Public Engagement

I've spent time the past two days at the conference on the Civic Mission of American Education in Bloomington, MN; specifically, at meetings of the Minnesota team for the Educational Leadership Colloquium, organized by Minnesota Campus Compact. Much of our time was spent discussing the importance of students having four years of high school math if they are to succeed in college and be prepared for better-than-minimum wage jobs in the new global economy.

While nobody around the table disagreed with the goal of four years of math (or at least nobody openly dissented), the discussion surfaced some fundamental issues. They can be boiled down to three questions:

• How will we find and train the teachers to teach so much math?
  
• How will we convince parents that more math is important?
  
• How can we motivate students who may want to go to college, but don't aspire to a career in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field?

Finding and training the teachers: We need to make high school (and elementary school) teaching more attractive for college students who are primarily interested in a STEM career. This would require predictable access to teaching jobs after graduation, good salaries, and reasonable expectations of job security. (As it is, beginning teachers, even if they're good, often get laid off because of shifting school enrollments and finances.) These conditions, while nontrivial, could be readily met if governors and state legislators made solid STEM high school education a long-term as well as immediate priority and funded it accordingly. It would also require attitudinal changes among college and university STEM faculty, to regard K-12 teaching as an admirable career for their students. We also need to provide life-long learning and skills-upgrading opportunities for existing teachers, and develop imaginative new teaching materials for them to use.

Convincing the parents: Many parents don't come from college-going backgrounds, and may not realize the importance of a college education for the success of their children. Children who go to college and thereby enter a new world of contacts and opportunities may become alienated from the homes and neighborhoods in which they grew up: a not-uncommon first-generation story, and one that both parents and children may wish to avoid. Further, even if supportive parents wish to help their children with schoolwork, math and science at a serious high school level may be a difficult challenge. These difficulties may be among the toughest to overcome, but help could come from the business community whose employees may be these same parents. (Businesses, of course, have a self-interest in a steady future supply of well-educated workers.) A concerted program in which businesses communicated with parents about the importance of their children's education, developed tutoring programs, and generally reinforced governmental and educational efforts could go a long way.

Motivating the students: Even smart, well-educated, and successful people often have trouble seeing how math is useful in their daily lives. To some extent this is because computers have hidden the often quite complex calculations that make the modern world run, or because specially-trained people do much of the quantitative work. But I suspect that nearly everyone could work more effectively if they approached their work more analytically. Equally important, lack of adequate numeracy (to use John Allen Paulus's useful word) is contributing to a degradation of our ability to function as citizens. Unscrupulous politicians can perpetrate many deceptions on a population that cannot analyze the quantitative consequences of government policies. To make math (and science) training more relevant to the population at large, we have to develop new ways of teaching so as to make the practical applications clearer. We should devote as much effort to teaching probability and statistics as we do to calculus and linear algebra. This is an effort that we in higher education should lead.