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History, Equity, and STEM Education

Equity in education is shaped by many factors, including the legacy of historical beliefs, policies, and practices. This chapter provides a brief history of the U.S. education system and of recent initiatives in science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) education. Two important threads run through this chapter. The first is our observation that this system has long been shaped by the belief that education can and should serve a national sociopolitical agenda; this belief is evident in historical and modern-day initiatives alike and has often been the basis of inequity within the system. The second thread is the committee’s conviction that inequity within U.S. education—in the past as well as the present—has not necessarily been an accident but in fact has been a deliberate feature of the system. In this chapter, it is the aim of the committee to provide an overview of the policies, beliefs, practices, and legacies that underpin the current education system, and to trace evidence of these two threads within these areas. This discussion of history provides the context for understanding current policy and practice in the education system, a topic taken up in Chapter 3.

KEY FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF U.S. EDUCATION RELATED TO EQUITY

In order to identify and describe inequity in STEM education in the U.S. education system—one of the committee’s primary tasks—we found that it was first necessary to grapple with its considerable history. While a comprehensive history of inequity in the public education system in the United

States is beyond the scope of our work,¹ in this section, we seek to provide a general sense of the continuing influence of history by looking at some key elements of the education system that produce inequitable outcomes for different groups. This brief history shows how, from the outset, the U.S. educational system has been influenced by the inequities of broader society (see Box 2-1); furthermore, aspects of the system have historically been engineered to produce discriminatory outcomes and maintain an inequitable status quo. Though it can be unsettling to grapple with the evidence that a nation founded upon the principle of “all men are created equal” falls well short of its aspirations, the committee believes that understanding the nation’s problems and identifying their roots are instrumental in the general project of becoming a more perfect union and in our particular goal of making STEM education more equitable.

In the first half of this chapter we highlight the ways that, even from the outset, inequity was present—to the point of being intentionally

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¹ A myriad of richly textured histories exist in the literature to guide readers through the chronology of schooling in the United States (Anderson, 2010; Gutek, 1986; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006; Pulliam & van Patten, 2013; Sadovnik et al., 2016; Webb, 2006).

included—in the U.S. education system via strategies of assimilation, deculturization, exclusion, and segregation that were designed to maintain an inequitable status quo and social order. As we show below, these strategies played out differently at different points in history, in different parts of the country and for different groups of people. The committee hopes that by unpacking specific political and cultural histories of U.S. education as a whole, we can better lay the groundwork for how to position and attend to equity work in STEM education now and into the future.

The Promise and Limitations of Public Education in the United States

The history of education in the United States is in many ways akin to the way a snowflake becomes an avalanche: independent structures and programs and systems have cohered into a somewhat centralized system

involving government at the local, state, and federal levels and organized around dominant political and economic interests at a particular moment in time (Cremin, 1982; Gutek, 1986). This history reveals a pair of competing realities—a promise and a problem within the U.S. education system.

The promise of the system lies in the good that public schools can and do effect. Education in the United States has long been understood as a powerful force for individual and social improvement—a means by which individuals might better themselves and their personal situation while also contributing to the larger-scale improvement of society and the nation. Politically, the education of the individual was seen as an essential component of a thriving democracy. A competing reality, however, is more problematic: the history of the U.S. education system shows that it is also shaped by societal norms that may be racist, sexist, or classist. At times, the public school system has played a key role in perpetuating unequal social structures and maintaining power for elite members of society. Thus, paradoxically, public education in the United States has long been understood as both a way of pulling oneself up and as a means for enforcing a social status quo that is profoundly unequal. This section and those that follow on deculturation and assimilation, exclusion and segregation, and resistance and struggle point to historical moments that bear out this claim and make visible this tension between the promise of betterment and the limitations imposed on that upward trajectory—a tension that has been present in the national education project from the beginning.

In illuminating this tension, the committee does not intend to imply that the equity problems within the U.S. education system are unfixable, nor that STEM education does not have the capacity to lift up, improve, and even liberate students. But we do want to emphasize that different communities interact differently with the U.S. education system, and that these varied experiences are often shaped by the fact that, historically, this system has generally and consistently been aligned with the concerns of wealthy, white men (Cremin, 1982; Gutek, 1986). It is our hope that the following descriptions of historical circumstances where the limitations of the system excluded individuals or groups from the fullness of its promise will provide context for subsequent chapters’ discussions of inequity in the present day. The point here is not that the system is irrecoverably broken; rather, the committee believes that attending to situations where equity problems threatened to eclipse the promise of the U.S. education system is a crucial step toward making it more equitable in the present day.

