Science
The connection between the Wall Street meltdown and the recent New England Common Assessment Program science test results released last week by the state Department of Education may not be blatantly obvious, but there is a link.
As noted above, many of the “best and the brightest” in recent years have flocked to Wall Street or to other financial service jobs, where they “engineered” financial instruments of an increasingly complex nature. They went there because that was where the money, the rewards, the status and the best salaries were. Meanwhile, old-line manufacturing industries migrated in large numbers offshore. While the global economy is here to stay, presumably — unless energy costs continue to make the word a big place again and provide a cost benefit to businesses that stay close to their customers — it’s hard to shake a feeling that it would be nice if the best minds we produce here in the U.S. went into industries that actually made genuine, tangible wealth, instead of the paper version.
State-directed economies have crashed and burned trying to direct outcomes of this sort, and history has shown, in our view, that free markets do the most efficient job of allocating such resources. But it’s hard to allocate anything when you don’t have a good supply of it, and one thing the U.S. seems to have less and less of, as our once formidable lead in science and technology shrinks, is an abundance of scientific talent.
We’re not just talking about PhD’s and other advanced degree holders. There’s a lot of science waiting to be done by ordinary people, who don’t wear a white lab coat to work.
Test scores have been the subject of controversy for years, and probably always will be. For schools that post less than scintillating grades, the temptation will always be to say the test is flawed in some way. It’s interesting that you never hear that complaint from schools that score well.
Compared to statewide levels, our local schools didn’t fare badly in the NECAP testing, but there’s still something that doesn’t scan right when only 25 percent of Vermont’s 11th graders tested proficient. In other test, the National Assessment of Education Progress Test, which uses national standards for scoring, compared to the standards developed by educators in Vermont, Rhode Island and New Hampshire for the NECAP tests, Vermont’s 11th graders scored in at the 77 percent proficient mark. So what’s the difference in the difficulty level of the two tests? The NAEP tests are widely regarded as being good indicators of what students should know, so it’s puzzling the NECAP scores were so much lower.
Locally, Burr and Burton Academy scored at 36 percent on the NECAP test; Arlington Memorial High School had 22 percent proficient.
Look at those numbers again. Even BBA’s score of 36 means that only slightly more than one third of its 11 th graders are “proficient” in science. It’s hard to know just what the NECAP test developers consider proficient, but our understanding of proficiency in other tests means something along the lines of what a reasonably well-educated person should know about a subject. We’re not talking Einstein levels — just what an average, well-educated student who has had the time and resources to learn more about this that regular working folks do should know.
There may be a an explanation as to how a score of 22, 25, 36 percent or even higher is “good enough” or better than what used to be, or about the same as what students in other countries know. If there is we’d like to hear it. Is it the test? Is the teaching? Is it the students themselves and a culture that has downgraded the importance of science as we’ve come to take a lot of its amazing developments — from iPods to medical breakthroughs — for granted?
The connection between all of this and Wall Street is that while one sector of the economy — financial services — sizzled incandescently for the past few years before crashing spectacularly in recent weeks and months, the numbers of secondary school students venturing into academically rigorous areas of study like science and math have dwindled. This is a trend that hopefully will be reversed when the nation gets its groove back and hits the re-start button economically. Just figuring out new ways the re-engineer products to counter global warming would be enough, you would think, to keep a lot of bright young minds working late into the night.