WHOOSH! (Update: Getting to the Heart of the Conundrum)

Q. & A. With Freeman Hrabowski

By DAVID FIRESTONE

Published: December 10, 2013

Freeman Hrabowski has probably done more to encourage interest in science and math among minority and low-income students than any other educator. As president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Dr. Hrabowski has turned his campus into one of the top sources of African-American postgraduate degrees in science and engineering, and he has helped develop several pioneering scholarship programs to get disadvantaged students interested in the subject and to become teachers in those fields. In 2011, he led a National Academy of Sciences study on increasing minority participation in science and technology, which recommended a series of ways to improve early childhood preparation, stimulate interest among high school students, and make college more affordable. He recently discussed some of those ideas with David Firestone of The New York Times editorial board.

The vast majority of high school graduates say they’re not interested in a career involving math or science. Why is that?

We in America tend to have an attitude that says math and science are not for most people. That comes from how we have prepared teachers. We have a way of looking at kids when they don’t seem excited about the work, or when they seem bored, or it’s taking too long to solve a problem, and the look says this: I’ll help you this year, but this is not really for you. You see math teachers going in with an attitude that says just that. We send that message whether we know it or not. Mothers tell their daughters and we tell kids in a million different ways, you’re not really a math-science person.

So it’s no surprise that students often don’t do well in the course work, which means they won’t be interested in the discipline. They’re not given a strong foundation — even going back to prekindergarten, when you have to develop thinking skills and language skills. There aren’t enough opportunities for kids to develop their curiosity. Too many parents aren’t reading to their children, which really does affect math performance. As a mathematician, one of the points I make is, if you give me a young person who can read well, I can teach her to solve word problems. But they’re not getting those strong reading and math skills through middle school, and then they can’t solve word problems.

How much of this do you think has to do with the way these courses are taught?

So much of it comes down to giving students hands-on experiences in math and science. When teachers can do that, they can make those abstract concepts come to life, so they can see the connection to what happens in real life. Without that, it’s very difficult for the child to get excited about it. And the stronger the math background of the teacher, the greater the probability that she’ll be able to use those kinds of different approaches to reach a variety of students in her classroom. Because people learn in different ways.

And yet the country still isn’t training enough science and math teachers.

We need much better prepared teachers in elementary and middle school. At those levels, typically, teachers don’t have a major in math and science in our country. The president is talking about the importance of funding for teacher training, and we’ve got agencies like the National Science Foundation who are working on it, too. We need elected officials at every level working on ways to give incentives to people to want to become science and math teachers.

One of the things we’re doing is called the Sherman Scholars Program[which gives college scholarships to promising students who agree to teach science, technology, engineering and math courses in Baltimore-area public schools]. We look for students who are very good in math and science and give them the funding and support to prepare to work in challenging schools, and particularly in middle schools. That’s really unusual to have math majors who are going to work with seventh-grade kids.

You’ve also talked a lot about the importance of role models in science and engineering, particularly for minority kids and for girls, who often don’t see themselves reflected in these professions.

Well, here’s a shocking statistic: the percentage of women majoring in computer science in America has gone down by 50 percent in the last decade. Only 18 percent of computer science majors are women, at a time when we need more people in these tech areas than ever. At U.M.B.C., we have a Center for Women in Technology, and those students serve as ambassadors, building community among women.

We need to do that at every level. We need to have kids working together in groups to support each other. You’ve heard of the same idea in Posse groups, the idea of building community at not just the college level, but in high school and middle school. It’s commonplace in athletic teams, but in math and science, we tend to make people feel like they have to compete against each other, and not help each other so much. Because if there’s a curve, they don’t trust each other enough to think they’ll get enough information from the other person, so they don’t give it out.

Even our highest achieving kids who come to U.M.B.C. will say, I don’t want to work in a group, because I don’t need anybody. We don’t teach students that you do need people in problem solving, not just in math and science but across the board. We can be more effective in problem solving when we learn to collaborate, ask good questions, explain with clarity, use the technology, and build that community in an effort to become even more proficient in the work.

It turns out that even a two-year college degree helps people more than many people expected.

That’s exactly right. I don’t think most people realize that almost half the students in higher ed start in community colleges. People of a certain age don’t really know how American, in the best sense of that word, community colleges are. And I’m speaking as the president of a research university. Community colleges often have very close ties with the corporate sector, and they have worked with companies to determine the skills that students need for certain programs.

One of the advantages of Maryland is, we do have elected officials who are investing in education at the state and local levels. People are really working to encourage communication and collaboration among governmental agencies, companies, K-12 schools, community colleges and universities at all those levels. You really need that if educators are going to understand what children need to know.

So many kids, particularly in low-income areas, are never even told what engineering is. How do you expose more minority kids to the potential of those fields?

That’s why engineering companies working with universities, and two-year institutions working with school systems, need to have professionals going into communities to talk about it. Our Maryland Business Roundtable for Education is doing exactly that. Its goal is to get companies working with universities and K-12 schools to expose kids to the possibilities, by having engineers and professionals of all types, particularly those in tech areas, going into the schools, from urban to suburban to rural areas, and having professionals tell their story. There’s nothing more powerful than hearing an engineer talk about being the first in their family to go to college. Or talking about not doing well at first and then having to really get knocked down and having to get back up.