Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 21, 1994 TAG: 9411220025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LEON M. LEDERMAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Despite heartwarming success stories we love to relate - of heroes like Jaime Escalante, Marva Collins, Ted Sizer, etc. - the center of gravity of the 40 million to 50 million children in our schools has not shifted very much. We are still a nation at risk and nowhere more so than in our troubled cities. When then-Secretary of Education William Bennett called Chicago's the worst school system in the nation, people in Washington, D.C., and Detroit would have argued with him.
I count it as a success that our leaders and so many of our stakeholders have not lost their interest. We know a lot more now about how difficult it is to rebuild a shattered infrastructure. But now we must simultaneously reshape our educational goals so that our children are enabled to cope in a changing world. In desperate efforts to break out of what seems to be a trap of non-functioning public schools, we've seen devices such as charter schools, vouchers, privatization, home schooling and hybrids proposed as alternatives to the beleaguered public-school system.
I'd like to describe here an intervention meant to support the public-school system through the process of science education. Why science education? Obviously, we are also concerned about reading and writing and geography. But experience with students in kindergarten through fourth grade teaches us that science and mathematics, taught in the right way, engage children, resonate with their own natural curiosity and open a door to the joy of learning.
Such children do better in the communication skills, which, of course, are the key to future learning. A positive introduction to the study of math and science also will serve to support the continuing education of children throughout their lifetimes. And the engines that drive the changes in contemporary society are science and science-based technology.
In Chicago, a consortium of universities has organized a private, not-for-profit intervention designed to assist, if not rescue, the public schools. A board of directors was created, composed of teachers, principals, scientists from universities and national laboratories, educators, university presidents and community-group leaders, and with strong participation by the private sector. In 1990, with funds from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, private philanthropy and the state of Illinois, we opened the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology near Chicago.
There are some 17,000 teachers in the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade system who must teach math and science. Our ``mission possible'' was to train them in the math, science and new pedagogy that has emerged over the past decades on how children learn. This demands radical change. The role and style of the teacher, the furniture and the very culture of the classroom are different in this new way of teaching.
Over the past four years, we have learned that, even in the most embattled schools in the inner city, there is a love of children and a passion for teaching. Given the opportunity to be better teachers, the response is overwhelmingly enthusiastic. At TAMS, we live by all the buzzwords: hands-on, minds-on, activity-based, inquiry methods, cooperative learning - the constructivist approach. Training is in-service, during school hours, weekends, evenings and summer. After four years of this intervention, we have 72 schools and some 3,200 teachers in our cohort. That leaves us just 420 schools and 14,000 teachers to go!
Changing culture is never easy. That it required this much time, effort (and money) should not be a surprise to the funding agencies, but it is. We estimate that the efforts to sustain the revolution probably will take an investment of $3,000 to $4,000 a year per teacher for perhaps three to four years.
But it works! Teachers love it and, when it is well-managed, it creates an intense, joyous learning process. This kind of intervention results in a greatly energized teaching corps in which the new teaching style spreads to other subjects and brings with it the technology that can so fruitfully enhance the teacher's effectiveness. Successful intervention in the public schools requires the support and commitment of those in the teacher's environment: principals, parents, school councils, community groups. It needs the collaboration of state and public school administrators in adopting the new, tough standards coming out of Washington. And it will need, for a long time to come, the support structure of the education stakeholders; in this case, scientists and educators, future employers, college authorities.
The leadership of competent and visionary school superintendents is essential to create an active and sustained intervention. Of course, we must continue to press on the teachers' colleges and on the accreditation system too. In the long run, what will count are teacher rewards in salary and status as professionals, and the imposition of a significant, regularly scheduled period of collegial, professional enhancement. Access to local university support and extensive computer networking are also part of what TAMS brings to the public-school system.
There is a shot that this kind of intervention, suitably replicated in many styles and variations in 25 or so cities, will begin to restore to the nation what was once a superb public-school system. All it takes is patience, money, the passionate commitment of a local CEO, university president and a few volunteer educators and scientists.
Leon M. Lederman, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1988 and a professor of science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, is chairman of the board of TAMS.
The Washington Post
by CNB