So much of the national dialogue about STEM focuses almost exclusively on “science” and “mathematics.” The words, “science and mathematics” conjure visions of theorems and symbols and long, equations in a virtually inaccessible foreign language.

“T & E” – technology and engineering – rarely surface in the national conversation. Yet the technology and engineering hold the greatest promise for making STEM education enticing, not scary.

So let’s change the conversation. Let’s move technology and engineering to the forefront of the American STEM dialogue. Let’s begin by changing the way we design “STEM schools.”

A few years back KnowledgeWorks’ EdWorks subsidiary worked with a team of teachers, business and nonprofit leaders, and, of course, scientists, to design a STEM high school.

We started with the premise that the school had to engage all students in a rigorous STEM education, not just the community’s brightest and best. In the beginning, we all instinctively turned to the scientists to tell us what the school should look like. One of the first things that the scientists taught us about STEM was that technology is not synonymous with computers.

Technology is anything that advances society.

Fire, they said, was a technology that revolutionized human life and culture. This group of research scientists taught us that it is through technology and engineering that humans adapt the natural world to meet their needs. Yes, they said, deep, rich knowledge of science and mathematics are essential to a STEM school. But scientific knowledge is the means, not the end of a STEM education.

These insights became the drivers of the STEM school design process. Suddenly, we were not designing a school that would simply increase students’ knowledge about science and mathematics; we were designing a school to help students learn how to think like scientists, to help students use scientific knowledge to change our world. All of a sudden science and math were not amorphous streams of facts and figures. They were the vehicles for advancing our world.

And that’s how we marketed the school. Students came. All types of students. We had more interested students than seats in the school.

Inquiry and problem-based learning are the heart of the STEM school design. English, math, social studies and science teachers all collaborate to design the curriculum for the school.

Technology and engineering classes are “laboratories” where students apply lessons learned in the classroom. Scientists come out of their laboratories. Leaders of business and industry roll up their sleeves. They all come into the classroom. Together, they dare students to help find solutions to some of the community’s biggest challenges.

The brightest and best learn and work right along with students who were not academic all-stars in their first few years of school.

Suddenly, these students and their parents and grandparents are excited about science and math. They see the connections between English and math and science and social studies -- and the real world. The teachers are energized. No longer are they working alone. They work with colleagues and the community.

And best of all, we’re seeing real results. High performance for all students, not just the “science geeks.”

We now use the same formula to design all of our STEM schools. And it happens time and again. The energy is palpable in every community. When you put the “technology and engineering” back in STEM, science and mathematics become exciting, not scary.

www.newschools.org

To meet the President’s challenges to improve K-12 STEM education and college graduation rates, STEM initiatives must focus on underserved students of color who are underrepresented in college completion and in STEM occupations, including computer science. Although there are many points of impact, I support the game-changing innovations included in the President’s call to action: Launching 1000 high performing STEM schools (including 400 new high schools) and preparing 100,000 STEM teachers in the next 10 years. I also believe that these innovations must also be supported with personalized learning in the humanities and STEM.

As a partner at NewSchools Venture Fund, I am fortunate to work with education entrepreneurs who are working passionately to answer the President’s call to action. These entrepreneurs are designing and scaling organizations that are proving a strong STEM education can have a lasting and meaningful impact on the future of our youngest generations and dispel the myth that STEM is a scary, smarty pants college and career choice. Charter Management organizations like The Alliance for College Ready Public Schools, E.L. Haynes Public Charter School, DSST Public Schools, Friendship Public Charter School, and High Tech High are providing STEM schools for students.

On May 24, a small cadre of dedicated people met with Secretary Arne Duncan to commit to creating at least half of the 100,000 STEM teachers needed in 10 years. These teachers will participate in performance-based teacher preparation and support as they progress from apprentice teacher to teacher to senior teacher to master teacher. It is imperative that these efforts be supported with personalized learning tools, such as those developed by organizations like School of One, Khan Academy, and BetterLesson.

