A much-publicized 1983 report warned that ours was “a nation at risk” due to an eroding educational system.
We’re still at risk, writes Leon Lederman in January-February The Sciences, and one need only look at his own honorable attempt to improve the quality of teaching in Chicago’s public schools. He frets that the nation is victimized by, as the article’s title has it, a “Blackboard Bungle.”
Lederman, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics, is director emeritus at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, and professor of science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
In 1990, Lederman, having concluded that the state of math and science education was woeful and declining, became chairman of a private, non-profit attempt to improve many of the 17,000 people who teach science and math to students in kindergarten through 8th grade.
Supported by 14 universities and four-year colleges, Lederman’s Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science opened on the IIT campus. Its funding comes largely from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Illinois Department of Education, and over four years has introduced 72 schools and 3,200 teachers to a hands-on program that seeks to improve teachers’ knowledge and get them to help students find answers in a more collaborative way.
Many primary- and secondary-school math and science teachers have flunked math tests aimed at 6th graders, writes Lederman. Making matters worse, teachers have less and less time to talk with colleagues, student-teacher ratios are awful, and getting long-term funding of reform attempts is a long shot.
The interventionist program actually goes into the school and, Lederman is convinced, “creates an intense, joyous learning process.” But his attempts to improve things have taught him the obstacles anybody faces in seeking change.
Finding top-notch staff to carry out interventions with teachers is difficult. Moreover, the central offices of educational systems, state regulators, unions and bureaucracies can present huge frustrations.
Given those realities, even in an educational system attempting reform such as Chicago’s, the Nobel laureate comes away convinced that change won’t come until we realize the system can’t heal itself. Outside intervention, from universities and the private sector, is essential but must be long term.
Ruefully, he notes that few university presidents care much about precollege education but says that if they did, “the payback would be a population of scientifically literate students that would raise statues to university presidents and deans” ($3.50, New York Academy of Sciences, 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021).
Quickly: January Hippocrates, recalling that Odysseus didn’t set out for Troy until he had left his son with a wise protector named Mentor, profiles modern-day mentors in the health field-virtuous and prudent doctors who have inspired a younger generation. . . . The editor of The New York Times, which has been hammered in Harper’s Magazine for its allegedly less-than-meets-the-eye coverage of the Clintons’ Whitewater real-estate dealings, breaks a public silence via the editor’s underwhelming letter to a Times reader, which is printed in Harper’s but falls way short of any convincing defense. . . . January-February Foreign Affairs includes syndicated columnist William Pfaff urging a “disinterested neo-colonialism” to save a destitute Africa, while Harvard’s Stanley Hoffmann writes in praise of the late Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ralph Bunche, an honorable United Nations official who made inroads in crafting peace worldwide but none in dealing with the U.S. racism into which he was born. . . . February Runner’s World is excellent in offering cures for, and tips on avoiding, the most common running ailments. . . . February Chicago is worth the profile of gate-crasher par excellence Jerry Berliant, a lawyer who did time for tax fraud in the Operation Greylord investigation of corruption in Cook County Circuit Court. . . . Heavily-qualified, quasi-trend story of the week is in Jan. 30 Newsweek: Americans are eating more Asian noodles! But “whether noodle shops proliferate beyond major cities remains uncertain.”
