SPUTNIK REVISITED:
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SCIENCE REFORM
Peter Dow
Buffalo Museum of Science
Reflecting on the launching of Sputnik on October 4th, 1957, the comedian Bob Hope is reported to have remarked, "Their German scientists are just smarter than our German scientists." Be that as it may, most Americans, so it seems, blamed our apparent technological inferiority to the Soviets on poor science teaching in our schools. Although a few concerned scholar-educators like Max Beberman at the University of Illinois and Jerrold Zacharias at MIT had already launched successful reform efforts in math and science education, it took the Russian achievement of lifting into space a 184 pound communications satellite -- followed within a month by sending up a half ton rocket carrying a live dog -- to arouse the United States to large-scale legislative action. Within less than a year, Congress passed, and President Eisenhower signed, the National Defense Education Act, the most far-reaching federally-sponsored education initiative in the nation's history. The bill authorized expenditures of more than $1 billion for a wide range of reforms including new school construction, fellowships and loans to encourage promising students to seek higher education, new efforts in vocational education to meet critical manpower shortages in the defense industry, and a host of other programs. Admiral Hyman Rickover, the outspoken director of the Navy's nuclear submarine project, expressed what most American's felt:
"We are engaged in a grim duel. We are beginning to recognize the threat to American technical supremacy which could materialize if Russia succeeds in her ambitious program of achieving world scientific and engineering supremacy by turning out vast numbers of well-trained scientists and engineers...We have let our educational problem grow much too big for comfort and safety. We are beginning to see now that we must solve it without delay."[1]
The Sputnik-inspired Reforms of the 60's
One of the primary forces shaping the science reforms of the 1950's and 60's was the National Science Foundation. Founded in 1950, the NSF education effort prior to Sputnik had been confined to promoting science fairs and clubs and funding summer institutes for teachers. In 1955 the NSF annual report expressed growing concern about the shortage of high school students entering scientific careers, but was reluctant to lobby Congress for funds given the nationÕs historic aversion to federal influence in school matters. While the Foundation had cautiously supported Jerrold Zacharias's early planning work on PSSC Physics at M.I.T., it took the launching of Sputnikreleased a torrent of federal funds. In 1958 the NSF increased its support for curriculum development at a rapid pace. In addition to supporting PSSC, they funded the School Mathematics Study Group at Yale and the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. Within the next two years they also launched two programs in high school chemistry: the Chemical Bond Approach Project and the Chemical Education Materials Study of the American Chemical Society. By 1960 the programs of the Education Directorate represented 42% of the NSF annual budget. Each of these projects, at NSF's insistence, was guided by a steering committee of prominent scientists and engineers.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Sputnik-driven reforms was the extensive participation of the university research scholars in the reform effort. For a brief period between the mid-1950s to the early 1970s some of the nation's most distinguished academics left their libraries and laboratories to spend time in pre-college classrooms. Nobel laureates sought ways to teach the very young how scientists and mathematicians think, and men who had worked on the Manhattan Project created "kitchen physics" courses for the elementary schools. Indeed the massive application of brain power to the problems of education, and the possibilities for change that arose during this period, are unique in the annals of American education.
Promoting high quality science and mathematics in the schools was not the only concern of the Sputnik reformers. Equally challenging was the issue of teaching methods that could promote good "habits of mind." One of the most influential products of the period was psychologist Jerome Bruner's The Process of Education, a slim volume of essays reporting the deliberations of the Woods Hole Conference of 1959. This gathering of scholars and teachers who had been working on many of the math and science projects was assembled by Jerrold Zacharias to review and share the early results. The conference produced a number of papers that discussed, among other things, the implications of cognitive research for classroom practice. One paper argued the case for intellectual "structure": "In teaching or in deciding what to learn there is a question of getting hold of that minimum array of information that can be structured in such a way as to yield the largest range of reliable inferences."[2] In writing about the conference afterwards Bruner stressed the centrality of structure as a way of building intellectual "transfer" between the disciplines: "This type of transfer is at the heart of the educational process -- the continual broadening and deepening of knowledge in terms of basic and general ideas."[3] Published in 1961, The Process of Education took the educational world by storm. It sold over 400,000 copies and was translated into eighteen languages.
