Panel: Teens need better textbooks, teaching standards

(LA CA ADA FLINTRIDGE) - Students, especially girls, need more hands-on experience and textbooks that include the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs, experts told state legislators at a joint Senate-Assembly hearing Friday. Students' interest in science and math drop significantly during the middle and high school years, particularly among girls, former astronaut Sally Ride said at the hearing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

What's more, just 11 percent of engineers and 20 percent of scientists are women, Ride said, and many related companies that recruit women find it hard to locate candidates.

"The reasons are not reasons of interest or aptitude, the reasons are more societal," Ride said. "It affects a lot of girls starting in middle school. We just try to introduce them to lots of other girls and female role models. All we need to do is fuel that interest and enthusiasm we know they've got." State Sen. Jack Scott, D-Pasadena, who co-hosted the hearing, cited what he called some rather sobering statistics about U.S. students' achievement in science and math. A 2003 study showed 11 countries outperformed American fourth-graders in math, and five countries did so in science. Achievement only declines as students get older, he added.

"I think that America's competitiveness is at stake here," Scott said.

Part of the challenge in strengthening student achievement in math and science is that kindergartners through third-graders often spend most of the school day immersed in reading and math, said Dean Gilbert, president of the board of trustees of the California Science Teachers Association.

"We claim to have world-class standards, yet teachers are told not to teach science in the early grades," Gilbert said. "We have an accountability system that assesses a very small part of the science standards."

Speakers said the state standards focus too much on procedure and not enough on the concepts behind science and math. California is among a handful of states that do not re-evaluate the standards on a regular basis to bring them in line with advances, said Assemblywoman Carol Liu, D-Pasadena, one of the hosts of the hearing.

"There's not this evolution going on to appreciate new knowledge," Liu said.

When it comes to recruiting and retaining math and science educators, there are few incentives for qualified people to choose the comparatively low-paid profession, speakers testified.

"There is broad agreement that not enough is being done to cultivate and nurture teachers who are doing a good job," Caltech professor Alice Huang said. Prospective teachers who are leaders in their field are also dissuaded by subject tests that are inappropriately focused on large amounts of content rather than problem-solving and procedural knowledge, said David Marsh, an associate dean of education at USC.

Marsh added that the state must find a way to get students and teachers working toward the same goal: Students tend to focus on SAT scores, but teachers are concerned with performance on the state's standardized tests as measured by the Academic Performance Index.

Liu, who heads the Assembly's Higher Education committee, said she believes Friday's testimony will help shape future legislation.

"We've concentrated a long time on English-language arts and math," Liu said. "I don't think that science is the only area that is affected by the same kinds of concerns."