As the president has stated, “This status quo is morally inexcusable, it’s economically indefensible and all of us are going to have to roll up our sleeves to change it.” Thoughtful STEM advocates like Chad Womack, a Black PhD scientist and bioentrepreneur, and others know that the overwhelming majority of kids will not choose to become STEM professionals in the traditional sense but every child should be STEM prepared, proficient, and literate so that no matter what path they choose they are able to navigate the knowledge and innovation economy. Nearly a quarter of future jobs requiring college will be connected to fields in computer science, engineering and life sciences. Jan Morrison posits that if students take a virtual STEM Learning Tour, their avatar would have a great time, continue to learn and make a living wage that enables them to raise a family, take vacations and live comfortably at both the technical and PhD levels. We must include the most underserved in this vision of the future.

As with most things in education, the discussion on STEM education has taken on a “black box” approach: we’re given a new mandate and it’s up to those within K-12 education, entirely on our own, to define our objectives and reach them. When it comes to preparing students and introducing them to the rich array of opportunities this field can offer, however, this is exactly the wrong approach.

The call for students who are prepared for, and interested in, work in the STEM fields has come primarily from one group: employers. So why are we trying to figure this out by ourselves, and not actively asking them – in fact, insisting that they tell us – what exactly “prepared” looks like? If we want kids to understand what they can do in these fields, why are we not asking employers to lead on that front?

For us to produce the students this group needs (and who can therefore offer our students a viable career path), we need to find out what our students need to know in order to be successful, and tailor the course of study accordingly. There are some good examples to consider along these lines: the National Academy Foundation has recently launched an Academy of Engineering model, which features a curriculum designed in part by the engineering industry, and which requires at least an internship in the field for successful completion. Project Lead the Way has also successfully introduced students to engineering and the real-world applications of what they learn.

But these are the exceptions. The reality is that there are lots of large and small companies trying to help in this area; however, because it is so hard to become involved in the classroom-centered instructional process, much of this work is actually taking place outside the purview of the school, often in extracurricular programs and through the many scholarship programs that companies offer.

Certainly, some of these outside-the-classroom efforts are wildly successful. The US FIRST robotics competition, for example, introduces students to science through robotics competitions that take on the atmosphere of a turbocharged sporting event. They’ve built an impressive base of evidence showing their impact. But much more needs to happen here: while this major program (one of the largest of such programs in the country) reaches nearly 250,000 kids a year across grades K-12, there are nearly 56 million school-age children in the country. Someone else needs to be reaching the other 99.6% of the population – and we’ll be much better at it if we can work collaboratively at the heart of the issue, and not be restricted solely to the outskirts of the schools.

For those who want to see the nation succeed in this space, growing a new crop of STEM-capable graduate able to replace the Sputnik generation now retiring, it is imperative that we bring the business community to the table for definition, direction, co-development, and inspiration.

Mr. Rotherham is correct on two important counts. People choose careers for varied and complex reasons, and our best hope of getting more kids into STEM careers lies in providing better educations for our most disadvantaged students. Assuming that we will take these sensible ideas to heart as a nation, there is much we can do to improve STEM career opportunities for kids who are so inclined. But we may have to give up our attachment to the STEM concept to improve our results.

As a tech geek and voracious consumer of popular science information, I’m a big supporter of sci-tech learning for everyone, especially for kids.

But there are three things about STEM that don’t add up for me: it’s not a real thing; it downplays the importance of literacy skills as a precursor to success; and it lacks a clear curriculum-to-career connection.

We’d be further along in meeting the goals of STEM if we unbundled the acronym and created curriculum tracks that match common work-life roles.

I’ll outline this solution at the end of this piece. But first, let’s look at what might be holding stem back.

STEM is not a Real Thing

Smashed together in a nifty though semantically useless acronym, STEM looks like a tight bundle of sci-tech opportunity. But it’s more a case of category confusion.

Science is not a single thing, but many things, including the social sciences—which I imagine have been left out of STEM, right?

For example, where would the work of Everett Rogers (the guy who came up with the “early adopter” technology innovation model) fit into a STEM curriculum? He was a social scientist studying technology adoption patterns, but not often computer technology, so is his work fair game for STEM programs?

