Hard on the heels of the release of FDOE Bureau Chief Todd Clark’s statement yesterday that Florida is “pretty much last in the nation for science”, Assistant Deputy Commissioner Kris Ellington said in an article published today on the Orlando Sentinel blog School Zone that the regulations for the Race to the Top competition will not allow that money to pay for the development and implementation of end-of-course tests in chemistry, physics and Earth/space science.  Only a week ago, Commissioner Smith had announced that these tests would be included in the state’s Race to the Top application.

Ellington concluded that tests in these areas will not be developed, and the FDOE will once again push for legislation that would replace the 11^th grade Science FCAT – a comprehensive but deeply flawed test – with a single biology end-of-course test as a requirement for high school graduation.  Such a bill was defeated in the legislature last spring, in part because of a blizzard of opposition from Florida’s science professors.

The end of course tests in chemistry, physics and Earth/space science are necessary to insure the uniform quality of these courses across high schools and to prevent school districts from further deemphasizing these subjects in their high schools.  Florida is already low in the rate of high school graduates taking physics (16%, about half the national rate).  Preliminary results from the American Institute of Physics quadrennial survey of high school physics teachers reveals that the fraction of high schools in Florida that do not offer physics is about twice the national rate.

According to Leslie Postal, end of course tests would cost about $1.5 million per year to develop and implement.

Leslie Postal from the Orlando Sentinel blog School Zone has posted the power point presentation delivered to the Florida Organization for Instructional Leadership (FOIL) by FDOE Bureau Chief for Curriculum and Instruction Todd Clark.  The presentation, titled “State of the State for Florida Student Achievement,” reaches a conclusion on science that Florida students are “pretty much last in the nation” in this area.

Dr. Clark supported this assertion with a stack of statistics, among which are that in 2008 Florida was:

49^th in the nation in the average score on the ACT science section

47^th in the nation in pass rate (3 or higher) on AP science tests

45^th in the nation in pass rate (3 or higher) on the AP biology test

In addition, the fractions of students who earned the highest grade of 5 on the FCAT Science exams, which are given in 5^th, 8^th and 11^th grades were:

5^th grade:  2%

8^th grade:  2%

11^th grade:  1%

No African-American students at any of these grade levels scored a 5 statewide (the St. Pete Times blog link is here).  Not a single student.

I will add here that Dr. Clark is intelligent, thoughtful and passionate about his work.  His candor demonstrates considerable courage.

Ron Matus at the St. Petersburg Times blog Gradebook reports that Florida Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith has issued a statement in response to a lawsuit filed this morning.  The lawsuit alleges that the state is not meeting its constitutional authority to provide quality education.  Commissioner Smith’s response says in part, “It’s unfortunate that this lawsuit diminishes the significant progress that has been made by our children over the last decade and simply ignores the performance of a state that is clearly outpacing the nation.”

Now I encourage the reader to look at the next blog post down.

One of the things I’ve learned in my brief time as a blogger is that sometimes blogging is like shooting fish in a barrel.

See Leslie Postal’s report in the Orlando Sentinel blog School Zone on a presentation that was given by an unnamed Florida Department of Education official today at the meeting of the Florida Organization of Instructional Leaders (FOIL).

Orlando Sentinel reporter Leslie Postal talked with some of the plaintiffs and plaintiffs’ attorneys who filed a lawsuit against the State of Florida this morning charging that the state is not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide quality public education.  You can find her story here.

The University of Florida announced at a summit of leaders in the science, math and education fields on Monday that it would partner with the Helios Foundation to improve instruction in the Pinellas County Schools.  The $1.6 million Helios grant will be used to support the Lastinger Center’s job-embedded master’s degree programs to develop math and science teachers in Pinellas. 

A Gainesville Sun report can be seen here.

Ron Matus at the St. Petersburg Times reports that a lawsuit will be filed today charging that the state has violated its own constitution by failing to provide high quality schools for all the state’s students.  The plaintiffs includes several students from around the state and two parents’ groups. 

In 1998, Florida  voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment requiring that the state provide high quality schools. 

Matus pointed out that the state’s core funding for the public schools has dropped from $19.3 billion to $17.9 billion in the last two years.  The state’s share of education funding has dropped from 62% in 2001 to 45% this year.

I was recently directed towards a paper released by Rutgers which makes the claim that retention of students in STEM studies and careers from the 1970’s though the late 1990’s has generally remained the same overall.  The authors also point out that for those students considered the highest performers, those in the top 20%, the rate of retention in STEM has fallen.

While I am inclined to believe that the quality of students who graduate with STEM degrees and then continue into the STEM workforce has decreased over the years studied by this project, there are several other claims throughout the report with which I must respectfully disagree.

“Universities in the United Stated actually graduate many more STEM students than are hired each year.”

