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chapter 2 The Achievement Gap Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. Stephen Jay Gould Let’s recap what we have learned so far: 1. In a high-tech global economy, STEM education assumes more importance than ever before. 2. American high school students perform poorly in STEM fields in comparison with their counterparts from other nations. 3. America’s low rank among other countries has persisted for 40 years. 4. That Americans value—and are committed to—mass public education, while many other nations educate only an elite group of students does not explain away the findings. 5. The percentage of American adolescents who study mathematics and science is lower than that of other countries. Why are we not competitive in STEM education? In preparing a previous book, Aptitude Revisited: Rethinking Math and Science Education for America’s Next Century, I concluded that there was one fundamental flaw in our system. Other factors, especially poverty, played a role, but there was, and still is, one basic problem : Far too many students are blocked from opportunities to master STEM because of false assumptions about aptitude. The barriers to STEM education take many forms. Students may be dissuaded from taking advanced mathematics and science courses. A teacher may interpret a probing question as a stupid one. A counselor may recommend that a student discontinue further study. Richard Tapia is a world-class, award-winning professor of mathematics at Rice University and a member of the National Science Board. A Latino from a t h e a c h i e v e m e n t g a p 31 poor neighborhood in Los Angeles, he attended college at UCLA. When he told his advisor he was thinking of applying to graduate school, the advisor said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Tapia replied, “No problem. You won’t be the one going to grad school, I will.”1 Tapia, one of only six “university professors” in the history of Rice University, has said: “As minority faculty we serve as role models in two directions. We demonstrate feasibility to the minority students and show the non-minorities that we as minorities can be excellent teachers and faculty.”2 Beliefs about innate aptitude and intelligence have done more harm than good. They are epistemologically unsound, and proponents of such beliefs cannot offer any compelling evidence that they describe empirical reality. Modernday psychometricians, including Charles Spearman, Robert Sternberg, and Howard Gardner, sound like medieval theologians arguing about how many angels would fit on the head of a pin. Is there one kind of intelligence (Spearman), or are there three (Sternberg), or eight (Gardner)? Some scientific concepts, hypotheses, and theories that were once widely accepted have been abandoned. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. We no longer try to understand personality by studying the bumps on someone’s scalp (called phrenology). We no longer treat diseases with leeches. It is time to abandon the concept of intelligence or aptitude. International research about educational achievement has found that when American students do poorly, parents and teachers often blame their underachievement on aptitude. When students in some other countries do poorly, parents and teachers instead say that students aren’t working hard enough. In February of 2001, I wrote about this issue in an article that appeared in USA Today. The editors placed a headline on the piece that they thought captured the message: “Tell Students: Yes, You Can.” In the article I discussed programs that work to close the achievement gaps between rich and poor students, between majority and minority students, and between girls and boys. When I wrote Aptitude Revisited, I was optimistic about our capacity to turn this situation around. I remain optimistic. If assumptions about group aptitude are arbitrary, a group that now is down can rise up. As you will see below, this has happened to some degree for young women in high school and college. But women still have a long way to go before we have equity in STEM fields. Someday driver’s ed and STEM education might have something in common . High schoolers know that with turning 16 comes the possibility of earning a driver’s license and the freedom to drive. Before they...

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