No matter what your perspective, science education in elementary school is CRITICAL.  Find yourself in the list below, and click on it to jump to an explanation about the importance of science education – from your perspective.

As an Elementary School Student
As a Parent
As a Teacher
As a School Administrator
As a Business Executive
As an American
As a Human

As an Elementary School Student:
Science is interesting and fun.  As you learn more each year, you can get deeper into science, and it’ll still be fun, and even more interesting.  If you don’t get enough science or learn enough of it in elementary school, it’ll start feeling hard in 5^th grade, then get even harder in middle school.

 As a Parent:
It’s about good jobs and the quality of life.  The future will be more complex and faster paced.  As manufacturing jobs go overseas, your kids will be left to find service sector jobs and knowledge intensive jobs.  The high paying fields of science, technology, and engineering have great jobs, great pay, and will be in demand for the foreseeable future.  Your kids have to love science NOW and learn about it, so they can be qualified for those jobs when they graduate college.  Qualified means that they will be more qualified than the technology/science workforces in Bangalore, India and Shanghai, China and many other cities far away from here.  Many companies already have R&D teams spread throughout the world, who collaborate via the internet as though they were in the office next door.  Being the smartest kid in the neighborhood doesn’t mean much anymore. 

Even if your child isn’t destined to be a scientist, industries that are science intensive need science savvy salespeople, administrators, executives and support staff.  And every workplace needs people that can reason well and problem-solve, and these skills are most easily taught via the sciences. 

As a Teacher:
You chose this profession to help kids grow and become productive adults.  Science is a huge part of what they need.  It’s a rich area for deep thinking and exploration.   

All that aside, they’re going to get tested on it in fifth grade – by the state, and the test results will be public, and will count toward and reflect upon your school.  The amount of science they are required to know in 5^th grade is HUGE, and the only way they’ll get there is if all the other grades help build the science foundation each year.   

What’s worse than a bad test score?  5th graders deciding they HATE science because they are overwhelmed and feel stupid.  And most of them are at risk of ending up this way if they don’t get the foundation they need in earlier grades. 

And yes, there is talk and rumor that science testing will get extended to lower grades.  No-one seems to know for sure, but the teachers that start embracing science now will be a leg up when and if testing comes to them. 

As a School Administrator
Every school administrator we’ve met cares deeply about kids learning and growing.  But an administrator’s tools to achieve that goal include teacher support, money and community attitude.  A big driver of those three items is test scores.  Test scores are public, parents look at them, school funding can be effected (if they are too low), and teachers really want those scores to be good.  In California, starting 2003/2004, science is tested at the fifth grade.   

As a Business Executive
Every business executive knows what happens when your employees don’t know enough to get the job done properly, and on time:  chaos and waste.  In the technical arenas, staff must not only be able to master the three R’s, but be competent in the specialty – an added challenge. 

When the labor force is short of trained professionals, work can’t get completed, new initiatives are not started, the cost to hire those professionals goes way up, and employees become more transient as higher paying offers tempt them to leave. 

It takes 15 years for an elementary school age child to become a professional, so what we do today will affect our workforce in 2020.  Kid's attitudes and exposure to science when young is a big factor as they think about what they will “be” when they grow up.  If they “hate” science, or consider it “boring”, odds are there will be one less applicant to choose from in 2020. 

As an American
In the USA’s short history, we’ve enjoyed the economic domination of the world.  Most of us take it for granted, and have an expectation of a very high standard of living.  But over the course of history, many different nations have dominated the world, and frankly, they’d like to do it again.  If history is right, no country can dominate forever.  But are we doing what we must to extend or maintain our worldwide economic lead?  Can the 300 million Americans really stay ahead of the six billion humans in the other countries? 

Countries have always traded with each other, and they do now.  But there is something really new afoot:  Worldwide high speed internet.  High speed connections worldwide now allow work teams of professionals in many countries to work together.   They can have video conference meetings easily.  Documents can be shared worldwide.  Knowledge can now be shared globally, in real time. 

With economic leadership depending ever more on knowledge, American companies are looking world-wide for the professionals they need to get the job done.  Since in many cases we don’t have enough qualified people at an affordable salary, they are turning to India and China and other countries.  So citizens of other countries can get great jobs and work with prestigious companies without having to immigrate to the USA. 

Just as the USA spread the fiber optic cabling network that supports high speed internet, the USA is spreading our knowledge base world wide as well.  Naturally, companies based in other countries will begin to hire the people we trained and will compete in the very same industries with American firms. 

You may not like this trend, but its here, and it is happening.  The question is, “How can Americans compete to maintain our economic lead?”  The answer is to keep our citizens better educated and more highly trained (on average) than the other countries.  And while we are fighting for leadership now, the battle in 15 years will be more intense, more critical than now.  So the kids today in elementary school today are critically important to us, since they will be the new crop of American recruits in 2020. 

As a Human
If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer, do you really care what country develops the cure?  If it saves your life, you’ll be thankful.  Curing cancer is just one of the THOUSANDS of really hard problems the world’s scientists and professionals are trying to solve.  But up until recently, companies and researchers only had real time access to the team in their building, or in their country. 

Although the prevalence of the internet levels the playing field and may help diminish the advantage of being an American, it also enables the best and brightest minds – no matter where they are in the world – to work together for progress.   

We need millions of scientists and technical professionals worldwide to:

• Cure diseases
• Make our world safer (cars, less pollution, security etc.)
• Make our lives easier, more enjoyable
• Solve problems like hunger, chronic pain
• Explore the universe
• And more.