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American Institute of Physics, the American Association of
Physics Teachers, and the Executive Committee of the Board
of Trustees of Oklahoma City University. He holds honorary
degrees from Case Western Reserve University, Jacksonville
University, Oklahoma City University, St. Lawrence University,
and Tufts University, In 1961 he received the Oersted

Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

Dr. Zacharias and his wife, the former Leona Hurwitz, live in Belmont, Massachusetts. They have two daughters, Susan of LaJolla, California and Johanna of Washington, D.C.

February 1979

STATEMENT OF JERROLD B. ZACHARIAS, EDUCATION
DEVELOPMENT CENTER, NEWTON, MASS.

Dr. ZACHARIAS. Mr. Pease, it is an honor and a privilege, which I don't frequently get, to testify before committees of this sort.

I would like to appear before you not just in the role of a professional teacher and an educational reformer for school and college, but as someone who has spent a large part of his life in addition to this, being an experimental physicist, with emphasis on the word experimental, an electrical engineer, and a military technologist. And Ĩ believe every once in a while in those various roles, I find that the Soviet Union provokes some of us to wonder, "Are we doing the right things?" Let me give a couple of examples.

In 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded their first atomic bomb, some of us had to decide what to do, and of all things, instead of wanting to work on bigger bombs, which I didn't think was the ticket, we had to work on such neglected military pieces of technology as undersea warfare, antisubmarine devices-how do you find those beastly things because we almost lost World War II to the German submarines. But the submarines weren't being attended to. Then we had to look at air defense and that wasn't being attended to, either.

So it is not unusual for me at a time like this to say where are we in trouble? The Soviet Union with its very clear foreign policy is creeping over the globe and what should we do. Clearly atomic bombs are only a standoff against atomic bombs. That is not where the issues

are.

As far as I can see, we have to prepare first-class professional scientists, applied scientists, technologists, and a public which is educated well enough quantitatively to understand what they are talking about.

In other words, here you find that the energy issues that the public faces-I would love to recite on energy now; I have been working on it for 6 months to try to see if we can get it understandable--you can make it clear but you have to understand the numbers. You have to understand the graphs. You have to be what I call "quantitatively literate," not just to learn a particular branch of somebody's favorite science,

So if I look at today as an opportunity to say what is on my mind, I would like to press only two things, two notions.

Mr. Pease brought up this morning, the issue of scale and scope of funding. And let's take a look.

If we roll together all of the grades from kindergarten through the first 2 years of college, then the country spends about $100 billion. a year. I haven't looked the numbers up for this hearing. If it is 90 or 98, it is not important. The important issue is that it is a lot of money. It is big like the military. It is big like transportation. It is not as big as the energy budget.

Now, the question those of us who are professional something else, say professional scientists, engineers, or whatever, do, or have learned to do, is to ask, "Where is the short end of the lever?" You are not going to reform education by trumping up another additive

amount that will substantially change that $100 billion a year. In other words, suppose you put in, as the Government does, something like $13 billion a year through an office that is changing its name. That is mostly additive.

Those of us who work on this kind of reform and if you say, well, do you do it technologically, the answer is yes, every time. You hunt for what is going to make a multiplicative change, in other words, how can we change the effectiveness or the productivity of that $100 billion a year. Let's talk about it with respect to science education.

I don't know how much is supposed to go in. I know that mathematics, so called, is uses something of the order of $10 billion a year, and I think we get precious little for it.

I believe and have believed that it would be possible to treat that subject as a disaster area, and make our $10 billion a year that goes into mathematics education, really pay off.

I believe that the Science Foundation should be in a position to do it and if this committee, if I could do some special pleading on it, and I noticed others this morning doing special pleading, I would say I look at what is most important for science education, not that I want to do it myself. It is that quantitative literacy is something which is spurned, which scares people, which scares the teachers, the adults, the parents. I can give an example.

There is a quite popular television program about the stock market, and they don't seem to know that inflation has hit us, and that the stock market now has figures like 880 for the Dow Jones. Whereas it is something like 400. And if you look at any kind of sensible analysis of where the stock market ought to be, it should be about 3,000. I have had scraps with some economists about where the stock market ought to be, and one of them says, "No, you are wrong, it should be 4,000."

it

Now, here is a simple case of something which is so needed for the public: To be able to plot graphs, to be able to handle those graphs and handle the quantities easily, to understand the nature of acceleration-accelerating rates; namely, the inflation rate isn't steady, is going up, and I happen to be of an age such that inflation even at the present figures, are scary enough, and if I think about what those figures are going to be, and I have, in terms of the upturn, it is pretty sad.

So let me say it another funny way.

