Why is it that structural change in “STEM education” has proven so elusive? What—if anything—might an ambitious foundation do about it?
In our capacity as an advisor to a philanthropic foundation, we had a series of conversations, both in person and over email, exploring opportunities for (and structural challenges to) transformative changes in “STEM” education. From our perspective, many foundations and initiatives have tried and largely failed to make a dent in this domain. This excerpt from an email exchange begins to detail why and offer very preliminary responses to these challenges.
I thought it might be helpful to share some of our thoughts about what fundamental assumptions need revisiting if we're going to see any sort of transformative change in STEM. The overwhelming majority of work we see nowadays is extraordinarily incremental, and we think that some of these factors are at the root of that…
All that's pretty abstract. I thought it might be helpful to flesh it out a bit with a specific example. Watching "school" attempt to figure out what to do about "computers" has been totally fascinating. It's especially fascinating because there is a burgeoning, parallel infrastructure out there for folks to grow as software engineers.
Let's start with just those four structural challenges:
One of the reasons I think computation is an interesting example to think with is that the outside world has so rapidly caught up and surpassed school in its efficacy in developing people's fluency...in ways that has largely not been the case for, e.g., physics or mathematics or chemistry or engineering. I think there are a ton of lessons to learn from these successes, but one of the elements that those successes elide is the very real opportunity to substantively revisit what and how we learn in all of our other subjects. Just as pencil and paper and blackboard transformed schools, so can (I believe) computation. Obviously people believe this about "technology" (broadly construed), but this has not touched pedagogy at all.
So, what to do about all this? Obviously, we have a particular strategic take in the form of a school design, but that intervention was articulated with a much broader mission than "just" STEM education. So I thought it might be interesting and useful to share a few of our thoughts about what some of the ingredients underlying structural interventions which might be possible that don't take the form of a school and more specifically target STEM...There are plenty of much more concrete, exemplary initiatives/brainstorms we could share from this, but I thought it might be a good start...
So first, to go back to our four, structural challenges above:
And in a very fundamental way, (4) is the limiting reagent to broader changes. But I think why and how that's the case deserves some elaboration. Specifically, I don't mean that as narrowly as CS10K—e.g. for computer science—it isn't that there aren't enough "computer science teachers" (though that may be true, too). But if you zoom out and think more broadly about other ingredients... like policy changes or school designs or school leaders or curricula or tooling or anything like that, our bench is wildly shallow there, too. Until you have real people with a real relationship to their domain who are domain experts and practitioners first and designers and educators second, I think we're stuck.
The only way to work around that (e.g. in the interim) is to focus on efforts which in some way unbundle the time or resources school currently monopolizes to meaningfully allow third party partners and experiences to take on a significant role. This has proven to be extremely difficult in general. Vanishingly few schools or school systems are going to give up money or time when they see something as nominally within their wheelhouse.
Given this, you'd expect to see very interesting work around the margins—with at-risk/opportunity youth, adult basic education, vocational education, etc. And you do! But almost all of that is around computer programming (for a variety of reasons I'm happy to hypothesize about). That is, while there are coding bootcamps, there are no physics bootcamps for overaged/undercredited youth.
In addition to human capital, I think another wildly underappreciated limiting reagent is basic research and design. Right now, people solidly assume that all work needs to be done at scale, quite soon. For a variety of reasons, this precludes a lot of the much more basic research and design work that's necessary when a field is underdeveloped. That is, in education we basically assume all the fundamentals are set, and now all we need is help scaling/implementing. There are vanishingly few communities devoted to the equivalent of tech transfer/translational research, and even fewer devoted to basic research and design...Those who do research have to put up with researching existing schools, which limits the scope of their inquiry to unhelpfully narrow (e.g. fMRI studies) or broad (e.g. charter school efficacy research) questions.
I think that this means we need significant vision and investment in articulating a real research and design community... think Xerox PARC or Mayo Clinic or Dewey's Lab School. For whatever it's worth, I think that this naturally complements (in ways I'm happy to expand on) the human capital diagnosis. Roughly: If you're going to bring in or develop a deep bench of domain talent, that talent won't be happy to be dumped into existing schools, and only a few will have the patience/gumption to put up with the bullshit of starting a new public school. So, where do those people learn and grow and acclimate to education-the-industry in the interim?
As you can probably tell, there's plenty more where this came from (and I'm happy to share other, exemplary analyses/brainstorms we've drafted internally as we've thought through our longer term strategic plan), but this is probably enough for now =)
As I mentioned, I think the vast majority of the most interesting work in this space isn't happening in schools— It's happening out in industry and adult basic education. Here are some of the organizations I mentioned which I think are especially interesting and bear much closer inspection...in their own way, I think each is also very interesting as an inspiration by analogy:
As promised, I also wanted to send along a few readings that are either exemplary of or have been formative in how we think about "STEM."