As someone who is also researching the STEM pipeline, I realize the importance of clearly defining STEM from the outset of any report.  Different researchers can have very different ideas of STEM, and without the explicit delineation of what is being considered and what is not, it is nearly impossible to refute or support an author’s hypothesis.  Within the Rutgers report, I was unable to find where the authors made a distinction between the retention rates in any given area of STEM.  This distinction would have not only given more clarity and definition to their report, but it would also have quelled the suspicions that gains in one area of STEM may have completely overshadowed the static nature or decline in other areas of STEM.  In fact, it was only upon very close inspection of the footnotes on page 9 of the report that I was able to find that the authors excluded the Social Sciences in their definition of STEM.  One further distinction that could have been made well beyond that of separate STEM fields would be the breakdown of the students which make up each field.  It would be extremely interesting to know the breakdown by gender and ethnicity of each category in STEM, as this would give further illumination to the topic.

“We also note that even the ‘necessary’ level of preparation is not fully captured by degrees since a sizeable portion of STEM jobholders do not have college degrees and/or degrees in STEM majors.”

With this statement, the authors left me with many more questions than they go on to answer.  What is considered a “sizeable portion”?  Does this mean that 10%, 30%, or even 50% of the workers in this field do not have the college background which supposedly qualifies them for these positions?  Does this substantiate their claim that the U.S. is graduating more STEM students that are being hired into the workforce?  The ambiguity makes it difficult to tell.  There is a lack of documentation for this claim, perhaps due to the variation found among the diverse STEM career fields.  Here again the reader is left wanting, as there is no discussion of what a STEM career entails, or even which careers are considered STEM for the purposes of the study.

Essentially, the argument being made is that there is not a shortage in the number of students who are being retained from high school all the way to their careers in STEM, but rather that there is a shift in what kind of students are being retained.  The authors make the point that the top performing students, defined as those being in the top quintile, are choosing not to go into STEM fields, or not to go to college at all.  This could be another explanation for their “sizeable portion” of STEM jobholders who do not have degrees.  Perhaps these top performing students feel that they are able to get the jobs they want without having to pay for the massive expenses of education, but I digress.

“We also found that the U.S. education system produces large numbers of top performing science and math students.”

As this is my particular area of focus, I find this claim at best disconcerting.  The authors’ claim is based on their study of international comparisons from the 2006 PISA report.  While this is definitely one way to illuminate the problem, (I also have looked at the PISA reports though for different information.  My post can be found here http://bridgetotomorrow.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/pisa-2006-an-international-report/ ) I find this approach to be slightly misleading.  The authors cite a previous paper which asserts that even though America has one of the lowest percentages of high performing students, it also has the largest number of these students.  While this may be true within their data set, I still find it appalling that only 8% of 8^th grade American students achieve a score which is considered at an Advanced level according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.  Even this is misleading, as when it is broken down by race and ethnicity, African Americans and Hispanics only have 1% and 2% of the top performing students respectively.

Thus, while in aggregate the United States may seem to be doing fine, I cannot agree with the authors of the Rutgers report that the United States is on track for the future.

In his talk at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society in Atlanta last Thursday, National Physics Teacher Education Task Force member David Haase urged physicists to advocate for their science in their state legislatures and other policy-making bodies, saying “Speak out for the importance of learning physics.”  He cited the example of the campaign for a high school course titled “Earth and Environmental Science” in North Carolina that was championed by lobbyists from the tourism industry in that state and was added to the state’s high school graduation requirements in 2000.  Statewide enrollment for the course jumped more than 60% that year, matching the drop in the demand for the state’s “Physical Science” course.  In other words, the new graduation requirement moved approximately half the students who had been taking Physical Science to the Earth and Environmental Science course and devalued the learning of the physical sciences among the bulk of North Carolina’s high school students.

Biology remained a required course and its enrollment level was unchanged.

Professor Haase’s talk slides can be seen here.  The graph showing the changes in North Carolina science course enrollment is on slide number 14.

The call to advocate for one’s own field in the policy-making arena is particularly relevant to Florida now.  Last spring, the Florida Legislature attempted to devalue the physical and Earth/space sciences by passing legislation that would have replaced the 11^th grade Science FCAT comprehensive high stakes test with the requirement to pass a statewide end-of-course test in biology to fulfill the testing requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).  While the 11^th grade Science FCAT is a bad test for several reasons, the exclusive focus on biology that the bill would have enacted would have caused the further deemphasizing of the physical and Earth/space sciences in Florida’s public high schools, where presently only 16% of graduates have taken a physics course, about half the national rate.  The bill was passed by the House, but was never seriously considered by the Senate.

The Florida Legislature also considered a bill that would have required biology and chemistry and one other “higher level” science course for high school graduation.  Once again, it was successful in the House but didn’t make any headway in the Senate.

