STEM graduation rates show uphill battle with math and science in School District
Students drive their underwater robot through a series of hoops during the 2011 Greater Philadelphia Sea Perch challenge. Photo: GPSPC
This story is part of a series produced by Technically Philly. It is published in support of Teach for America’s 2012 education workshop series Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education. The series will run daily Dec. 5-9.
Updated, Dec. 5, 12:26p: Added total number of students graduating from 2005-2010 period, and total number of District enrollment to compare with STEM results; Corrected Womack’s title at America21 Project.
Last week at Drexel University, public school student teams kicked-off a five-month regional challenge to develop an underwater robot.
Students will prototype and engineer their robots until March of next year, when they’ll compete regionally for a slot at the second annual National Sea Perch Competition in Virginia.
Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education
Application deadline: December 16
Teach for America, in partnership with Technically Philly, will be hosting an invite-only series of education innovation workshops in 2012 intended to inspire the creation of actionable nonprofit and business ventures to impact education. TFA is looking for a cross-industry pool of applicants but is encouraging Philadelphia’s entrepreneurial technology community to get involved. Mention that you saw the workshops on Technically Philly in your application.
At a local level, the competition is intended to show off the talent of students in the School District of Philadelphia and other regional public schools who spend hundreds of extracurricular hours building state-of-the-art robots with the help of dedicated teachers and industry mentors.
Teams gather around an indoor swimming pool, drop remote-controlled robots into the water, and are challenged to perform specific underwater tasks, like stopping the flow of a simulated leaking oil well, or propelling through a series of hoops.
“If people came to one robotics competition, they would be floored that our students do this,” says the District’s STEM Coordinator Kendrick Davis.
Advancing the priorities of math and science initiatives is a focus for Davis and his small team in the District’s division of College Readiness and Accelerated Programs. But the Sea Perch competition is launching at a time of great uncertainty for the school district’s education initiatives related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as STEM.
Despite an aggressive federal push to prepare students for 21st century jobs, the School District’s perceived lagging prioritization of math and science education was amplified this summer by a budget crisis that is tearing down fledgling and disparate STEM efforts, leaving concerned citizens and stakeholders to move outside the system to fix the problem. Without improvement, they say, Philadelphia will have a hard time assembling a 21st century workforce that can rely on math, science and technology skills.
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