Change the Equation Blog

The Massachusetts Governor’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Council just released a video featuring people in cool jobs that require STEM skills. This is the first of a series of videos that the STEM Council will send to schools across the state.

The video features some pretty cool jobs. Check it out:

While we’re on the subject, have a look at some of the videos CTEq released last year to show kids how cool jobs that use STEM skills can be. Companies created these videos as part of a ground-breaking contest among CTEq members. SAS and Activision produced the winning videos:

You can see all the videos here.

American kids are dreaming big, and that’s good news. The bad news is that we’re not equipping them to realize those dreams.

A new Gallup poll finds that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in America’s youth. Here are some of the more startling findings. Seventy-seven percent of students in grades 5 through 7 want to be their own bosses. Forty-five percent plan to start their own businesses. Forty-two percent say they will invent something that changes the world. (Yes, they can’t all be right—there can be only so many Steve Jobses and Bill Gateses—but you have to admire their spirit.)

Ninety one percent say they’re not afraid to take risks, even if they might fail, and 85 percent say they never give up. Gallup did not field this poll outside of the U.S., so we don’t know how students in other countries would have responded. Still, it’s tempting to see this poll as evidence that the uniquely American spirit of invention, enterprise and self-reliance is undimmed, even in these gloomy times.

But a stiff dose of reality may well overpower that youthful spirit. Altogether too few students are on a path to realize their dreams. The Gallup poll finds that fewer than 60 percent of students have a bank account, almost half don't learn about money or banking in school, and a scant five percent are interning with a local business.

The fact that so many kids have little or no exposure to money management or business may well stand in the way of their plans. But their anemic performance in subjects like math and science is at least as big a barrier to their success. Yet there, too, students are confident. An Intel survey in 2010 found that a whopping 85 percent of high school students think they're good at math and science. National and international tests tell a very different story, of course. There's a big difference between constructive confidence and blind bravado.

We have ample evidence that students' hopes are already being dashed. Overwhelming majorities think they'll finish college--91 percent by last count--but fewer than 7 in ten are even graduating from high school in four years. The graduation rates at two- and four-year colleges are much lower still.

Still, we should see our glass as half full. The Gallup poll shows that our students have pluck, that they want to make it on their own. We have a lot to work with, but if we don't get them more engaged in learning more challenging math and science, we'll squander our most precious national resource.

Gallup plans to keep giving this poll for the next 100 years. (How's that for pluck?) If our young people keep getting their hopes dashed, we may well see those poll numbers drop.

Yesterday, we wrote about new research suggesting that students of color do better in classes taught by teachers of the same or similar race. We lamented the fact that teachers of color seem to be in short supply. As luck would have it, a separate studyreleased yesterday attempts to explain their scarcity. Chalk it up to working conditions.

The new study’s authors, Richard Ingersoll and Henry May, have found that the problem isn’t getting teachers of color into schools. Efforts to recruit them into the teaching force have apparently paid off over the past two decades. The problem is keeping them in the teaching force. They are much more likely to leave teaching than white teachers are.

Ingersoll and May conclude that poor working conditions drive them out. They are more likely than white teachers to teach at schools that are hard to staff and are more likely to burn out as a result. What is their main beef? Many say they left because they lacked input into school decision making and/or lacked autonomy in the classroom. These causes trump low pay.

A major lesson of the study? Working conditions matter, and we neglect them at our peril. All too many students of color are leaking out of the pipeline to good jobs, especially in science, engineering and technology, so they need their role models to stick around.

Should high schools be judged by their success in preparing their students for college? That idea has been gaining ground recently.

A couple of years ago, some plucky researchers found that some high schools getting great marks from state accountability systems were doing too hot on the college front. Even if their students were getting into college, many didn't survive past their freshman years. By contrast, graduates if some schools that fared poorly on state report cards did much better in college.

The plan to rate schools according to their graduates' success in college depends on data. Some 43 states now have the capacity to track individual students' progress from K-12 to the end of college, but only 23 are using these systems.

Kids of gotten the message that they should go to college--whether 2-year or 4-year programs--but huge numbers never get a degree. Should high schools be on the hook for how well they've equipped their graduates for success?