A few months ago on the editorial page of the New York Times, in the editorial column, there was a graph. I forget now what it was about. And I wrote the editor a letter of congratulations for putting a graph in an editorial column. It is the only way you could possibly have understood any of this, the only way you will understand the energy business, the only way you will understand most of what has to happen.

Now, again, I believe that that is-let me call it a topic, and a special pleading, that can be handled. But it cannot be handled by saying, OK, we will prepare another collection of learning aids. We will include video discs wherever they turn out to be useful; there should be appropriate books and topics and apparatus and things for the students of the various ages from kindergarten through under

graduate and early undergraduate. But if you do it, the most important learning aid of all is a teacher, and that is no kidding.

Now, in 1956 when some of us, a group of us, got together we knew that the langauge of the current, the current language at Los Alamos, at the atom bomb lab was broken English. It wasn't English. We knew that in the radar lab of World War II we had gotten most of our first-class ideas from the British. We didn't really quite say so, but that is the way it happened.

So we had to catch up with our foreign colleagues. We were down by a couple of years at least, and what we didn't do then, and which we have to do now, is to include people of all ages. I heard somebody in testimony today say that scientists begin in middle school. They don't. They start being interested in technology or whatever it is or applied science as young as they can get their hands on stuff to manipulate.

Now, the Science Foundation came to the rescue financially, and inspirationally, too, in 1956, to do something about our shortfall in the quality of science education, but they forgot the teachers. The high school teachers, however, were not forgotten. It was the Congress. Albert Thomas of the House, I forget which committee, was responsible for forcing $40 million year down the NSF throat to do something about teachers. Now, he was at the time mostly interested in high school teachers, and the numbers were moderate, they were only, let's say, of the order of 100,000 high school teachers of science who had to be helped.

However, when you get down to the elementary schools, the number goes up by another factor of 10. The teachers, you might as well face it, have got to be nimble and unafraid of quantitative reasoning and all of the science and applied science that goes with it, and they number 2 million. How much would it cost? Well, it depends. You have to have a mechanism which hits the issue where it is most susceptible, not vulnerable, susceptible.

And we have in the room a young man named Douglas Lapp. He works in Fairfax County, with a population base of something less than 1 million total. He has 60,000 elementary schoolchildren with 2.000 teachers. He has a way of manufacturing the apparatus the kids use, that the teachers use, a way to get that material into the schools, into the classroom, and out of the classroom. You remember the rooms are finite, even this one must have a change of scenery. Not only does he get to the teachers and prepare teachers of teachers, but also teachers of teachers of teachers. The principals get involved and so does the board.

Now, you say, isn't that just great. Anybody here who is within a gallon of gasoline distance of Fairfax County, could go see it.

There is trouble, and again it is the public. But also it is the scientific public; namely, the scientific public or the technological public that does not come to the rescue and say, the amount of time allocated to teaching quantitative literacy is not enough, never mind whether you call it science or not. When you call it science you scare the teachers right off, call it quantitative literacy you will, too. I don't think you can call it anything. You just have to let it exist first.

In any event, there should be on that school board people who understand that the country is in some kind of pickle. You can't just say,

declare war on the Soviet Union. What we have to do in this country is to have a productive, intelligent, first-class economy, and it is going to need the kind of thing that the economy depends on.

So I would try to say how much would it-how much money would have a big effect.

I think $10 million a year for 5 or 6 years could cover the-run the whole gamut from kindergarten through early college and make it quite possible complete with teacher education if you do the right thing with that. And that is going to cost you, as far as I can see, another $10 million a year for probably in perpetuity because I would like to see the school systems themselves carry on their own backs namely, out of that 100 billion, the business of getting the teachers familiar with what they are doing while they are doing it.

You notice, I am not saying, you put science education into the teacher colleges, because the teacher colleges teach teachers while they are not teaching which is the wrong time. If you want to learn to sail a sailboat, you don't do it by reading a book or having somebody tell you. You do it by getting into the boat.

One quickie now. It came up this morning.

That is "Why does the science education get such a small fraction when in fact they need more?" If you look at the 100 billion a year in the schools and say, what is it going to take to handle this tremendous diversity of interests of teachers and children, you are going to say of the order of $1 billion. In other words, if you can effect something by a factor of 100, 10 or 100, you are doing beautifully.

Now, this has been going on. This is not new. The NSF has tried to play cozy with the education budget ever since the education directorate started in 1955.

What I'd like to know is, and I don't know how to find out, why does the Science Board that governs the NSF budget, the directors and so on, continue to act as if scientists are generated in graduate school when every one of them who is a scientist knows perfectly well that he caught fire when he was a kid.

In other words, why does the education, why does the management of the NSF seem to believe that the education part of NSF can be a super-stepchild or stepped-on child. Maybe the committee can find out. I don't think I can.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Zacharias follows:]