February 4, 2012
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Leon M. Lederman, Nobel Laureate, Director Emeritus of Fermilab, and founder of Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
Leon M. Lederman was awarded a Nobel Prize in1988 for his work in high-energy physics. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, and holds an appointment as Pritzker Professor of Science at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. Dr. Lederman is a founder of and the inaugural Resident Scholar at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), a three-year residential public high school for the gifted in Aurora, Illinois. He was the director of Fermilab from 1979–89. He is a founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science, which was active in the professional development of primary school teachers in Chicago from 1990–2003. For more than 30 years Dr. Lederman was associated with Columbia University in New York City, having been a student and a faculty member there. He has served as President and Chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest scientific organization in the United States, and is a member of the National Academy of Science. Among his prestigious awards are: the National Medal of Science (1965), the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1976), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1982), the Nobel Prize in Physics (1988), the Enrico Fermi Prize given by President Clinton in 1993, the Abelson Prize of the AAAS (2000), and the AIP Compton Medal for leadership in physics (2005). Dr. Lederman served as a founding member of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the United States Department of Energy and the International Committee for Future Accelerators, as well as a Commissioner for the White House Fellows. More recently, he served as co-chair of the National Science Board’s Commission on 21st Century Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), with longtime colleague, Shirley Malcom, head of Education and Human Resources at AAAS. Technos spoke with Leon Lederman in his office at IMSA in April before he met with students for “Lunch with the Laureate.”
How is the work of the Commission on 21st Century Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) going?
We’ve completed our work and have written a draft report, which we sent to the National Science Board. We haven’t heard much from them. But we’ve been, from the beginning, inspired by the 9-11 Commission, which was appointed to look at why terrible things happened and what we can do to prevent such things from happening. They had a very distinguished and very political committee, though it was bipartisan. They were sensitive to the fact that their recommendations would have to go through Congress, and they knew the ropes. After handing in their report, and therefore officially being disbanded as a commission, they stayed together, raised some money, and kept going. They’ve held press conferences, appeared on TV programs—doing everything but marching up and down outside of Congress, but making enough fuss that the Congress eventually began enacting their proposals. It was embarrassing to Congress for the committee members to get on television and say, “It’s been three months and we’ve seen no action.” We thought that was a very good way to go—they stirred up public support, had citizens writing to their congressmen telling them, “Why aren’t we listening to these guys? They’re smart and they have experience, and they say we should do the following things.” So, we want to do similar things. We’re now in the process of fund raising to get enough money to have meetings as a group of private citizens to do more about a very strong set of ideas on getting the public alerted to the state of education, especially science education, in this country. Sure, Junior may be getting a B+ in science, but that doesn’t mean he’s learning anything that’s useful.
The Commission is still intact?
No. We’ve handed in our report, they thanked us very much, and we disbanded. Now we’re working as private citizens, raising funds for the next step.
You’ve been quoted as saying one of your goals was to talk to Oprah about your mission to revamp science education—have you heard from her yet?
Well, not yet, but we haven’t given up. I use Oprah mostly symbolically, as someone who represents influence and the money to get things done. She has a huge following, and we know she cares about education, so I think she’d be a natural to help us.
Where will you go for your fund raising?
We go to the foundations, like the Ford Foundation, the Macarthur Foundation, and so on—people who are interested in education. We need to contact the press and business leaders—they’re very much important in this whole effort. A number of our colleagues are from business, and I think they provide the crucial element to the whole thing. Because if Microsoft, IBM, and Intel and other such companies can’t hire innovative engineers and scientists and mathematicians from this country, then we are slowly going down a slippery path to third-world status. India and China are growing by leaps and bounds…China graduated, with high-quality curriculum, something like 200,000 engineers to our 75,000 as recently as a couple of years ago. And I think that difference is widening, as we get fewer students interested in math and engineering and science.
I was told this by Alan Greenspan once, that the last two or three decades, we’ve been buoyed up by immigration, kids from Ireland and Greece and Taiwan came to our graduate schools and then half of them stayed here, but half of them went back to their home countries. But they’re not coming anymore, because their schools can offer them more opportunities now. Once upon a time, a good engineer graduating in Ireland, for instance, couldn’t get a job. Now those countries realize that they shouldn’t be sending these students away. And today Ireland is one of the richest countries in Europe, because they paid a great deal of attention to keeping their bright young people home, getting good jobs and good opportunities.
And, having fewer graduates in science, engineering, and technology here is one of the reasons why so many of our businesses find they have to out-source their technical needs.
Right. I think we’ve out-sourced about everything we can at this point, except the company itself, which may be the next step.
What are some of the specific recommendations for STEM educators that came out of your commission’s work?