Jerrold Zacharias, who co-chaired the Woods Hole Conference with Bruner, challenged Bruner's emphasis on structure, suggesting the richness of the pedagogical dialogue that took place at Woods Hole. Recalling Bruner's account many years later, Zacharias remarked, "Structure gives me the pip when you apply it to education. Jerry makes such a point that the way to remember something is to understand its structure; that's the way Jerry remembers, but that may not capture the interest of the kid."[4] In an unpublished paper written in 1965 Zacharias pointed out that structures like Newton's Laws of Motion and Gravitation may be what science appears to be to the layman, but they are not what science is all about at the "cutting edge." "I have had the great good luck," he said, "to have lived through and participated in some of the great revolutions in physics, including the evolution of the great structure called quantum mechanics. But scientists are usually having their greatest sport when the structure is fuzzy, ambiguous, inadequate, or possibly just plain wrong."[5] In the end both “the importance of structure” and “the process of inquiry” became central concerns of the science curriculum reform movement.
Although the Sputnik reformers largely ignored the educational establishment, classroom teachers were partners in the enterprise. Scholars may have shaped the conceptual design of the new programs, but gifted teachers translated the new ideas into effective classroom materials and activities. This collaboration between classroom teachers and research scientists was the hallmark of the curriculum reform movement of the 1960s, and it represented a fundamentally new way of stimulating educational reform. Educator John Goodlad later cited the decline of this scholar-teacher partnership as one of the major causes of the demise of the Sputnik reforms. According to Goodlad, "The ambitious strategy of bringing scholars and teachers together in the development of new instructional materials and subsequent follow-up in the classroom had some chance of success. But even this promising approach faced formidable obstacles in the structure of schooling."[6] When teachers are treated as passive recipients of innovation rather than a vital participants in the enterprise, said Goodlad, reforms loose their power.
Perhaps the greatest flaw in the Sputnik reforms was the "top down" model for change that characterized their implementation. However participatory the development process, implementation usually followed a dissemination model better suited to consumer products than to educational change. Commercial products like drugs or automobiles naturally flow from the research laboratory to the commercial marketplace through well-defined distribution channels, but the industrial research, development, and dissemination model was poorly suited to the implementation of school reform. The educational innovators of the 1960s often found themselves in the hands of hostile and unreceptive publishers who had not participated in the enterprise, and who failed to invent alternative methods of distribution more suited to the new programs and products. The developers realized too late that changing educational practice meant more that creating innovative teaching materials and strategies. In also meant solving the problems of delivering professional development services and materials support to 15,000 autonomous school districts. Furthermore it meant selling the education establishment on the cost-effectiveness and practicality of the complex new programs. In short, there was little thought in the 1960's about how to implement what today we would call "systemic educational reform."
Nonetheless, the Sputnik-inspired science curriculum reform movement inspired a rich dialogue about learning and teaching that engaged some of the finest academic minds in the country. It also created some alternative models for instruction that are still worth examining by those interested in educational innovation. Some of these models have recently been resurrected in modern form.[7] If the movement had lasted longer, it may have solved more of its implementation problems and had a wider impact on the schools. Unfortunately, however, by the end of the decade, federal support for curriculum innovation was beginning to wane. While President Lyndon Johnson saw educational reform as an important ingredient of the "Great Society," the nation's growing involvement in the Vietnam war shifted funding priorities in Washington. What finally killed the science reform movement, however, was the Apollo moon landing in 1969. When the world saw Neil Armstrong unfurl the American flag on the surface of the Moon, our "education gap" seemed as mythological as the so-called "missile-gap," and, ironically, Congressional support for science education began to fade. Before the mid-seventies the Education Directorate of the National Science Foundation had shrunk to less than 10% of the agency's budget, and following the election of President Reagan in 1980, the Directorate closed altogether. The Sputnik reforms were to prove as ephemeral as the technological threat that spawned them.
Science Reform in the 1990's.