Early History of Education in the United States

We begin our discussion of the history of the national education project with the founding of the United States. However, we first want to

acknowledge here in the strongest terms that Indigenous communities have from time immemorial educated their youth in both formal and informal capacities. This section centers on colonial and national activity as the foundations of the present educational system, which denies Indigenous sovereignty and excludes Indigenous ways of knowing that persist in the present day; the following sections look in more detail at Indigenous approaches to education and the interaction between these cultures and the U.S. education system.

Early in the colonial period, numerous factors impacted the kinds of education available to children and youth. These influences included, but were not limited to, economies, geography, religion, and traditions. Vestiges of regional differences in education that emerged during the colonial period are still evident today in regional distinctions and disparities. Nuances existed among the colonies, but one commonality cut across them: education was not a right, but a privilege afforded to those who were white, male, and wealthy. From its beginning, then, education in this country was used to establish and maintain white male social dominance, and to support a status quo that assigned power to groups and individuals based on how proximate they are to that white, wealthy, male ideal.

This social order was linked to a concept of civic order. Once the United States gained its independence from Great Britain, political leaders began to understand that true democracy relied on citizens who were able to understand particular political and social issues and so were able to participate in civic life (Kober et al., 2020). Thus, education of the public (though often narrowly defined) was seen as one way to bolster the new democratic republic and was gradually formalized in the years following the founding of the United States (Labaree, 2011).

In the 19th century, a system of common schools—schools that would standardize a free public education experience for all children in the United States—was emerging. Supporters of the common school argued that universal public school would support social cohesion among different groups and educate immigrants and other perceived outsiders to the norms and mores of U.S. society—that education could and should Americanize immigrants (Gutek, 1986). This belief reveals the tension between the promise of the education system to elevate individuals (here, outsiders who through education can become more like the citizens of their adopted country) and the problem, which is that this promise is realized only to the extent that it makes one more like one specific cultural identity (i.e., the white, wealthy, American man) at the expense of other identities and ways of being. We discuss this tension further in the following section.

Though various sectors in American society opposed making education publicly supported, free, and accessible to all children and youth, eventually, proponents of the common school prevailed. In 1830, at the beginning of

the public-school movement, about 55 percent of children aged five to 14 were enrolled in public schools; by 1870, this figure had risen to about 78 percent (Neem, 2017). By 1918, every state in the Union had passed legislation mandating that children attend school through at least the elementary years, cementing a national-level commitment to public education. However, for non-white students, access to schooling would remain segregated and unequal until the latter half of the 20th century.

The curriculum offered by 19th-century common schools varied by region and gradually evolved with changes in society. However, the purposes of education as understood in decades past influenced this curriculum, even across different regions; these shared purposes included the idea that common schools prepared white males of the lower socioeconomic classes to be productive citizens and efficient laborers (e.g., factory workers) whereas white females engaged a domestic curriculum for homemakers (Kaestle & Foner, 1983). Non-white students were consistently excluded from common school systems, and efforts to expand who schools are designed to reach have been met throughout history with varying levels of resistance. Thus, throughout this history, certain groups and communities such as women, Black Americans, Indigenous People, immigrants, impoverished Americans, students with disabilities, and others have had vastly different experiences in their interactions with schools.

The nation’s early history also shows that the creation of public education in the United States was undertaken as a way to facilitate the development of social cohesion across different groups in service of a unified national identity. Narratives around the history of the United States describe a “melting pot” of different cultures homogenizing into one national character in service of a functioning democracy. That homogenization is often cast in a positive light, with the public education system playing a central role in this project. However, not all groups and communities have had their home cultures acknowledged—let alone welcomed or sustained—in U.S. schools. In fact, as discussed in more detail below, the U.S. education system was from its earliest years designed to exclude some communities and to force other communities into participating in dominant cultural practices.

