Don't forget the mathematicians

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University and is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama pledged to help American schools recruit and train 100,000 new science and math teachers over the next 10 years. But he left out the scientists and the mathematicians. Also the economists, the anthropologists, the political scientists and the historians.

That's a big problem. Since the 1980s, scholars in academic fields have largely ceded K-12 schooling to professors of education. If we're serious about improving our schools, we need to bring those scholars back in.

As a professor with one foot in each camp - a history department and an education school - I'm acutely aware that people in the academic disciplines generally dismiss education, and education professors disdain the disciplines. Too many ed schools still work on the myth that you can teach students "methods" of education, without rigorous attention to the fields they'll be instructing. And most scholars still think that anyone who understands a subject can teach it. They're both wrong.

We've all had teachers who didn't know enough about their subjects to instruct it well, and we've also had teachers who knew their material backward and forward, but couldn't communicate it to others.

So besides helping schools hire new teachers in science, math, engineering and technology, as Obama promised on Tuesday, he should also establish special incentives for collaboration between education schools and all the academic fields.

Earlier in his speech, Obama invoked Sputnik, and we can learn from the burst of intellectual energy that followed the Soviet Union's 1957 launching of that first satellite to orbit the Earth. Panicked by the specter of Soviet technological superiority, the federal government plowed money into basic research and education in the sciences. But it also lured scientists themselves into K-12 schooling, where they spearheaded a pedagogical revolution.

Consider the Physical Sciences Study Committee, funded by $6 million from the National Science Foundation. It brought together practicing scientists to reform high school physics instruction. Producing four textbooks and teacher manuals, the committee presented physics not as a "mere body of facts" but as "a continuing process by which men seek to understand the nature of the physical world," as the first textbook explained.

Likewise, the NSF-funded Biological Sciences Curriculum Study galvanized practicing biologists around K-12 instruction, producing three new texts that emphasized "investigative processes" over "authoritative content."

The NSF also funded new curriculum projects in math, chemistry, Earth sciences and more. By 1977, nearly two-thirds of American school districts had adopted at least one of these programs. At one point, 19 million students were enrolled in a course that drew upon an NSF curriculum.

I was one of them. In 1973, when I was in the seventh grade, my science teacher used the NSF-funded physical sciences program. It was the best science course I ever took. In weekly laboratory experiments, I explored volume, mass, solubility and other basic concepts - thanks to the scientists who took breaks from their own labs to develop the curriculum.

It was also thanks to my teacher, who was extraordinarily skilled. Not all teachers had the knowledge he did; indeed, many of them hadn't studied the science they taught. As late as 2004, only one-third of physical science teachers in American middle schools had a major or certification in a physical science.

So it won't be enough just to revise our curricula, like we did before. Instead, we need academic scholars to work with education schools to transform the way that we prepare the next generation of teachers.

In my own subject, for example, too many high school teachers still present history as "the facts" instead of a sustained inquiry and argument about them. That's because they haven't been exposed to the essential inquiry and practice of the field. I couldn't teach you chemistry, but it's not because I don't know enough about teaching. I don't know enough about chemistry: how it generates questions, what counts as an answer, what's left to know.

So by all means, let's invest more federal dollars in education. But let's do it in a way that brings academic scholars into closer cooperation with the people who write our curricula and train our teachers. Let's seize this new "Sputnik moment" - as Obama called it - and get it right this time.