ARIZONA DAILY INDEPENDENT by Dr. Peter Pingerelli and Diane Douglas 7/8/2023
Some remember the live broadcast of Apollo 8 orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve 1968. Over 1/4 of the world’s population listened in, as the crew read from the Book of Genesis. The United States of America led in space exploration, and we were another step closer to man stepping onto the moon’s surface: an achievement requiring education, dedication, courage and perseverance of thousands of men and women.
And yet it was a simple analog device called a slide rule that helped us achieve this goal. With over 5 million parts in the Apollo Saturn V spacecraft, astronauts, engineers, scientists, and students routinely used slide rules to make the Apollo program a reality, while also allowing users to develop and enhance mental skills when calculating an answer.
We certainly don’t advocate revitalizing this nostalgic masterpiece of technology with the advances of graphing calculators and computers, but there’s something remarkable and important about continuously exercising our mental capacities as we become seemingly more dependent upon our newfangled digital world. Today, we need to simply ask Google, Alexa, or SIRI to answer a question as waves of artificial intelligence increasingly sweep into our culture and educational system. But can we still aspire to achieve these national aspirations of new frontiers when our country is failing to educate the upcoming generation of students desiring to become medical professionals, scientists, or engineers? How can our nation excel in these fields if our students no longer understand the math and science behind the tools?
In Arizona the results are sounding the warning bells. Of all students statewide, 60% are failing English Language and 67% are failing math according to the 2022 assessment. And yet all we hear from a system incapable of teaching our children basic academics are demands for more money. The Arizona state budget for 2023-24 is $17.8 billion of which $9.3 billion is allocated to K-12 education. When do we stop giving money to a system that can’t do what it is paid to do?
Results are also discouraging when it comes to statewide science assessments. In 2018 and 2019, 50% of students statewide were not successful at passing the AIMs science assessment, and the 2021 and 2022 results from the new assessment AzSCI are yet to be made public.
More:
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2023/07/08/arizona-we-have-a-problem-the-state-of-s-t-e-m-education/