Deculturalization and Assimilation

As noted in the first chapter of this report, the history of education in the United States is replete with examples of how schools have served as the sites of indoctrination and cultural erasure—a truth underlined with particular violence for Indigenous and Black communities. Beginning with the first impulses to support state-sponsored education of non-white, non-wealthy individuals, the U.S. public education system has been understood as a means by which the nation could forcibly transform othered

communities into entities more closely resembling the accepted, dominant paradigm (Labaree, 1997; Tyack, 1974). This forcible transformation has taken two primary forms in education in the United States: assimilation and deculturalization. Assimilation, as defined by Spring (2022), signifies the ways that education in the United States has historically acted to “absorb and integrate cultures into the dominant culture” (p. 8). Deculturalization, however, has a more active connotation, signifying “the educational process of destroying a people’s culture (cultural genocide) and replacing it with a new culture” (Spring, 2022, p. 8). For certain communities, deculturalization is experienced as one of the primary methods and end goals of education in the United States (Spring, 2022, p. 8). To put this another way, U.S. national goals for education are shaped by and in service of efforts to deculturize and forcibly assimilate othered groups. Below, we look briefly at deculturalization strategies that dominate the history of Indigenous peoples in the U.S. education system; assimilation via education as experienced by 19th-century European immigrants to the United States; and language education as a site of assimilation and deculturalization.

In the case of Indigenous communities, formal public education—and STEM education specifically—in the United States was leveraged by the federal government as one of the primary mechanisms by which Indigenous peoples have been subjected to cultural erasure and genocide, beginning with the very first interactions between colonizers and settlers and continuing to this day (Senate Commission on Labor and Public Welfare, 1969). While the explicitness and violence with which assimilation and acculturation has occurred in the history of Indigenous experiences in U.S. public education is widespread, perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon is embodied by the federal Indian boarding school system. Though it is beyond the scope and capacity of this report to offer a comprehensive account of the violence endured by Indigenous people who attended federal boarding schools—much of it undertaken with STEM education as motivating factor—we sketch the context here.

Federally funded boarding schools came into being in the 1870s, as part of the U.S. government’s redoubled efforts to forcibly deculturize Indigenous children—itself a strategy within the larger systematic denial of Indigenous peoples’ right to exist (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006). Prior to this, funding for education for Indigenous students primarily served students in day schools. Under the new model, the United States began an “outing system” in which children were violently removed from their homes and forced into boarding schools rather than being allowed to attend day schools and live at home (Ellis, 2008). This process was designed to sever all ties between children and their Indigenous cultures. Children were stripped of their names and all cultural signifiers, forced to live in squalor and without appropriate health care, and subject to physical, emotional, and

sexual abuse—sometimes resulting in death. This was all done in the name of forcibly deculturizing Indigenous peoples or what has been infamously called “solving the Indian problem” in the United States.

The committee notes that, importantly, this history includes early formations of what we would now recognize as “STEM education”—in particular the technical and vocational skill components of operating agricultural tools and technologies toward particular ends. According to the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report, the vast majority of instructional time in boarding schools was devoted to “industrial work” ranging from all aspects of agriculture to economics (Newland, 2022). The goal of the boarding school system was twofold: indoctrinating children in Western cultural practices (and thus destroying Indigenous ways of life) and extracting forced manual labor from the children in its care. In this way, the origins of scientific and technical education for Indigenous children coincided with, and were premised on, the forced removal of children from their homes and families. Additionally, it is critical to note the ways that STEM education serves, and has served, an agenda of assimilation and deculturization that itself serves U.S. economic and industrial interests.

Another historical moment where we can see the centrality of the U.S. education system to the project of assimilation in service of socionational cohesion is in the experiences of 19th-century immigrants who came from Europe and China in response to the increased demand for labor generated by an industrial and commerce-fueled economy. Education was seen as critical to the growth of industry, which required a more skilled workforce and literate populace. Additionally, as noted above, much of this immigration fueled the development of the common school in the name of achieving social cohesion in service of maintaining the existing social order. The existent U.S. citizenry—particularly the English-speaking, middle- and upper-class Protestants—called for the Americanization of these new immigrants (Gutek, 1986). That is, they believed the continuation of the nation depended upon the new ethnic immigrants adopting the worldviews, embracing the norms, and taking up the values and beliefs dominant in society. Political leaders at the time believed the stability of the republic relied upon an educated white citizenry and deemed the common school as an instrument in assimilating outsiders (Kaestle & Foner, 1983).

This pressure to assimilate and Americanize took the form of discrimination against new immigrants. Though treated considerably better than Black and Indigenous communities at the time, the new immigrants experienced negative stereotyping, segregation, harassment, and systemic discrimination in employment, housing, and in other sectors of public life (Ignatiev, 1995; Roediger, 2007). They were subjected to unsafe, unsanitary, and overcrowded conditions in both living quarters and workplaces. In turn, the new immigrants wanted and expected to be treated humanely and

with dignity; to be protected from abuses, those occurring in the workplace and in other public spheres; and to be free to pursue and attain the life currently restricted to the middle and upper classes—in short, to secure better futures for themselves and their children. Assimilation was often seen as one way to escape such discrimination and achieve such goals.

