U.S. Science Imperiled by Poor Schools and Politics

PASADENA — Although science is flourishing in the United States and public support strong, there are worrisome problems on the horizon that could pose long-term threats to the country.

One is the pre-college preparation of future scientists and engineers. Three recent studies that compared U.S. mathematics teaching to other countries show we lag far behind most developed nations. Some of this is attributable to curriculum design but another aspect, particularly in Asian countries, is the far greater degree of parental involvement in, and concern about, children’s education.

The teaching of science in elementary schools, for the most part, ranges from nonexistent to execrable. Two Caltech professors, appalled at what their children were being taught, are developing, with the Pasadena school system, a K-5 science curriculum--and some 30 other faculty and Jet Propulsion Laboratory personnel have volunteered to help. This is something universities must do everywhere.

Science and math teaching in high schools is not much better; there are high schools offering only one year of science.

One reason for the general decline in the quality of U.S. elementary and high schools, and particularly in science curricula, is a shortage of qualified teachers. People who used to choose teaching as a profession--traditionally women--can now find more satisfying and lucrative careers elsewhere. Those with mathematical and scientific training are in tremendous demand in technology-based industries. It is vital that the investment be made to get good people back into the schools.

What is so insidious about the poverty of good science curricula is all the potential Lawrences, Alvarezes, Einsteins or Fermis who never get interested and never try to become scientists. What a loss--many become lawyers!

There is another, perhaps even more important, facet of the problem. Almost all serious issues facing the nation have a strong scientific and technical component: energy, nuclear power, the environment, food, drugs, disease-control, national security. We rely on our elected representatives, who ordinarily have virtually no scientific training that would help them make sound decisions on these critical questions. I am not advocating that everyone become a theoretical physicist. But we must have an educational system that will at the very least produce a population with a modest degree of scientific literacy.

Public policy toward pre-college education is inconsistent. On the federal level, there were severe cutbacks in the National Science Foundation’s pre-college programs in the early years of the Reagan Administration. Under the leadership of director Erich Bloch, the NSF has worked to restore some cuts.

With this said, you may wonder why the United States has been able to become the best in the world in almost every area of science. How can this be when our schools are so rotten? There are a number of reasons: We have a large, diverse population; the success of a scientific enterprise depends heavily on the contributions of a relatively small number of spectacular individuals; we had an enormous infusion of foreign talent that fled Europe before World War II, and we didn’t have much competition for a long time. It took Western Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan a while to recover from the war.

But our real secret weapon was something else: the organization of scientific research. The co-location of research and teaching in American universities enables the enterprise to flourish. It enables the United States to take college undergraduates who often have educational histories inferior in every respect to foreign counterparts, and turn them into the world’s most productive and creative students and scientists.

Other countries have created research institutions that do no teaching and universities that do little or no research--a fundamentally flawed system, poorly positioned to keep up with the rate of scientific progress required today. The concentration (roughly 75%) of our basic research Establishment in the universities provides the explanation for U.S. scientific pre-eminence. Nonetheless there are problems.

American academic science since World War II has become increasingly dependent on fluctuating financial support from the federal government. Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, heavily research-oriented universities, derive more than one-half their incomes from the federal Treasury. The corresponding figure for Princeton, say, is probably around 25%. I have several concerns about that relationship.

While the overall dollar amounts devoted to research and development have consistently reflected the Reagan Administration’s confidence in science, those budgets have also been increasingly skewed toward defense applications. For 15 years, from the mid-1960s to 1980, there was rough funding parity between civilian and military research and development efforts. Since 1980, as NSF Director Bloch has pointed out, the balance has shifted heavily toward defense. Right now, only a little more than 25% of the federal R&D; effort goes into primarily civilian research.

And, according to Bloch, the proportion of military R&D; funding devoted to basic research has been declining since 1971. Outside of the Innovative Science and Technology Office of the Strategic Defense Initiative organization, much of the military R&D; effort is focused on fairly short-range development efforts.

Another worrisome point: Federal tax reform, while overdue, will nonetheless have a negative effect on research universities. Taxing students’ scholarships and fellowships appears especially counterproductive. At the same time, the revised tax law also lessens the appeal of charitable contributions to higher education--and to other worthy nonprofit organizations. Finally, the new law places severe restrictions on the use, by private but not public institutions, of tax-exempt bonds to finance construction of needed research, education and support facilities.

Students’ aid is not only going to be taxed, it will be diminished. In its proposed 1988 budget, the Administration recommends severe cutbacks in students financial aid. The higher-education community will no doubt turn to Congress and lobby heavily for the protection of current and future students. There is, after all, a huge constituency: 12 million students (most with two parents) and 3,000 colleges and universities with interested faculty members.

Caltech looks for the best potential scientists and engineers when it recruits incoming freshmen, without regard to financial need. We’re generally successful--typically our freshmen have the nation’s highest average combined SAT scores--but 70% to 75% of the school’s incoming students need financial aid.

We’re trying hard to attract scholarship, fellowship and loan funds from the private sector. But major reductions in federal financial aid programs, if implemented, might well turn Caltech and other private institutions into places filled with only children of the wealthy and the poor--the middle class will not be represented.

Pork-barrel politics have entered the halls of academe. In the past few years, it has become common practice to hire a Washington lobbyist to present an institution’s case for needed campus facilities.

Within academe, it’s argued that such a practice permits the “have nots” to play catch up with the “haves.” Although the research facility and instrumentation needs of U.S. universities are real, on both “have” and “have not” campuses pork barrel politics are not the way to produce the kind of science that this nation requires.