Would Rogers’ work qualify in places where he talks about the Internet but not where he talks about the use of new seed varieties by Midwestern farmers? Both examples are in the same book, (his classic, “Diffusion of Innovations”), and come from the same discipline of communications, but I don’t think STEM programs would necessarily recognize his ideas or that of many other important thinkers of his ilk.

STEM’s artificial organization makes figuring what to study very difficult. Yet ideas like those of Rogers are some of the most important ideas we would want sci-tech kids to understand.

Or what about Edward Tenner’s stuff? He’s clearly a technologist. His work in “Why Things Bite Back” and “Our Own Devices” explains many important things people growing up in the 21st century should understand. But he has just as much to say about boxing gloves and washing machines as he does about computers and cell phones.

Technology is, by its very nature, inter-disciplinary; it is less a thing unto itself and more of an enabler of things. STEM seems to have hijacked it to a foreign country. Engineering is more specific but still has civil and electrical branches that should be recognized as semi-discreet disciplines. And math, as we traditionally teach it in school, may or may not fit in neatly with any of the previously cited areas.

A program that elegantly integrated the elements of STEM could be interesting, but it could also prove unwieldy since the disciplines are so diverse. STEM itself is a conglomeration of things we think should go together but that really don’t, an artificial grouping of disciplines that obscures rather than clarifies what it is we might do in school to make our kids more future-ready.

STEM is a well-intentioned but ill-conceived approach at marketing technical and scientific literacy—a curricular Rube Goldberg Machine. I’ve asked many people what it is, and many people have asked me what it is. None of us seems to know—and that’s not for lack of trying to find out.

In theory, STEM is the wave of the future. In practice, “STEM” is wonkspeak for “We want to stop handing out H-1B visas and off-shoring tech work.” But we don’t need the H-1Bs and the offshoring because we’re short on techy types here at home. We seek tech help beyond our borders because it’s cheaper and because technology itself facilitates the management of distributed teams. Regardless of what degrees our kids end up with, Americans will continue to be more expensive and technology will continue to make distributed teams more effective. STEM may not only be confusing; it may be irrelevant compared to more “traditional” high tech disciplines like computer science.

If we want more scientists, let’s create amazing science programs, and push them down to the lower grades. If we want engineers, let’s create cool engineering programs. If we want more computer kids, let’s start teaching kids computer science instead of just PowerPoint and Word. If we want more kids to get hooked on more math, we probably need an age-appropriate, ultra-relevant applied math track for kids to pursue in parallel with traditional math instruction.

If we weren’t hung up on STEM, it wouldn’t be hard to see how simple sci-tech programs could be created, programs with direct links to sci-tech career opportunities. I learned computer programming in my freshman year of high school in 1976. I guess Mr. Erickson, one of our math teachers, was pretty STEMy for his time (though he didn’t try to teach us math during computer class, so perhaps he wasn’t so STEMy after all).

All Mr. Erickson did was get some computers, create some computer language courses, recruit a few kids to take his classes, and build a couple of simple partnerships with local corporations to take a few summer interns so his best students could get real-world experience—and so that even kids like me who didn’t get internships could see that there was a direct path between learning opportunity and life opportunity.

The computer classes themselves didn’t really have a strong connection to the real world. But back in the 1970s, even professional computer workers didn’t know, as we do now, about all the methodologies (like Agile or Extreme Programming, for example), and all the career sub-specialties (like user interface and user experience design) that exist today.

But if Mr. E. could pull off this nifty little program all by himself 35 years ago, why does our country have such a hard time delivering the same experiences to kids now through STEM when we have easier access to technology and more technology expertise in schools?

Probably because STEM isn’t a real thing; it does not exist in nature. It is hard to create STEM programs because it is hard to know what STEM is. By contrast, computer science is a real thing. Creating computer science programs is relatively easy because we know so much about the theory and practice of computer science. Why start with STEM and be confused when we could start with COMP-SCI and know exactly what we were doing?

The opportunity we’re missing here is the opportunity to help kids find clear paths through school to legitimate real-world professional disciplines.

