Participation in high school science fairs has been declining, and some teachers say Pres. Obama’s policies are to blame.
“To say we need engineers and ‘this is our sputnik moment’ is meaningless if we have no time to teach students how to do science,” Dean Gilbert, president of the Los Angeles County Science Fair, told the New York Times.
In his State of the Union Address last week, Obama called for America to celebrate its science fair winners. But his education policy forces schools to focus on math and reading scores, at the expense of the kind of creative projects that science fairs entail. While many high schools do send their best students to elite science fair competitions, most American teenagers are missing out on the chance to pursue their own scientific inquiry. With the Obama administration pushing to broaden the subjects tested under law to include science, teachers are worried this will take away what little time they do have for science projects.
“I have so many state standards I have to teach concept-wise, it takes time away from what I find most valuable, which is to have them inquire about the world,” said Amanda Alonzo, a science teacher in San José, Calif., who stays late to advise her science fair students.
Paul Dickman, a science teacher in St. Petersburg, Fla., says he still looks forward to this year’s science fair, despite the discouraging drop in participation. “I don’t know if you can generate that kind of excitement just teaching chemistry or physics in the classroom,” Dickman said. “When kids get down and do a project themselves, they get excited about science.”