There have been many commissions—we have a list of about 30 to 35 commissions over the last 20 years, starting with “A Nation at Risk,” which was published in 1983, and more recently the Glenn Commission. You don’t have to read the reports, just read the titles: “Before It’s Too Late”! “A Nation at Risk”! Nice titles that tell you the whole story. All these reports got it right: They know our educational system is failing; they know our high school seniors can’t do college work in general; and in international tests, our fourth graders are a little above average, our eighth graders are below average, and our twelfth graders are at the bottom. The lesson to parents is: Don’t leave your kid in school too long.
We know what to do. We know we have to attract the best kids into teaching, we have to pay them more, we have to treat them like professionals, and the curriculum has to be wrenched from the 19th century and brought into the 21st century. There are many things that need to be done, and they’re all on the lists—but nothing gets done. There’s a failure to implement. Part of it is local control of schools. We have a tradition that goes back to the Founding Fathers that education is a local responsibility, and we never dropped that. Then, there is a suspicion about what the federal government can do or not do. In fact, I can think of three instances where the federal government made a strong intervention. The first was the G.I. Bill, when something like seven or eight million returning World War II veterans went to college who would never have dreamed of going to college, if they hadn’t had this opportunity of all-expenses-paid education. And that had a tremendous effect on this country’s economy and on our abilities. Some economists estimated that the Treasury gained ten dollars of taxes paid for every dollar spent on the G.I. Bill. So that was a big intervention into education by the federal government. The second was Sputnik, which scared everybody. A bill went through Congress which allowed Congress to pay teachers’ salaries, build school buildings, pay for enhanced learning in math, science, and foreign languages—it was an amazing bill, the National Defense Education Act.
That was about 50 years ago.
Yes. Sputnik was launched in October 1957, and in 1958 we created NASA, we created DARPA, we created a Presidential Science Advisory mechanism, all those things came out of the National Defense Education Act. It’s amazing what you can do when there’s something beeping over your head. The third federal intervention into education was the recent No Child Left Behind legislation.
It seems we almost have to be in a crisis mode before we take action.
That’s right. So, a lot of people are observing, not a Sputnik-like event but a slow disintegration of American education, which is just as disturbing. The metaphor is the frog—if you put a frog in boiling water, it takes immediate measures and jumps right out; but if you put it in a pot of warm water and slowly heat the water, you can boil the frog. I think everybody agrees that we’re all in hot water.
We’re reading and seeing so much about global warming now and it seems like a crisis is upon us.
Well, the science has been around for more than 20 years, when far-sighted scientists increased their data gathering. A lot of it was in the form of complex computer codes in which you put in the solubility of chemicals in the ocean, the atmospheric chemistry, all kinds of things, to try to predict the climate in complicated ways. And all of the data kept showing that CO2 is bad and raises the temperature; if you raise the temperature, some complicated things happen. For example, birds can immigrate further north if they want cold weather, but the trees they depend on for the insects can’t immigrate as quickly, so this throws off the ecological balance. To illustrate how the ocean levels are rising, now you don’t have to use computer codes—just show people a video of a glacier that ten years ago was a mile thick and today is a puddle of water.
The public can understand those images better than the computer codes.
Right. But you need the computer codes; they’re there, and they keep warning you in detail, but you have to understand the data. Now, scientists are adding other data, like what we can do to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, and a great deal of useful information is coming out this. Something I didn’t know, for example is if I drive my car, which gets not quite 30 miles to the gallon, 10,000 miles over a year, then I’m putting one ton of coal—not CO2—into the atmosphere. Multiply that by the number of cars on the road, and you begin to see the magnitude of the problem. Now there is a huge effort to bury the carbon before it gets into the atmosphere, and that’s a technology we don’t really have command of yet. Nuclear energy is another thing; it has some drawbacks, such as nuclear wastes, and at some point, we’re going to have find a way to get rid of them. But there is a lot of serious research being done on renewables, on solar energy, wind energy, and geothermal energy.
You said earlier that there is a lack of interest in science, technology, and engineering on the part of U.S. students. What’s the data on that?
It’s an average across the nation. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) takes the measurements. They look at high school science majors, students who take science electives; that number is going down. Then we find that higher education can’t get off the hook because half of the kids who’ve gone through AP courses, stayed in high school, and graduated can’t do college work because high schools have watered down the courses. So a high school diploma is no longer a pass to college. I experienced this in my own career. I was a professor at Columbia University, where the students had phenomenal SAT scores. The same thing happened at the University of Chicago; we got the best students. Then, I moved on to IIT in Chicago, which accepts students from the Chicago Public Schools, where most kids couldn’t read or do algebra, but they had graduated from high school. They were good kids: they listened to Oprah and Michael Jordan and didn’t do drugs, they went to school, they stayed away from gangs; they did what they had to do, and the high schools graduated them. But that means they needed remediation. Well, who’s going to remediate them? Colleges can’t really afford to remediate these students, and it’s a major problem. There’s nothing wrong with the kids; their high schools didn’t prepare them for college. And they want to go to college—they understand the difference economically over the long-term future of the value of a college education or losing tens and tens of thousands of dollars of income if they drop out.