Here’s a simple idea: partner with the Agile Alliance to create a secondary curriculum in the Agile Software Methodology so kids could get a taste of professional software development before they finished high school. The methodology is proven and used across industries the world over. It provides opportunities for the development of language skills and social and emotional competencies as well. A global community of brilliant people exists to support it. And a wonderful organization exists to play a leading role in program development. If we want more computer kids going on to computer careers, this would be a great way to go, and something that could probably be started on a national scale with a few e-mails and phone calls.

You Can’t Get STEM Without LIT

Ever met a scientist, technologist, engineer, or mathematician who couldn’t read or write? Neither have I. I think every STEMy person I’ve met or worked with has been a superb reader, an excellent, if not flashy, writer, and a tremendously clear thinker.

LIT comes before STEM. Without literacy—without extremely high levels of literacy, in fact—sci-tech folks can’t perform the complex mental abstractions required for their work. STEM would work better if we called it “STEML” or, for more mathiness, “STEM + L”, or “STEM/L” to show that language is the “common denominator”. (Maybe “L-STEM” would be catchier, though.)

We have a major literacy crisis in this country. Many of our elementary kids don’t read well. Large percentages of our high school graduates have to take remedial writing courses in college. Before we can be STEM-ready, we have to be LIT-ready. But STEM itself may get in the way of people understanding this.

Conceptually, STEM creates a faux discipline. In the process, it may encourage us to cordon off sci-tech study from language study, the very thing that enables people to be successful within STEM.

What do computer programmers learn? Computer programming languages. What do scientists need to know? A lot of Latin and Greek. Mathematicians and engineers use abstract symbols and concepts that function like special languages, too.

Language—and the logical thought it enables—forms the foundation of most STEM skills. But if we make STEM a “thing” that doesn’t include language, we cut it off from language. And if we hype STEM as the thing, we privilege it above literacy and give the impression, however subtle, that it is somehow better to be a programmer than a poet when, in fact, language mastery is the seminal ability underlying STEM success.

For a humorous and insightful explanation of how math and literature are inextricably bound together, watch this highly entertaining 3-minute video.

The opportunity we’re missing here is the opportunity to show kids how language and sci-tech disciplines relate so kids can learn to leverage the power of language in their lives and careers. I teach computer science concepts to kids all the time, especially in Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies. I do this by using some of the traditional notational conventions of database design and object-oriented computer programming. This is easy to do, kids think its cool, and it helps them organize, memorize, and manipulate information.

By infusing more of our traditional curriculum with concepts from computer science and information theory, and then moving kids into focused sci-tech curriculum tracks that use these concepts as fundamental building blocks, we would be doing more to get kids into the careers of the future than we’ll doing with STEM programs walled off from language learning.

STEM Lacks an Explicit Curriculum-to-Career Connection

As I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of reducing education to job training, but it seems that our national rationale for STEM is based, at least in part, on increasing future sci-tech job creation. But what do I take in school if I want to do STEM? And if I completed a STEM program what kind of career would I go into? I have no idea. The goal of everything we do in education should be to create learning opportunities that lead to life opportunities. But how do we do this through STEM?

If I want to be a Marine Biologist, it’s easy to figure out which classes I need to take. If I want to be a computer programmer, I might be better off skipping classes and just getting a computer, some software tools, and a few books.

We have a standard high school math sequence that leads right up to Calculus. I can be a math whiz in high school and then major in math in college but what career do I pursue as a result? This is why we need an applied math component in our schools, something that brings math into well-known application areas.

Math isn’t just the “M” in STEM, it’s really more like a horizontal thread running through the “verticals” of science (but please, let’s include the social sciences), engineering, and computer science (but not necessarily technology which is a much vaster discipline than can be accounted for by computers alone.)

As for engineering, we have never had any explicit engineering curriculum at the K-12 level. So if we want it, we’ll have to build it from scratch. But better to do this, and to build something we all understand, than to try and figure out what engineering looks like in the context of STEM.

