The recovery of the State of Florida and more broadly our nation and world from the present pandemic will depend heavily on medical professionals, scientists, engineers and technologists. The importance of these professions to our society has never been clearer.
The professionals in these fields also have as much economic security as anyone does in a world suffering its second major economic shock in a little more than a decade. And yet, it is likely that when Florida’s schools return to normalcy – perhaps not until we are all vaccinated against COVID-19 in Fall 2021 or even later – the opportunities that Florida’s children have to enter these critically important professions will be even more limited than they were before the pandemic.
Even before the pandemic, Florida’s students were poorly prepared for college majors leading to careers in health, engineering, science and technology. College faculty and professional societies generally agree that students who want to pursue such careers should take calculus and physics in high school. But the rate at which students in Florida’s public high schools were taking calculus in the Fall of 2019 (doesn’t that seem like years ago now?) was 35% below the national rate. The rate at which Florida’s public high school students took physics was 56% below the national rate. Of the 361 large (more than 1,000 students) high schools in Florida, students took calculus and physics at or above the national rates in only 19 (and five of those were in a single school district – Seminole County). Among those 361 large high schools, 45 (or 12%) didn’t even teach a physics class. That was a sharp increase from the number the year before (36).
That neglect at the high school level carried through to the workforce. Among the fifty states, Florida ranked 37th in 2017 for the number of science and engineering bachelors’ degrees universities in the state conferred per 1,000 individuals 18-24 years old, according to the National Science Foundation.
Black students in Florida were doing particularly poorly. They were severely underrepresented among bachelors’ degree graduates from Florida’s State University System in engineering, computing, math and physics. But the underrepresentation of black students showed up at the high school level among students who took and passed AP exams in calculus, physics and computer science. The underrepresentation started long before college.
And that was before the pandemic and the collapse of Florida’s hospitality and tourism industry, which played an outsized role in the state’s economy.
When the virus is finally defeated and Florida’s schools can return to a new normal, what will that new normal look like? Florida’s most comfortable equilibrium seems to be to focus the school system on reading proficiency, and then perhaps on a bit of math as well. And then the civics knowledge necessary for good citizenship and perhaps some additional social sciences. That’s what Florida’s test scores and policies say is the state’s educational comfort zone – delivering a basic education to a broad spectrum of students, and neglecting to give many students opportunities to excel. In the economic wreckage in the wake of the pandemic, that comfort zone will be where Florida’s educational system will most likely crawl. It would be understandable if the state did so. Nobody now alive remembers seeing anything like this biological apocalypse.
And yet…I see that Americans are now starting to look differently at our nation’s self-sufficiency. In a piece in Wired, the Research Director at American Economic Liberties Project, Matt Stoller, wrote simply that “We must make things we need here.” (Hat tip to Billy Townsend) Among the “things we need” are medical professionals, engineers, scientists and technologists. We must make them here – in the US and in Florida. Our state and nation have been heavily dependent on imports of these professionals from other nations for too long.
The only way Florida can sustainably improve the preparation of its students for careers in these fields is to do whatever it takes to recruit the teaching corps it needs to give all of its students – regardless of income and race – access to high quality instruction in math and science (including calculus and physics) as well as in the other subjects that students need to succeed in these and other fields. Not every student will choose a career in these fields. But every student should be encouraged and prepared for those paths.
Will our economically devastated state be able to afford such a teaching corps? That’s the wrong question. We must do this, or in the years following the pandemic Florida will slide the rest of the way down the cliff to utter ruin. We must now rely on the state’s children to bring us back from economic death, and we must provide them with the extraordinary teachers they will need to become equipped for that gargantuan task. Recruiting that teaching corps should be the clear number one priority of the State of Florida for the next decade.
Bridge to Tomorrow 