AP Credit for Project Lead the Way
Posted on May 24th, 2010 by Jaimie Schock
Project Lead the Way (PLTW), a national, highly-regarded engineering program for high schools, was recently given a status upgrade by a suburban Chicago school district. Henceforth, all PLTW courses within Oswego’s two high schools will be given equal weight with Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Oswego schools adopted the PLTW program six years ago, but the engineering courses only had the status of any other elective.
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Science textbooks provide students with lots of useful facts, but science is not about spoon-fed answers. “Learning doesn’t work that way in the lab. You might start with a phenomenon that gets you wondering and leads to questions. We’re helping them (students) build critical thinking skills,” Rebecca Smith, co-director of the Science and Health Education Partnership.
President Obama wants American high schools to graduate kids who are college- and career-ready. But, statistics on remedial education indicate that that’s not going to be an easy goal to meet. In 2007-08, a third of first-year college students required at least one remedial education course in either math, science or English.
Giving students compelling, hands-on lab exercises is a way to ignite their curiosity and interest and should be commonplace in all American high schools, writes Francis Eberle, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. Yet, he adds, too many school labs are “dismal at best” and these sub-par facilities are a big reason why students get turned off by science and don’t go on to study it at college.
Math and science teachers are having a tough time making the transition from traditional teaching methods to more effective inquiry-based learning, a prize-winning elementary school teacher told U.S. senators May 6, appealing for more professional development programs. Susan Naylor, a mathematical instructional coach from Woods County, West Virginia, testified before the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
We can do better. That’s the bottom-line assessment of STEM education in the U.S. by John P. Holdren, the former Harvard physicist who now directs the Office of Science and Technology Policy, making him President Obama’s chief science advisor. “Too many of our children, particularly too many of our girls and minorities, are steering away from science and engineering, and we’re trying to address that.”
Up to 300,000 K-12 and public university teachers and staff face layoffs in the next academic year. Members of the U.S. Senate Education Committee are hoping to pass a $23 billion measure to keep many of them on the job.
Facing tight budgets and other pressures, schools are taking fewer museum field trips. So museums are taking their shows on the road, via travel programs, videoconferencing, and computer-based lessons. Yet, some worry that kids will lose out, missing “the wow factor of actually seeing that huge Triceratops skeleton.”
When the Space Shuttle program is grounded later this year, after nearly 30 years of service, quite a few scientists, engineers, and technicians could find themselves jettisoned into the ranks of the unemployed. So why not turn some of them into teachers? That’s the notion behind the proposed Space to School Act introduced in Congress by Democratic Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, of Florida, reports the Orlando Sentinel. 