For all I know, each of these ideas may be in the minds of those who created the STEM concept. There may also exist right now, in some schools, programs that look exactly like the ones I’ve mentioned. But if they do, we should be looking at their results and promoting their success as a means of evangelizing for the expansion of STEM through the replication of successful programs. But where are these programs? What results have they produced? And how have they been supported through STEM policy?

We can say that we’re pushing STEM because we want more kids getting technical and scientific degrees in college. But don’t we really want more kids getting technical and scientific jobs in the world?

To teach STEM such that many more kids pursue STEM careers, we would have to radically alter the personnel in schools, the equipment we make available to them, and the sequencing of student courses. I’m not against doing this by any means. But I want us to be realistic about what it will take, what we’ll have to give up, and how little we might get out of it. It’s going to take more than a catchy acronym to get us where we need to be.

The most logical way to increase the percentage of sci-tech career-ready kids would be to create sci-tech magnet schools that begin right after the elementary years. But even if we could create these amazingly cool schools, we wouldn’t want to organize them around STEM. Instead, we’d want to organize them around career roles because that’s the end result we’re looking for, isn’t it?

When I was entering middle school, I felt a little techy, even though the only computer on the market was the quirky “home brew” Apple I, and the only “computer” I’d ever used was a calculator. With a school fashioned after Mr. Erickson’s computer curriculum, however, I might have opted in. But this school would have had to exist first.

STEM is an “if we build it, they will come” scenario—a high tech field of dreams someone is going to have to bet the farm on and feel just as obsessed about as Kevin Costner did until those magical men came out to play. It’s a complicated, risky proposition, where simpler solutions might already exist.

Many kids are attracted to high-tech gear these days, and the popularity of forensic crime shows has piqued some interest in science. But very few kids are interested in how technology works or how they might work with it beyond texting and playing games. And most don’t want to get their hands dirty with the grime and goo of lab science. Cool sci-tech programs, and cool sci-tech schools, might not increase the number of kids pursuing sci-tech careers. The individual personalities of children, and unpredictable aspects of our culture, may have more to do with our results than the programs we develop.

As technology “appliances” become ubiquitous, kids of the future may end up as disinterested in learning about how these things work (because they are so commonplace) as they would be about learning how to make telephones, televisions, and microwave ovens. Scientific and technological interest, beyond use, may turn out to be a socio-cultural phenomenon far beyond the reach of government policy.

A potential problem with STEM is that its confusing existence may stem any chance of people like Mr. Erickson getting some nice little programs going in their schools. If we start funding large and complex STEM initiatives, when STEM is not something we can easily define, we may end up wasting money on poorly constructed projects.

The opportunity we’re missing here, is the opportunity of having thousands of small Mr. Erickson-sized wins in the sci-tech education game. Instead, we may risk large losses as people line up at the funding trough to create disjointed programs. Having a simpler national initiative in computer science, for example, would make more sense. Computer science programs are cheap and easy to design and implement. And CS runs across every aspect of the traditional school curriculum. It also has obvious career trajectories any teacher, kid, or parent can understand.

So Let’s Do the Easy Things First

There are easier and more direct ways of reaching our goals than executing educational programs through a slippery concept like STEM. Why use a new and unfamiliar organizing principle when the world has already organized scientific and technological disciplines for us?

The best way to reach STEM goals would be to abolish STEM and replace it with: (1) Real computer science curriculum at the secondary level; (2) Applied math curriculum to accompany our traditional Algebra-to-Calculus sequence; (3) Serious science classes for kids at the middle school level; and (4) An engineering track that begins with Civil Engineering and evolves on from there.

Real Computer Science Curriculum at the Secondary Level

We don’t need “computer use” or “multimedia production” in schools as much as we need computer science and information theory: languages, architecture, object-oriented concepts, operating systems, databases—along with product development, UI/UX, IT, project management, and (Yes!) maybe even a little marketing. (Good for the language skills, right?).