We also have no choice but to advocate for our own fields in teacher preparation programs.  As the UTeach program at the University of Texas – Austin has demonstrated to great acclaim, it is relatively easy (given some serious resources) to graduate a large number of biology teachers.  It is much more difficult to raise the graduation rate of physics teachers to a number that would make a serious impact on the quality of physics teaching at the state level.  Certainly UTeach, which graduates about three physics teachers per year, hasn’t succeeded in this.

And while it’s tempting, given the numbers, to say that biology teachers have the necessary background to teach physics at the high school level, it’s generally not true.  Pre-service biology teachers often take the two semester algebra-based physics sequence, and almost always in a traditional lecture environment.  In this way they are neither getting sufficient content (physics) knowledge nor sufficient pedagogical content knowledge (that is, an understanding of how physics is learned).  In some cases, the situation is even worse.  In FSU’s new pre-service biology teacher major (associated with the FSU-Teach program, which is a “replication” of the UTeach program), future biology teachers take only the first semester of the algebra-based physics course, the one that deals with mechanics.  They do not take the second semester – the one that deals with electricity and magnetism.  Of course, the electromagnetic force is the one that holds together molecules, including molecules important in biology like DNA.  In short, these pre-service biology teachers never learn about the force that drives life.

A letter I’ve sent to Senator Nancy Detert, Chair of the Florida Senate PreK-12 Committee, is displayed below.  The letter was sent November 8.

Taken individually, this letter will not make much of a splash.  However, we know from experience that when a large number of Florida’s science faculty make a collective statement – as we did last spring in our letter to Governor Crist and this summer in our white paper – it makes a difference in the thinking of our state’s policy-makers.  Last week’s announcement that Florida’s application to the “Race to the Top” program will include a proposal for end-of-course tests in chemistry, physics and Earth science (none of which was on the state’s radar screen last spring) is an illustration of this.

If Senator Detert receives a blizzard of letters on her committee’s position against raising graduation requirements, it might matter.  We know that op-eds in the state’s newspapers and leading education blogs matter.  We need to start being more active as a community in these ways.

Dear Senator Detert:

I am writing to comment on the Interim Report titled “Review the Effect of State High School Graduation Requirements on Student Preparation for Postsecondary Education and the Workforce.”  The need to expand opportunities for students to earn bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields is urgent, and the State of Florida should move immediately to focus attention and resources on the gateway high school courses for STEM fields, which recent research demonstrates are physics and calculus.  The go-slow approach advocated in the Interim Report is not consistent with the urgency of the state’s long-term economic prospects.

A report published by University of South Florida researchers in 2007 on research conducted using the state-of-the-art data warehouses maintained by the Florida Department of Education addresses the question raised in the title of the Interim Report in a very direct way.  The USF study, published in the Journal of Education of Students Placed at Risk (Volume 12, Issue 3, Pages 243-270) examines how “high school science and mathematics course-taking creates pathways toward future baccalaureate degree attainment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors.”

The USF report reached two primary conclusions about high school course-taking.  The first was that “Enrollment and attainment in physics and calculus is particularly important for all students with respect to obtaining a STEM degree down the road.”  The second was that “minority students who are prepared for STEM degree attainment by virtue of taking high-level science and mathematics courses, particularly calculus, chemistry, and physics at the highest levels, are more likely to persist through STEM coursework in college than their White counterparts and obtain a STEM degree.”

In other words, if increasing the pool of STEM bachelor’s degree graduates is indeed a priority for Florida’s education system, then it is also a high priority to make sure that every high school student –particularly in Title 1 schools – has access to physics and calculus courses that are staffed by highly qualified teachers.  And we must move immediately to make sure this happens.

The Interim Report also set a list of preconditions for raising high school graduation requirements in science.  Two of these preconditions appear to be direct challenges to the science faculty of Florida’s colleges and universities.  We are already addressing these challenges.

The report said that “science and mathematics instruction must be revised to make instruction relevant to students. This requires universities, colleges, education preparation institutes, and school districts to emphasize the actual art of instruction in their curricula for the preparation of teachers.”

Some of Florida’s college and university science faculty are scouring the nation for the best research-based teaching practices, which all involve engaging students actively in our science classrooms and laboratories. One example is the adoption of inquiry-driven SCALE-UP studio physics programs at Florida State University and Florida Gulf  Coast University.  These programs are based on research performed at North Carolina State University and adopted at many institutions throughout the nation.

Your report also said that we must “aggressively recruit STEM educators from postsecondary institutions.”  We are doing this by leading the effort to improve degree programs for pre-service teachers within our own science departments, talking with strong students in our courses about the importance of teaching to our society, and attempting to collaborate with those in our colleges of education and the Florida Department of Education who are officially charged with these duties.

Thank you for your consideration and service.

Sincerely,

Paul Cottle

Professor of Physics