IT is a habit of public discourse in our

secular democracy to find in every "problem"-whether it be energy, decline of the family, or failure of self-government itself a new task for the educationa! system. Public ignorance of science might seem, by definition, to pose just such a task. A report on this problem, however, by the Panel on School Science convened by the National Research Council (NRC), makes an auspicious break with habit. It finds that improving public literacy in science is a task for the scientific community, not the schools.

The panel was convened at the request of the National Science Foundation (NSF), as part of an effort by that agency to reassess its performance of its statutory responsibility for science education in the nation's elementary and secondary schools. During the 1950s and 1960s, NSF had expended about $1 billion on the development of new courses and teaching materials in mathematics, the natural sciences, and the social sciences and in the support of "institutes" to refresh the knowledge of schoolteachers and help them learn to use the new courses and materials. Among the widely acknowledged favorable outcomes of this effort came the need, in the early 1960s, to upgrade the content and quality of freshman science courses in the colleges.

Nonetheless, as the new materials in the life sciences and social sciences percolated into the schools, NSF found itself embroiled in controversy. Ad hoc pressure groups and susceptible congressmen accused NSF of "teaching evolution as a fact rather than a theory" and imposing "value-laden" courses on schoolchildren in violation of the First Amendment. NSF support of science teaching in the schools had thereupon waned and, by 1977, all but ceased. Then, in response to pressure

Gerard Piel is publisher of Scientific American magazine.

from university professors still concerned with school science, NSF commissioned three national studies of the state of precollege science teaching and invited eight national organizations to review these studies and declare their views on the situation.

The NRC panel speaks for the university people who induced the NSF reassessment in the first place. Their primary findingthat the schools cannot be expected to solve this problem unaided-reaffirms the spirit that launched the curriculum reform movement in the late 1950s. For it was not the school system nor yet the NSF but the scientific community itself, under the leadership of Jerrold Zacharias, that recognized the deplorable state of science teaching in the schools and did something about it. That is, on their own initiative, in collaboration with concerned secondary and elementary school teachers, university scientists developed the courses and materials and conducted the teacherteaching institutes on which the NSF spent its $1 billion. The NRC panel, chaired by the same undiscourageable Jerrold Zacharías, calls upon the country's scientists and engineers to come forward and do it again and this time to undertake a permanent commitment, as a primary professional obligation, to elevate and maintain the quality and content of science teaching in the schools.

The recommendations of the panel describe new ways and new institutional settings in which members of the scientific community, whether employed in the universities, in industry, or in government, can play their part. In its description of the present state of school science, the panel sets out an urgent case for action that some may take as an occasion for despair.

From the prevailing preoccupation of the popular culture with the psychic, the paranormal, the mystic, and the occult,

A
Study
in
Decline

GERARD PIEL

the panel finds it apparent that an alarming number of American adults cannot tell sense from nonsense. Mathophobia and the associated incapacity to make rigorous quantitative connections and distinctions, the report says, afflict altogether too large a fraction of the adult population. In the enterprises of singlepurpose pressure groups in contemporary politics, wishing displaces thinking; none of these groups accepts the real-world constraint that allows the attainment of each good only in a trade-off against some other good. The American people share no common body of knowledge and understanding on which to ground a reliable consensus on such urgent public issues as energy and the arms race. Too many Americans find themselves coping with life in today's largely man-made environment in relatively as much ignorance and superstition as their forerunners in the pristine environment of nature.

Contributing inevitably to such disorder and incapacity in the public mind is the decline in the time and attention given to science teaching from the level to which it was lifted when the science curriculum reform movement was at its height. The NRC panel cites findings in the NSF studies that elementary school teachers "typically" spend twenty minutes a day on science and social studies each, as compared to forty minutes on arithmetic and ninety-five minutes on reading. More than half of the high schools, moreover, require only one year of instruction in science and mathematics.

In this situation, it can be taken as encouraging that, at the time of the studies, 32 per cent of the elementary school districts were still prescribing the NSF-funded materials in the natural sciences and 25 percent in the social sciences, if only 8 percent in mathematics. In the high schools, the dwindling NSF funding had been accompanied by a corresponding decline in the use of the products of the science curriculum reform movement. In biology, around 30 percent of the school districts were using NSF-supported curricula before 1976-77, but only half of that percentage were in 1976-77; in physics, use of the original path-breaking Physical Sciences Study Committee curriculum fell to 4 percent of the nation's school districts-down from a high of 14 percent.