Applied Math Curriculum to Accompany our Traditional Algebra-to-Calculus Series

Economists, MBA’s, social scientists, and sports folks all use a lot of math. Personally, I didn’t like math because of math, I liked it because it made me a better gambler—and that made me money. All the math hotshots at my school were card-counters and probability whizzes. We made up our own applied math curriculum through weekend poker games and a sports book I ran in the library (sadly broken up at the height of its popularity by an earnest librarian; as a naive 15-year old, I had no idea gambling wasn’t allowed on school grounds).

Serious Science Classes for Kids at the Middle School Level

I love science now but you couldn’t get me anywhere near it when I was in school. In fact, I contend to this day that I am the only holder of a BA from a major institution who never took a single science class in college.

Why? Because science was too daunting in high school.

My science friends always had so much work to do and I didn’t want any part of it. But if I’d had a strong science warm-up round in middle school, jumping into Mr. Walker’s killer chemistry class might not have been so intimidating.

Science is hard even at the beginning. Get yourself into AP Physics and the Universe gets very big, very quickly. Let’s get kids excited about specific scientific disciplines aligned with obvious career choices before they even get to high school. Start the track earlier, get the train running faster, and make sure kids and families can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

An Engineering Track That Begins with Civil Engineering and Moves on from There

Leading kids directly from school world to real world, not through vague disciplinary distinctions but through concrete career trajectories, is the way to go. Civil engineering would be fun even for tiny kids because tiny kids love to build big things.

But here again, to engineer an engineering curriculum, we’d have to start it early and take time away from other stuff—stuff we’re already not studying enough of.

What would you cut out? Phonics? Spelling? Grammar? Composition? Research papers? History? Civics? Library? PE? Music? Art? Recess? Adding engineering—which barely exists at all in K-12 schools right now (unless we count after-school robotics clubs)—might force us to cut some of the things, like literacy, that make engineers successful in the first place.

We Need Real Programs to Meet Real-World Needs

If we have a need in this country for more scientifically- and technically-inclined citizens who can compete favorably for the jobs of the future, let’s address that need directly with courses that lead directly to careers. Instead of starting with an ersatz amalgam of disciplines like STEM, let’s start with real-world disciplines that have a high likelihood of ending in professional expression.

Again, I don’t think education should be job training. But if people in power are concerned with macro-economic employment trends, and if they think the best way to prepare our nation for future global economic competition is by turning school into high tech career preparation, then let’s give it our best shot by doing the things that make the most sense. The promise of STEM lies in the extraordinary opportunity we have today to bring science and technology education into K-12 schools. But this opportunity will likely be realized more successfully if it is more focused.

No matter what happens to STEM, let’s not forget that literacy comes first, that sci-tech programs will require new schools, new tools, and new people—and that an acronym does not an educational movement make. It’s time to look clearly at the wonderful scientific and technological opportunities we have before us and see them as they are, not as we might wish them to be for funding or policy purposes.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel of sci-tech career preparation with a fuzzy concept like STEM. The world has already fashioned that bit of technology for us—and it works quite well. Our kids might even end up working in it some day if we’ll only show them exactly what it is.

As my colleagues Diana Epstein and Raegen Miller have pointed out, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a STEM initiative these days, but most overlook a fundamental problem. In general, the workforce pipeline of elementary school teachers fails to ensure that the teachers who inform children’s early academic trajectories have the appropriate knowledge of and disposition toward math-intensive subjects and mathematics itself. Prospective teachers can typically obtain a license to teach elementary school without taking a rigorous college-level

STEM class such as calculus, statistics, or chemistry, and without demonstrating a solid grasp of mathematics knowledge, scientific knowledge, or the nature of scientific inquiry. This is not a recipe for ensuring that students have successful early experiences with math and science, or for generating the curiosity and confidence in these topics that students need to pursue careers in STEM fields.

In order to improve STEM learning, we must strengthen the selection, preparation, and licensure of elementary school teachers. We need higher standards for selection into teacher preparation programs—standards that include demonstrated proficiency in math and science at a level that is far higher than our current pool of teacher candidates. Elementary grade teacher preparation programs must include more—and more rigorous—math and science courses in both content and pedagogy, and teacher candidates must perform in these courses at the high levels that we would expect of our students.

