Another article in the New York Times by Ellen V. Futter, “Failing Science” pointed to the utter disastrous situation of science teaching in America’s urban school districts. (You may not be able to “read” this article unless you have an account with the NYTimes). The Futter article is a response to the announced results of science in urban schools for fourth and eighth graders by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (If you follow this link, you will be able to access all of the results of the NAEP’s Urban Science Test). As I have acknowledged on this blog, the results are not very good. Fetter cites the statistic that 43 percent of eighth graders do not have the skills to understand basic science principles. If you go to the NAEP website of test results, you will see that the authors struggle with the results. Some times its difficult to see how the kids are really doing. For example, on the Executive Summary page it says: “The percentage of fourth-graders performing at or above Basic ranged from 35 to 60 percent in the districts, compared to 66 percent for the nation. The percentage of students performing at or above Proficient ranged from 6 to 26 percent in the districts, compared to 27 percent for the nation.” What they mean is 40 to 65 percent of the kids in urban are not able to do science at the “basic” level in fourth grade compared to 34 percent for the nation. Are we in trouble when 1/3 to 2/3 of your class can not answer basic science questions on a standardized test? You’ll have to be the judge of that.

But something needs to be done to bring to students some of the wonder, excitement and joy of knowing something well. The culture of science as seen in museums and zoos, in science education learning centers such as the Boston Museum of Science, or the Exploratorium in San Francisco some how needs to reach into the schools, especially our urban schools. There are simply too many students who could be challenged to do well, if given the chance, and could prosper in science learning environments. Atlanta just built a multi-million dollar aquarium (Georgia Aquarium). More than 3 million people visited the museum in its first year, and just after a year, millions of dollars of improvements will be made to the museum. Many museums around the country have school programs, as the Georgia Aquarium does, but simply bringing kids to a museum for a field trip is not going to impact the culture of the school, where the problem really lies. The culture of school learning needs to change.

Most science is taught using text books that allow teachers who are not prepared to teach science to involve kids in memorizing facts, rather than engaging in hands on science activities. The classroom culture does not reflect the natural world, nor does it foster an exploratory or discovery oriented way of looking at learning. I know these are generalizations, but they are based on research by Horizons Research, Inc. that looked at the activities that teachers use in science classrooms. According to results on a year 2000 report, about 9 percent of classes work on extended science investigations, or help kids design their own experiments, and event less are involved in reporting any of their findings to the class. Instead learning is extremely “school-like” with predictable activities such as reading from the text, following instructions in a “lab” activity, working in groups. The culture of the museum or the natural world, or how people in science work is not really present in school. Kids rarely debate science ideas. They rarely do lab activities or science projects in which answers are unknown. Students rarely contribute to important science-related social issues such as working on projects where they monitor air pollution, or look at the quality of the water in their local streams, or what the geology is under their school!

There are however examples out there that contribute to changing the culture of school. The Gates Foundation, which I’ve written about, is working with some urban schools to reduce the SCHOOL size, enabling teachers to create more personal learning environments, and more opportunities for students to worth on relevant (to the students) projects, engage in debates about various topics, not only in science, but other areas of life.

There are other examples of how to change the culture of school. Learning Styles work by Rita Dunn and associates have shown that focusing on the variety of ways that people learn can have a powerful impact on changing the culture of the school. Work by Carol Tomlinson and others on Differentiated Instruction is a powerful way of working with classrooms that are diverse. I’ve been a long-time supporter of the 4MAT system, developed by Bernice McCarthy. 4MAT is a powerful tool for organizing instruction around diverse ways that students learn.

These are pedagogical approaches to changing the culture of schools. However, cities like Atlanta need to start with changing the culture of how businesses, institutions of higher education, science centers and museums view their relationship to public schooling, and their responsibilities for improving the quality of education in their own community. This is where we must start to fix the problem.