Education was understood by both the working immigrant class and the white ruling class as a viable path to assimilation. While they resisted the pressure of political leaders to use common schools to erase their cultures, languages, mores, etc., the (European) immigrants of the 1830s and 1840s and their working-class contemporaries likewise viewed the common school as a means for social and economic mobility (Ramsey, 2018). They began to mobilize in organized and strategic ways (e.g., nascent stages of labor unions) to leverage education toward better futures for their children and youth.

Finally, one area where the U.S. education system has, from its beginning, been used to enact agendas of assimilation, discrimination, and deculturalization is that of language and language learning. Even though the United States does not have an official language, throughout its history, there has been an expectation and at times a demand that everyone must learn and understand English (Bybee et al., 2014; Gándara & Escamilla, 2016). This emphasis on English language learning has at times taken the form of cultural erasure enacted under the guise of education.

Non-white communities, in particular, were consistently taught that their languages were not valued or acceptable in the United States (Bybee et al., 2014), and efforts to obliterate these other languages were undertaken within and beyond the education system. This is clearly seen with the censure and erasure of languages spoken among Indigenous and enslaved Black people. Similarly, policies and practices sought to effect linguistic erasure in the American West following the Mexican American War, where Mexican people living on land taken by the United States suddenly found themselves having to abide by new laws and faced pressure to learn a new language instead of their native Spanish. Eventually, the children in these communities were placed in “Mexican schools,” where they received instruction only in English.

White immigrants from many European countries in the 19th century sometimes experienced discrimination when speaking languages other than English, but many immigrant communities—especially those who spoke French, German, and Dutch—were able to establish schools where students could receive instruction in their native language and also learn English (Gándara & Escamila, 2016; a key difference from “Mexican schools”). However, in the early 20th century, in response to another mass influx of immigrants from European countries, many states began to establish laws designating English as the only language that could be used for instruction

in schools. This led to the closure of many of these bilingual schools (Bybee et al., 2014; Gándara & Escamilla, 2016). In the current era, the No Child Left Behind Act (2001; NCLB) required schools to ensure that English instruction for English learners set up students to succeed in all school subjects (not just English language learning), and to adopt standards that would lead to a rise in English language proficiency (NASEM, 2018). While it may appear that under this rubric, students have more opportunities to learn English within a balanced curriculum and thus gain the language skills they need to succeed in school and beyond, there are still instances where some states are enacting policies that follow the bare minimum for the established federal policies and thus fall short of adequately serving English language learners—whether by neglecting proper English language education or by focusing on it at the expense of other content.

Exclusion and Segregation

In the previous section, we described the imposition of dominant, white cultural practices on non-white populations as a central feature of the history of education in the United States. In this section, we briefly discuss ways that education has served as a tool of exclusion and oppression in order to prevent some communities from acquiring power and resources.

For Black Americans, inequity in education manifested first as outright exclusion in informal and formal prohibitions to education: until the mid-1850s (before the emergence and institutionalization of common schools), education for Black Americans was outlawed in much of the United States. Around the middle of the 19th century, as those concerned about the stability of the nation and the continuation of the republic promoted and implemented the common school, regions, states, and municipalities acted to limit the benefits of common schools for Black Americans (Anderson, 1988; Douglas, 2005; Du Bois & Gill, 1912; Span, 2005; Tyack, 1974; Tyack & Lowe, 1986; Woodson, 1919). Thus, in the common school era, outright exclusion morphed into segregation, a less comprehensive form of exclusion strategically focused on the kinds and quality of opportunities accessible to Black Americans (Anderson, 1988; Butchart, 1980; Douglas, 2005; Du Bois & Gill, 1912; Litwack, 1965; Moss, 2009; Rasmussen, 2010). Throughout this time, the segregated schools serving Black children and youth were severely under-resourced (Ashmore, 1954; Bullock, 1967; Du Bois & Gill, 1912; Pierce et al, 1955).

In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court declared segregated schools by law unconstitutional. Despite this, the myth of “separate but equal” and the reality of “separate and unequal” education has remained prevalent throughout U.S. history: schools today are in fact

more segregated now than they have been at any other time in history as a consequence of de facto segregation (e.g., residential segregation in concert with polity’s determination of school district boundaries).