In 1977, the year of these studies, the fourteen-year decline of the average scores of high school students on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests reached a new low. Explanations for the decline have turned largely on the indubitable fact that the percentage of students taking the tests had been increasing, from 25 percent in 1952 to more than 50 percent in 1977. But the decline in scores must also reflect decline in the quality of teaching in the high schools-if only in consequence of their swelling enrollment throughout the postwar years. And some of the decline of the quality of teaching, the NRC panel declares, must be charged to the running down of the NSF-funded science curriculum reform movement.

Teachers surveyed in the studies gave testimony to the disappearance of the teacher institutes in their deprecation of their own training and qualifications for teaching science and mathematics. The "hands-on" spirit of teaching and learning fostered by the NSF-funded materials declined along with the disuse of those materials and the closing of high school teaching laboratories. Behind all of these untoward trends, of course, lies the decline (relative to the inflating GNP) of public expenditures on education and other compensatory functions of the welfare state intended to brake the vicious cycles that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The prevailing popular response to the decline of the schools, the NRC panel observes, has tended to devalue science education still further. The "back to basics" movement has preempted time previously given to the sciences and the more interesting branches of mathematics that come along in the curriculum after the third R. Ironically, preparation of students for the multiple-choice tests that are supposed to measure their aptitude and competence in "the basics" has contributed further to the blurring of their literacy and their command of mathematics.

Against this depressing background, the NRC panel advances recommendations that respond to its findings-and summon the conscience and goodwill of the scientific community. In contrast to the rather centralized initiatives of what the panel

hopes was only the first phase of the science curriculum reform movement, it calls now for a decentralized crusade, with centers of initiative all over the country. Thus, its first and leading recommendation is to establish enough science and mathematics teaching and resource centers to serve each large school system or cluster of neighboring smaller systems.

One of the functions of these locally based resource centers would be to provide inservice training for science and, math teachers in response to needs iden-. tified by nearby school systems.

A second important function of the proposed centers would be to provide low-cost kits of science and math materials to teachers from participating school systems. The need for this service is especially great at the elementary level, since most elementary schools are poorly equipped to teach science and mathematics. The logistics of supplying hands-on instructional materials to elementary school classrooms on a large scale has presented a serious obstacle to the use of activity-centered programs in both disciplines. Most systems have not been able to find effective ways of supplying instructional materials other than textbooks to elementary school classrooms. The problem has been one of scale, and also of costs. Even though the developers of the elementary-level course content improvement programs have usually attempted to use materials that would be relatively inexpensive to purchase, the marketing costs associated with the commercial production of elementary science and math kits have raised their price to a prohibitive level for many school systems. Because significant amounts of expendable materials are frequently used in many of the new programs, another obstacle has been the problem of maintaining the kits in a ready-to-teach condition once they have been purchased.

The NRC report cites two existing science resource centers in New York and Virginia that have demonstrated a practical solution to these problems. Personnel at these centers manufacture most of the science apparatus used in local elementary schools. These pieces of science apparatus, as well as packages of expendable materials, are assembled into kits that are loaned to teachers at participating schools. Considerable cost savings result from

employing high school students to assemble simple apparatus, such as microscopes, balances, circuit boards, and trundle wheels. Additional savings are made by purchasing supplies in bulk, directly from manufacturers, and by reprocessing kits of instructional materials after each use so that they can be used by several elementary school classes each year.

Even when overhead and administrative costs are included, the science kits produced by these centers cost substantially less than those available from commercial suppliers. For example, a "Small Things" microscopy kit for a class of thirty-two students costs the Fairfax Science Materials Center $68 to prepare, compared with $202 for the least expensive commercial version. A large part of this saving results from the use of a simple elementary microscope manufactured by the Fairfax Center at a cost of fifty-two cents. (Seven thousand of these simple microscopes were manufactured by high-school students during two summer vacations.) The least expensive comparable microscope available from commercial suppliers would have cost over four dollars. In total, the first four thousand science kits produced by the Fairfax Science Materials Center cost the school system $211,000 instead of the $420,000 they would have cost commercially.

The proposed centers could also help improve the quality of teaching at the secondary level, both by working within the constraints of existing curricula and by acquainting local teachers and administrators with the options available for improving the curriculum. The resource centers would provide an ideal site for the introduction, adaptation, and dissemination of supplementary science and mathematics teaching materials. The centers might also collaborate with university science faculties to sponsor summer institutes for science and math teachers that would be closely tied to the needs and interests of local school systems.

While the NRC panel calls on the NSF to come forward with the seed money to help establish such centers, it looks to local initiative, above all, to make them a reality. A principal part of that initiative can and must come from the local scientific community. With a little imagination and motivation, scientists can supply de