From HT Politics.com
by Zack Anderson
Nobel Prize winning chemist Harold Kroto began honing his science skills as a child tinkering with radios and other gadgets.
The Florida State University professor believes a knack for science often surfaces early in life, so he wonders how much good will come of Gov. Rick Scott’s proposal this week to elevate university science programs over the liberal arts in future funding decisions.
“It needs to start in the nursery school, the elementary school and in the home,” Kroto said in an interview with the Herald-Tribune this week.
Education experts throughout Florida are raising similar questions about Scott’s plan to emphasize science, technology, engineering and math — the so-called STEM disciplines — at the university level, with some saying the science push would be more valuable if it was directed at primary and secondary school students.
Universities need a “broader pool of students entering” STEM degree fields, said former University of South Florida president Betty Castor.
“That is really an issue that I think begins in the K-12 system,” Castor said.
Scott unveiled his university reform plan Wednesday as part of the jobs-oriented portion of his 2012 legislative agenda.
While noting that science education is also important in kindergarten through 12th grade, the governor said in a news release that Florida’s university system “must lead the way” and “drive its graduates toward high employment and high earning careers by increasing its focus on graduating students in STEM fields.”
Scott noted that less than 20 percent of Florida university graduates earn STEM degrees.
But universities cannot change those statistics on their own, said Brad Tanner, a science instructor at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota and the former president of the 1,000-member Florida Association of Science Teachers.
Tanner believes Florida needs to do a better job recruiting and training good science and technology teachers at the elementary, middle and high school levels.
Science teaching positions are some of the most difficult for schools to fill, partly because the salaries are much less than most science-oriented careers in the private sector.
School districts have tried a variety of tactics to lure more science teachers — including offering salary increases and recruiting from the corporate world — but Tanner said boosting STEM programs continues to be a hot topic among his peers.
Tanner also believes that elementary schools do not spend enough time teaching science. “Not nearly as much as they should,” he said.
He works to help fellow teachers incorporate science lessons into other subject areas, such as math and reading.
Children who have not developed a science “mindset” by the time they graduate high school are unlikely to experience a conversion at the university level, Kroto said.
The renowned scientist also questioned Scott’s plan to elevate certain university programs to the detriment of others, particularly the social sciences and liberal arts.
Scott said in an interview with the Herald-Tribune on Monday that he wants to shift support from programs like anthropology — which the governor said contributes little to Florida’s economy — to STEM fields.
But Kroto believes his interest in visual arts and architecture were useful in his Nobel-winning research, in which he and two colleagues discovered a super strong molecule called buckminsterfullerene that is expected to have important applications for building materials and nano technology. Kroto and his colleagues named the molecule after Richard Buckminster Fuller, who popularized the geodesic dome structures that the molecule resembles.
“Science pays the bills,” Kroto said, but visual arts are his first love and he believes everyone should have a broad education.
Those sentiments were echoed by university leaders across the state this week.
The totality of higher education includes the sciences and the liberal arts, and you need them both to have a complete educational system,” University of Florida President Bernie Machen told the Gainesville Sun newspaper. “So it shouldn’t be either/or.”
Still, education experts agree that science programs need improvement across all grade levels.
Florida has struggled with science education for younger students. Just 40 percent of 11th-grade students in Florida performed at grade level on the science portion of the 2011 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
Lower grade levels perform slightly better, but only 51 percent of fifth graders were proficient in science this year.
A recent U.S. News & World Report ranking of the best science high schools in the nation included just eight Florida institutions in the top 208, ranking Florida seventh nationwide for top science schools behind much smaller states like Massachusetts. Florida had only eight top schools compared to 30 in New York, a state with roughly the same population.
Florida education leaders worry that the state will fall further behind if budget cutting in the public schools continues this year.
But top lawmakers have refused to rule out more cuts for school districts, which lost $1.3 billion in state funding last year, or about 8 percent of per-student revenue.
The state is facing another budget deficit of up to $2 billion in 2012
http://htpolitics.com/2011/10/13/college-is-too-late-to-start-learning-about-science-experts-say/3/
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