to increase expenditures on capital (instead of letters) and really take medicine into the future.

So call your city council member and get them to resolve that this madness must stop. Write your representative in DC and tell them that private industry and charities will best be able to fund the future of medicine. Advocate for the future of science in America!

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Dumb students "out" themselves

The controversy over electives in the Albuquerque Public Schools curriculum heats up. Should students who do poorly on state tests be forced to take remedial classes and not allowed to take electives? Wednesday, students themselves responded in the Albuquerque Journal newspaper -- but may not have proved the point they intended. The Journal said the letters are from students at Jefferson Middle School. Of eight letters published, seven of them are full of grammar and spelling mistakes:

"I know I wont wont my eletive tooken away. wht about the sped kibs? Hae you thought about that!"

The students are responding to the possibility of APS taking electives away from students who fail state tests for math and reading.

Another student writes, "I dissagree with your oppion. If students dont have there electives we will have no reason to come to school. And if kids start not coming to school it will be your fault."

Melissa Armijo has a child at Jefferson. She agrees with the statement, but said the mistakes in the letter are scary. I think that they should have a medium of being able to still give a child an elective and also having that child learn how to read and write correctly,"Armijo said.

The Albuquerque Journal is a partner with KOAT. The Journal said the letters that were published were representative of the letters they received. Many of the letters came from an e-mail sent by their teacher and then a few from the students themselves. The Journal said they confirmed every letter that ran in the paper but chose not to run the students' names. There were several letters the Journal did not run that had even more serious grammatical and spelling errors.

Jefferson students did well on last year's math and reading tests but the school did not meet Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. More than half the APS high school students tested last year did not pass the math or reading sections of the standard tests. APS said those students may soon have to replace electives with remedial classes in those subjects. The district is waiting for guidelines from the state before implementing any new policy.

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Australia: Literacy taught by illiterates

By Christopher Bantick

It is not just this newspaper that is questioned by Ilana Snyder over its position on literacy. In her book The Literacy Wars: Why Teaching Children to Read and Write is a Battleground in Australia, I am cited several times, and not because I have written on this page. I do hold the view that literacy can be taught with rigour and tested for performance. Snyder suggests: "It was the Murdoch paper's crusade against contemporary approaches to literacy education that motivated me to write the book. In recent years, The Australian's in-house opinion shapers have been accorded astonishing privilege and power. Their goal has been to dictate a reactionary model for the secondary-school curriculum. It is time to hold them to account." But while Snyder can attempt to marginalise The Australian's role in the literacy debate, this is misleading.

It is not my intention to examine and dismiss Snyder's often fatuous, niggardly arguments in her intemperate book. The point here about Snyder and fellow travellers who endorse the view that literacy is an experience rather than a learned discipline is that opposition of any kind - call it conservatism - is ridiculed. It is a neat ploy to say that the so-called Right, for which this newspaper is supposedly a mouthpiece, is narrow and prescriptive in its appreciation of literacy. The enemy has been identified. Meanwhile, those on the Left are expansive, welcome new ideas, are progressive and embrace theory. But this is a deceptive argument.

Literacy transcends the Right or Left positions. It is critics such as Snyder who wish to reduce it to the old Left-Right debate. Moreover, if opinion is even marginally conservative, it is immediately treated as suspect. The problem with Snyder's reductive argument is that she denies the reality that literacy education in Australia is in serious trouble. There are many children who cannot read, write, spell, understand grammar, construct a clear sentence and punctuate with meaning. The reason is palpably obvious.

The students accepted into university teaching courses are often simply the leavings, the lees if you like, after the better students have opted to undertake more prestigious and ambitious degrees. One has only to look at the entrance scores for teaching, some as low as 56, to see that high-flyers are not entering the classroom. The result is teachers who are not proficient in literacy are teaching children. Is it any wonder that Australia is producing illiterate children when they are taught by illiterates? It is for this reason that the NSW Government has introduced tests for five-year-olds in literacy and numeracy from this year in an attempt to head off early learning difficulties. It makes sense.

The reality is that literacy instruction in Australia has been of questionable quality for decades. It is also easy to trace the decline in proficiency to the introduction of progressive, child-centred, jargon-based theory that took over many Australian classrooms during the 1970s. What Snyder and the strident voices of the Left do not grasp, or seem to care about, is that if children are not taught literacy, then they are effectively disenfranchised for life.

Recent research by Australian National University economists Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan, entitled How Has School Productivity Changed in Australia, points out that today's teenagers are less literate than those of the '60s. The reason is simple: poor teaching.

While Kevin Rudd makes much of his so-called education revolution, which is supposedly going to leap off a laptop keyboard, he has been noticeably silent on the much harder question: will the federal Government be insistent that schools lift their literacy standards? Before the election, Rudd promised to publish primary and secondary school results in reading and writing and numeracy in years three, five and nine. Earlier this month Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Julia Gillard, when referring to the national action plan for literacy and numeracy, said: "The Rudd Government understands that literacy and numeracy are the building blocks of a good education." Well, prove it.

The Rudd Government needs the will and preparedness to take on the entrenched interests in university education departments that work against structured, phonetically based language instruction. It should expose where literacy instruction is deficient and take necessary remedial action. This can be measured by a published state-by-state, school-by-school comparison. But these results should not ossify hidden in some departmental journal but be published in newspapers, much as the Year 12 results and school rankings are done in Victoria. It will soon become evident why it is that some schools in the same socioeconomic band, with the same cohort of children, are doing better than others. This does two things: expose the schools and expose deficient teachers.

While Snyder's book will be welcomed by the literacy luvvies as a justification for their failure to instruct children properly, the truth is that the Left resists accountability. Do parents really care about the literacy wars? Hardly. They just want their children to learn to read and write.

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