Today innovation in science education is again in full swing. How does the present movement differ from the Sputnik reforms? Will it run its course in a few more years, like the efforts of the fifties and sixties, or will it find fertile soil in the schools and take root more deeply than the earlier reforms? One difference between the new and the old science reform movements is their origin. Unlike the Sputnik reforms, that developed out of competition with the Soviet Union for technological and military supremacy, today's efforts have their roots in the global market place. In 1983, the celebrated "year of the reports", nearly fifty national studies totaling over six thousand pages signaled a new wave of national concern about the poor state of American Education. Among the most widely read of these documents was Action for Excellence: A Comprehensive Plan to Improve Our Nation's Schools, a study carried out by the Education Commission of the States. Chaired by James B. Hunt, Jr., the governor of North Carolina, the report stressed the relationship between a strong educational system and the country's economic well-being. The Commission pointed out that productivity in manufacturing was growing four times faster in Japan than in the United States, and proposed a partnership between government, business, labor, and the schools to bring about lasting educational change. Calling for higher levels of competence in reading, writing, mathematics, science, reasoning, and the use of computers to speed the pace of economic growth, the language of the report sounded like an economic call to arms: ÒThere are few national efforts that can legitimately be called crucial to our national survival. Improving education in America -- improving it sufficiently and improving it now -- is such an effort."[8]
Another difference is found in their goals. Documents like Action for Excellence, and the widely-quoted report of Secretary of Education Terrel Bell entitled A Nation at Risk, published in the same year, set the agenda for the new reformers. They argued that educational challenge of the coming century was to prepare all children to compete successfully in the increasingly competitive job market of the post industrial society. No longer was the mission to recruit and prepare "the best and the brightest" to staff our university and corporate research laboratories. Now we needed a broad range of competencies among all students to keep the American economy growing and competing successfully with technologically sophisticated countries like Germany and Japan. This would require not only the participation of the cream of the academic world. Skilled people from all segments of society -- government, business, industry, and the local community -- must be brought together to participate in the new transformation of the schools. Significant change must come from collaborative efforts between a broad range of constituencies drawn from the schools, industry, and academia, together with grass roots efforts by parents and other concerned citizens. As New York State's former Commissioner of Education, Thomas Sobel, put it, changing schools requires Òtop down support for bottom up reform."
One of the most persuasive champions of the new science education reform movement was Bassim Shakashiri, the energetic head of NSF's Education Directorate, who took over the ailing division in 1984. A chemistry professor from the University of Wisconsin, Shakashiri pinned a "Science is Fun" button on his lapel and dazzled Capitol Hill with compelling testimony about the inadequacy of the nation's investment in science and math education. Going beyond the committee room, Shakashiri courted congressmen and their families with Christmastime "Science Shows" at the SmithsonianÕs Air and Space Museum and pyrotechnic displays at the National Academy. With such flamboyant efforts he managed to increase the NSF education budget from $55.5 million in fiscal 1986 to over $200 million in 1990. By the fall of 1990 Shakashiri’s directorate had a $285 million budget request pending before Congress, and when asked by the legislators what he thought the Foundation's education budget should be by 1993 he boldly told them "$600 million."[9] Pressed for details about how he accomplished so much so quickly, he replied, "Seven days a week, fourteen hours a day."[10]
Shakashiri's mission echoed the Sputnik reforms in some respects. In 1987 the NSF funded three multi-million dollar efforts designed to create a coherent program of science education for the elementary and secondary schools, the largest NSF grants for science education since 1975. There were several new elements, however. The grants required the participation of a publisher that would provide matching funds for testing, teacher training, and marketing. Perhaps even more significant, in announcing the grants, Shakashiri contrasted the goals of these new projects to the original NSF science curriculum projects developed in response to Sputnik I, which he said had been created to foster an academic elite. "Now we face a different problem," he remarked. "It is not just our 'best and brightest' who are inadequately prepared. We are failing to provide an adequate background, an adequate introduction, and an adequate level of science 'literacy' for the population as a whole."[11] Unhappily Shakashiri's intensive politicking on behalf of his division did not endear him to his boss, Eric Bloch, and following a swiftly implemented reorganization plan that restructured his directorate, Shakashiri lost his job.
Other advocates for the economic imperatives of the current science education reform movement include Harvard economist Richard Murnane, and MIT economist Richard Levy. In their recently published book, Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy, Murnane and Levy identify six skills that all high school graduates will need to acquire and hold a job that pays middle class income wages:
- The ability to read at the ninth-grade level or higher
- The ability to do math at the night grade level or higher
- The ability to solve semistructured problems where hypotheses must be formed and tested
- The ability to work in groups with persons of various backgrounds
- The ability to communicate effectively both orally and in writing
- The ability to use personal computers to carry out simple tasks like word processing.[12]
Using case studies drawn from Honda and Northwestern Mutual Life, they describe in impressive detail the job requirements now found in both the blue and white collar segments of our economy. Sighting the screening practices of Diamond-Star (a Mitsubishi-Chrysler joint venture) they conclude: "Close to half of all 17-year-olds cannot read or do math at the level needed to get a job in a modern automobile plant."[13] Northwestern Mutual Life doesn't even bother with paper and pencil tests. They simply confine their recruiting to college campuses where they are more likely to find students who are competent in reading and math, and have the communication skills to handle customers professionally and work collaboratively with their fellow employees.