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The President’s Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy
PUBLIC HEARING
Galileo Academy of Science and Technology
1150 Francisco Street, San Francisco, CA
Thursday, April 15, and Friday, April 16, 2004
Jim McMurtray, Executive Director, National Alliance of State Science and Mathematics Coalitions (NASSMC)
I thank the Chairman and the members of the President’s Commission on the Moon, Mars and
Beyond for the honor and opportunity to present this testimony. I’m James McMurtray, Executive
Director of the National Alliance of State Science and Mathematics Coalitions: NASSMC is 38
state coalitions of business, education and public policy. We have an association with NASA
through the Linking Leaders Program, which aligns, or works to align, NASA and state resources
with state efforts to improve mathematics and science education.
A scientifically illiterate populace is an economic and social liability that no nation can afford. Full
citizenship requires literacy, and scientific literacy must be part of that. To go back to the Moon
and on to Mars will require a national resolve that cannot be borne entirely by a small group of
science professionals. If science and mathematics are only for the few, then there is no shared
national ownership of these missions of discovery and exploration, and unless they are supported
by a literate electorate able to appreciate their value they will not happen.
Educating tomorrow’s astronauts, then, argues for a bold enterprise. Our present system of teaching
science to our citizens does not work for everybody because it is not designed to. The system
reserves advanced science and mathematics for a small subset of the population. To bring relevant
science to all students will require the most profound change in our thinking. It will require a
different system.
There is a very long pipeline to a career in science and it narrows very quickly. Only a handful of
students receive advanced instruction in mathematics and science. Those who do not continue in
this pipeline are not diverted to some other path toward science literacy; they are simply removed.
Science and mathematics are no longer part of their education. They have been sorted out. Since
they will not become scientists or engineers, they will have no more access to science beyond the
satisfaction of their own curiosity.
Science education cannot be structured so that required basic science and mathematics instruction
is limited to the first few courses and a long sequence that is designed to prepare scientists and
engineers. If that is all our students get, it will not be nearly enough. It will be a foundation on
which nothing is built.
Nearly three decades ago, the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council
recommended fundamental systemic reform of American education. They defined this as
fundamental, comprehensive and coordinated change in the policy, financing, governance,
management, content and conduct of the system. Efforts were made but their impact on the system
is hard to detect. Systemic reform has not happened.
Since its beginnings in the late 50’s, NASA has designed and undertaken its missions and its
programs through a technique involving the development of a critical path. Critical path planning
does not begin by examining where we are and finding ways to make small incremental
improvements, it begins with the desired outcome and some essential questions:
What are we trying to do?
What critical developments must happen along the way?
How will we know if we have succeeded?
Critical path is developed by thinking backward from the goal and designing a system that will
produce exactly that result.
I propose that this strategy be applied to the design and development of a different education
system. I believe this can be done with existing infrastructure and that it can be initiated while the
current system continues to function. We need not dismantle what we already have, but we must
immediately begin to design a replacement.
Simply improving the present system will serve only to make it do more efficiently what it already
does. Systems are perfectly designed and operated to produce the results they get. To change a
complex system it is necessary to change many things at once. Leave key elements unadjusted and
the system will repair itself to its former condition.Higher education is part of this system, and therefore, inextricably part of the problem. Our universities and colleges of education have to change.
But to a system, change is indistinguishable from damage. If we really did change lots of things in
the system at once, if we changed many, many things in the system at once, that might cause the
system to fail altogether. It would do irreparable damage. And what it might be replaced with is
whatever could form in that vacuum. Natural selection works, but it’s not guaranteed that it will
work for us. So let’s not do that. Leaving this to chance is not in our interest.
The environment of all systems is other systems. A new design can be implemented to operate in
tandem with the present system. Educators working alone cannot design a replacement system.
This will require broad collaboration involving America’s scientific and social institutions. This
system will exist alongside the older system until it replaces it, and it will replace it when it shows
that it works better. It will take all the creativity and wisdom that we can marshal, but it will be
done.
We face a teacher shortage, particularly in mathematics and science. Our schools continue to fall short of our expectations. Our assessments define success as non-failure. Females and minorities are underrepresented in science and mathematics courses. Perhaps this is because we have confined our thinking to a system in which it is held as self-evident that learning can only happen in groups, that such groups must necessarily be in a classroom, that classrooms must contain no more than a given number of students, that there must be 12 grades,
and that each classroom must be presided over by a teacher trained in the very system we are trying
to alter. I am convinced that, within the present system, these problems have no solution. In a different kind of system though, they might not exist at all.
What I propose is not a new experiment but a new design. We do not know what it will look like,
but we know it will be very different because it will be designed to produce a different result. The
system we have now was not designed. It just evolved.
Americans are capable of doing this. There are people in the country ready to take on this task.
While we educate tomorrow’s astronauts, we must also educate for a society, a culture and an
economy in which the work of astronauts has value to the larger population.
We have done difficult things before. The two Voyager spacecraft gave us pictures of the outer
planets, robots have shown us the surface of Mars, we’ve launched into space a telescope the size
of a school bus and we repaired it in orbit. We can also build a system that shares our scientific
legacy with our children and leaves none of them behind. They will not all become scientists,
mathematicians, engineers or astronauts, but they can share the journey back to the Moon, to Mars,
and beyond if it is also their journey.
Thank you very much.
http://www.moontomars.org
Photo Credit: NASA/GregKnott.com
Slides Accompanying Testimony – PDF on President’s Commission Archives
