The American Programmer and the Science Advantage

Back in the early '90s I was a software engineer for a company that made FEA products for the manufacturing, automotive and airline industries. I was fresh out of grad school with no formal software engineering training, but I'd been programming since I was 13 and managed to land a job. I was no great shakes as a programmer (I'm no great shakes at any kind of real engineering, mechanical, chemical or software.) and realized after a few years that I wasn't going to be happy with it. So I moved into a different aspect of development, quality assurance (it turned out I had slightly more talent for this and enjoyed it immensely) where I worked until I moved into management.

Ed Yourdon wrote a book back then called The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, basically saying that America had about 10 years before companies started shipping their software development needs overseas. At the time, it seemed unlikely, but obviously he was right.

Freedman today suggests that the governement may finally have decided that cutting all the science out of the ciriculum may not have have been smart (and may not have producded the army of god-fearing theocrats the policy was intended to generate -Ed).

Fortunately, two senators, Lamar Alexander and Jeff Bingaman, asked the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine to form a bipartisan study group to produce just such a list, which was released on Wednesday in a report called "Rising Above the Gathering Storm."
...
The report's key recommendations? Nothing fancy. Charles Vest, the former president of M.I.T., summed them up: "We need to get back to basic blocking and tackling" - educating more Americans in the skills needed for 21st-century jobs.
Among the top priorities, the report says, should be these:

(1) Annually recruiting 10,000 science and math teachers by awarding four-year merit-based scholarships, to be paid back through five years of K-12 public school teaching. (We have too many unqualified science and math teachers.)
I think this is a good idea. Most (but not all) of the math or science teachers I had were terrible at the subject. They didn't study it in school and were forced to teach it as punishment for whatever political failure was in vouge at the school . I became a scientist in spite of most of them, not becuase of them (with 2 exceptions)

(2) Strengthening the math and science skills of 250,000 other teachers through extracurricular programs.

This is a waste of time. Just fire them.

(3) Creating opportunities and incentives for many more middle school and high school students to take advanced math and science courses, by offering, among other things, $100 mini-scholarships for success in exams, and creating more specialty math-and-science schools.

Incentives are good, although I'm not certain this is the right one. Still, it's a start.

(4) Increasing federal investment in long-term basic research by 10 percent a year over the next seven years.

Again, incentives are good.
(5) Annually providing research grants of $500,000 each, payable over five years, to 200 of America's most outstanding young researchers.

I'm not sure how you will figure out who these people are given the disparate topics.

(6) Creating a new Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Energy Department to support "creative out-of-the-box transformational energy research that industry by itself cannot or will not support and in which risk may be high, but success would provide dramatic benefits for the nation."

A new DARPA would be a great thing.

(7) Granting automatic one-year visa extensions to foreign students in the U.S. who receive doctorates in science, engineering or math so they can seek employment here, and creating 5,000 National Science Foundation-administered graduate fellowships to increase the number of U.S. citizens earning doctoral degrees in fields of "national need." (See the rest at www.nationalacademies.org.)

This is the heart of the problem. It's a little depressing it's last on the list but basically, we've been shipping our knowledge overseas and getting nothing back. I was 3rd in my class in grad school and, compared to the foreign students over in physics, I looked like a high schooler. While my friends and I would moan about doing half a dozen problems out of Jackson's MHD book, the foreign students did them all. And I mean all. If they were professors here, I'd bet my last dollar science and math standards would be on their way up.

The risk is that the US will become the France of the 21st Century. A has-been global power more obsessed with preserving language and former cultural victories and progressing to the 22nd.