Ask a scientist in their mid 50s or older where they were in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy spoke to Congress about the urgency of sending a man to the moon, and chances are they’ll remember.
After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, into space in 1957, competing against the Russians in science and technology became a national obsession. The federal government poured money into improving science education, sponsoring summer institutes on college campuses for K-12 teachers and awarding grants to science education experts to develop cutting-edge textbooks and curricula. The American students who studied science during this period went on to invent the artificial heart, the personal computer, rockets that have flown to Mars and two-in-one shampoo.
In the years since, however, enthusiasm for science has faded. Teachers stopped turning on the television for space shuttle launches, and the federal government declared other national priorities, such as fighting terrorism at home and abroad. Hollywood and the news media once treated people in science, like John Glenn and Carl Sagan, as rock stars.
No longer.
While American students do better in science than they do in math on international comparisons, over time, science scores have not improved, while math scores have risen, and other countries have caught up. Eighth-graders’ scores on the on the 2007 Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), put the United States in the middle of the pack in science achievement, behind nine other countries, including Japan and Russia.
The United States also does not have as high a percentage of top science students as those countries do. Ten percent of American eighth-graders hit the advanced benchmark on TIMSS 2007, compared with 32 percent of students in Singapore and 13 percent of students in Hungary.
In the first seven years of the 21st century, the number of people entering science and engineering jobs grew at the smallest rate since the National Science Foundation began tracking the data in the 1950s. Foreign scientists have filled the jobs left open by Americans who lack the interest or ability to do them — 25 percent of all college-educated workers in U.S. science and engineering jobs in 2003 were born abroad — but they can’t work on national defense projects and may be tempted to return home as the aerospace and pharmaceutical industries take off outside the U.S.
