The 90s similarly saw a huge output of various agencies and groups of scientists detailing exactly what was wrong with the current system. Yet here we are today, with a system that is largely the same as it was in 1964.
Here we are today with that same educational system, and it is failing us in a number of ways. While the situation is not yet dire, without lasting change being made it shortly will be. There was a fantastic report published in 2008 by the National Academies Press called Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which details just where we are today. Their findings are fairly grim. Roughly 1 in every 3 high school students are taught math by someone who has no background in it, and likewise 3/5ths of those in the physical sciences are taught by educators who lack certification in the subject. Among low-income students, this is even worse; 70% of their teachers lack a background or certification in the subject. Less than a third of 4th and 8th graders, and only a fifth of 12th graders are rated as proficient in science. At the collegiate level, only 15% of students graduate with a degree in science or engineering – approximately half of those who started. Among the countries studied, only one ranked lower.
In many ways, we won’t directly see the scope of the problem until it’s too late. Americans love new technology, and much of it comes from innovations created in the U.S. If we are to keep creating the next round of iPods or what have you – the next big inventions – we need to maintain and develop the infrastructure that enabled those inventions to be created in the first place. The Internet came about from research done by RAND in the 60s, and so many things came from Xerox PARC, or Bell Labs. During a speech at Harvard in 2009, Judy Estrin (former CTO of Cisco) had this to say:
We've had a real shift in the research community... in that there has been a shift towards more and more short-term focus, a shift towards commercialization. Now we have what I call a lab gap. We used to have Bell Labs, Xerox PARC - these were places that were able to prototype things at scale. We have nothing in between academic research, and commercialization. That try and test at scale doesn't exist today, and national labs are not good at doing this type of innovative thinking. In the computer industry it doesn't matter so much anymore, but in energy and in life sciences it matters a lot. We have a real gap, and we have to figure out how to solve that.