Furthermore, states must strengthen their licensure requirements so that teachers cannot obtain a license without passing the math and science sections of the exams. Finally, alternative certification programs should continue to recruit candidates who were STEM majors in college or are STEM professionals, and their licensure should be streamlined in order to get them into classrooms as soon as they are ready.

Specifically, we need to do the following:

• Increase the selectivity of programs that prepare teachers for elementary grades

• Implement teacher compensation policies, including performance-based pay, that make elementary teaching more attractive to college graduates and career-changers with strong STEM backgrounds

• Include more mathematics and science content and pedagogy in schools of education

• Require candidates to pass mathematics and science subsections of licensure exams

• Explore innovative staffing models that extend the reach of elementary level teachers with an affinity for mathematics and science and demonstrated effectiveness in teaching them

Right now the country has a strategy for increasing the number of STEM graduates that is basically predicated on hoping we can induce some percentage of students who can choose from a variety of careers to choose a STEM career instead. We offer scholarships and other incentives in an effort to induce them.

But people chose their career path for a variety of reasons, large and small. And it's worth asking if in this instance trying to change the choices of those who are in a position to make choices is really the most powerful leverage point here. After all, many of the people writing on this blog or reading it didn't chose STEM careers because they found other paths more meaningful for them.

So perhaps rather than wring our hands about STEM we should be focusing on all the students who cannot chose a STEM career even if they wanted to because they are getting a substandard education or, worse, have dropped out of school altogether. With dropout rates for minorities at almost 50 percent and college completion rates for low-income students at 8 percent by age 24 those are the places we should be looking for future talent. With a good education some percentage of those students would also chose STEM careers just as some percentage of students overall do today.

In other words, in any population there is some percentage of students who will chose STEM careers and some percent that would rather do other things with their lives. Rather than trying to squeeze a few more out of populations that can already make that choice, let's focus our energies on giving currently under-served populations the choice in the first place by improving the overall quality of their educational experience. If you're not taking the right classes or worse if you're not in school STEM is not a viable choice for you right now. Fixing that seems the path to the richest untapped vein of future American talent.

The need to produce more highly effective teachers in STEM is a very important national goal. It is as strategically significant as it gets. The key to our country’s future economic viability is innovation and problem solving, creating new and more effective products and services in response to the needs of our communities. This means being able to frame new questions and apply tools and principles of a discipline to craft and test new answers. Clearly, the capacity we need in the STEM disciplines to address our economic interests depends upon, and goes well beyond, mastery of extant knowledge.

In the past few years, learned societies and universities have taken up the challenge of improved productivity in STEM disciplines, as reflected in the numbers of students graduating with STEM-specific majors and in terms of those who intend to teach in preK-12 classrooms. Some answers are beginning to emerge.

First, the way undergraduate courses are taught is critical to increasing majors and those who are interested in teaching. The American Physical Society (physics) found that when students enjoy the learning process because it is challenging and not drudgery, they are inspired to complete the major and to consider becoming a teacher. Indeed, a transformation in undergraduate physics instruction is being accomplished by professional development to help professors make the discipline come alive.

Another important point of intervention is preK-12 science and math instruction. Here, the key is to assure that teachers understand that their job is to open the door to the disciplines early by helping elementary students recognize how it applies to important everyday situations rather than in esoteric and academic terms (memorizing definitions and formulas). As they master math concepts, understanding the problem is as critical as computational operations, and as they become aware of interesting dynamics in their world, they are then “doing” science. One science educator once told me that elementary science teachers must learn to help their students notice the science all around them in their urban and rural communities as the basis for the more discipline-based approach they will encounter in higher grades. Rather than being intimidated by science and math, they are taught that science and math are tools that are used in everyday life by everyone.

Finally, I would comment on the issue of job skills associated with STEM knowledge. Employers, unions, government agencies and community based organizations all need to join a campaign to help all of our children understand how they can prepare for the future that is so fast evolving. This is a time when knowing math, science and literacy are the modern equivalent of “reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic,” and we are all smart enough to learn enough to contribute.