Again, if you look at the NAEP or the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS), measurements, our kids just aren’t anywhere near the same-age kids in India and China—they’ll eat their lunch! But that’s who we’re competing with. You don’t compete only with your next-door neighbor or the next state—you’re competing with people all over the world. Right now, if you have an MRI or a CAT scan taken in Chicago, it’s more than likely being interpreted by a radiologist in India. It’s good that they can do it. It’s bad, though, if it means we can’t do it.
The Deputy Minister of Education in China said they’re building 40 new universities, and their model is Harvard—each one is going to be better than Harvard. So that’s our competition.
They’re putting their money where their mouth is, and they see the need.
Sure. They’re looking to the future, this is what they want to do, and they have the brain power and the determination to get it done. Of course, they’re also coming up against the questions about what they’re doing about the environment, just as we are.
Earlier you touched on the local control of education. Should it be changed, and how might it work?
Sure, someday. I’d like to see more businessmen become active in the management of schools. Look at what we have: We have a school, so you have teachers, and then you have a teachers union; then there’s the principal, and they have their own union. Then you have the teacher training institutions, who determine who gets into their course of study; but not too many kids want to be teachers these days (it doesn’t pay too well), so the teacher training institution lowers its standards to attract customers—and that’s the kind of teachers you have in your schools. Primary teachers get maybe one semester of science or math in college, and all of a sudden they have to teach it, so they approach it with total insecurity, fear, and loathing, and of course, the kids pick up on that. It’s a disaster. I know this because I worked in Chicago Public Schools in a project that helped to train primary school teachers on how to teach science to kids. At the age of Kindergarten through grade five, the kids are all scientists—they ask questions, and the teachers need to be able to handle that in class.
How is it different from the traditional science classroom?
This occurred right after school-based management went into effect, so that each school is like a little corporation, with an elected board of trustees, and the principal is the CEO. We set up a teacher training institution at IIT, which is in the city of Chicago, and we borrowed curriculum from Berkeley and other places. It included lots of beautiful hands-on stuff, which was developed back in the Sixties, but the teachers needed to be trained in how to conduct inquiry with the kids. They had to learn how to ask questions and to let the kids come up with the answers.
For instance: A second-grade teacher brings in three boxes of different soaps and asks the kids which is the best. You’ll get various answers, but eventually, the teacher asks, “What is this soap supposed to do?” Get the clothes clean. How does it get the clothes clean? One of the kids thinks it has to do with strong bubbles. So, the teacher shows them how to make bubbles with a wire hoop and dissolved soap in a dish, which is great fun. But, then the teacher tells them to measure how long the bubbles last; or how big the bubbles are. And they write down these measurements and make a graph based on their observation of soap bubbles.
This is research.
Yes. And they can answer other questions, based on the data they’ve gathered. For instance, is it possible for a bubble to last for 20 seconds? Maybe one group of kids has a 19-second bubble, so they know it’s possible, even though they haven’t yet observed it. They can draw that conclusion. They can determine the average length of time for the bubbles by looking at their graph, too.
So, when the kids go from second grade to middle school and on to high school, it’s not unusual for them to ask questions in this way.
Right. They learn how to find the answers to the questions through observations and measurements. Of course, later on they should learn the basic facts. It would be a good thing to find New Jersey on a map.
What’s the best thing that classroom teachers can do to learn how to use these techniques?
Teachers require professional development—and I don’t mean just a couple of weeks in the summer—every week. We should think of it as business does: upgrading the workforce. Teacher advancement is crucial, so I think at least one day a week to be spent on teachers becoming better teachers by collaborating and talking to each other should be part of their professional development plan. They should have the time, desire, and facilities in their schools to become better teachers by talking to each other as a routine thing. In order to be better teachers, they have to learn constantly.
I’ve heard you say that we should use more stories in our science and math classes—teachers should give up 20 percent of content to emphasize the process.
Stories are the process of science, which is a humanistic activity. It’s the human brain wanting to understand the world in which we find ourselves. How does it work? Why does the sun come up every day? We have to find a way to connect the sciences with the humanities. Kids have to learn how to communicate. What’s the point of being a scientist, if you can’t formulate and relate your ideas by writing them down and speaking to groups? That’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom: Knowledge is what we can give kids in a science class; wisdom has to come from our tradition in the humanities, the arts, literature, music—that’s the wisdom which makes life more interesting. To me, it makes sense.
A note from Dr. Lederman to our Readers: “Any audience suggestions, advice, monetary contributions, etc., can be sent to you [editor@ait.net] for transmission to our efforts to awaken the public to the urgency of fixing our education system.” And he probably wouldn’t mind if you gave Oprah a call on his behalf.
Read more about Leon Lederman at his Story of Leon page, with links to other pages. You can email him at: lederman@fnal.gov.