Women, too, were systematically denied STEM education opportunities for the sake of preserving the status quo. Throughout U.S. history, women were regarded both by law and in practice as “less than” their male counterparts and thus received a vastly different education. In early America, education for women was limited to skills necessary to run a household and training in proper social behavior. STEM learning opportunities for women were further limited by social status: only wealthy, white women were allowed to receive some type of academic education.

Over time, the purpose of women’s education expanded to include teacher training. Notably, because of this, some of the subject areas that women were allowed to study were science related; in the early 19th century, courses for women included physics, astronomy, and chemistry. By contrast, men were encouraged to study Latin and other subjects pertaining to leadership (Tolley, 2003). It was not until the 1920s that men began to study scientific disciplines, pushing women toward studying the humanities. Women did not stop studying science, however, and were instead separated from men to learn “science content [that catered] to the presumed life goals of [their gender]” (Tolley, 2003, p. 163). Further, women experienced discriminatory practices in the types of courses they were allowed to take: for example, young Black women were often required to take home economics in higher numbers than their white counterparts, and were not allowed to study other subjects like science and mathematics (Tolley, 2003). These exclusionary practices have contributed over time to uneven representation in the STEM disciplines and will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.

Resistance and Struggle to Realize the Promise of Education

While public education has often been the site of cultural erasure and violence, schools have also been places created by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities as sites of activism, humanization, and liberation. In this section, we briefly describe how STEM education has been used as part of some resistance movements. Black Americans have long used education as a primary pathway to treatment as human beings and full citizenship with the privileges and rights they have long been denied, and as a vehicle of social mobility for gaining access to the political and economic spheres from which they have been deliberately excluded. As such, Black Americans have always undertaken efforts to educate themselves, despite huge barriers—including the education of Black people being deemed a criminal act; usurping of Black communities’ resources (e.g., free

and forced labor, diversion of taxes to support schools that prohibited the attendance of Black children and youth); and coercive subjection of Black students to an inferior education. In times when slavery and segregation were legal, Black Americans engaged in clandestine activities, with risk of death and bodily harm, to learn to read and write, markers of citizenship. U.S. educational history is full of examples of Black people’s efforts to subvert the deculturizing and dehumanizing aims of mainstream education, including the acts of marginalization and exclusion, by garnering and utilizing the limited resources available to establish, staff, and support their own schools (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 1995; Trafzer et al., 2006; Woodson, 1915). In fact, such endeavors were so extensive that some scholars credit them with the establishment of the public school system in the South (Anderson, 1988; Woodson, 1919). Throughout this history, Black leaders pushed back the pressure to educate solely for the sake of developing laborers, and would, instead, adopt curricula grounded in the classics of the white Western canon—that is, a traditional education historically reserved for the governing class (Anderson, 1988; Bond, 1934; Du Bois, 1903; Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 1995; Watkins, 2001).

One example of resistance in public education undertaken by Black Americans is the Freedom Schools movement, initiated in 1964 as a mechanism to provide Black Americans with supplemental education and as a direct rebuke to the under-resourced, still-segregated public schooling system of the American South. Freedom Schools became an organizing hub not only for ensuring that Black students had access to the political and cultural histories of Black Americans, but also for building capacity for political resistance within Black communities.

The legal system was also an important vector for resistance, as can be seen in cases brought by Chinese American families and Mexican American families in efforts to gain equal access to public education. As early as the 1880s, Chinese American families fought against racial segregation and for equal access to public education when denied enrollment due to their Asian ancestry and when instruction did not serve non-English speaking students (e.g., Lau v. Nichols, 1974; Tape v. Hurley, 1885). Similarly, throughout their long fight for education equity, Mexican American families turned to the legal system to resist segregation in the era of “Mexican schools” (Bybee et al., 2014). In most of these cases, the judgments often went in the favor of families, but appeals made by school districts would ultimately force families into a perpetual back and forth to end segregated education on the basis of race, linguistic ability, and proximity to other schools (Bybee et al., 2014; Donato & Hanson, 2019; Gándara & Escamilla, 2016).

Summary

This brief sketch of the history of U.S. education illustrates clearly the promise and problem of the system: that education in the United States affords a wealth of opportunity to some students and has also been inequitable from the founding of this nation, often by design. Different groups and communities have experienced this inequity differently, as can be seen above. Indeed, there is not one history of education in the United States; there are multiple histories that reveal the different ways that different groups have been impacted by the public education system. These different histories are linked by common strategies deployed within the system (e.g., forced assimilation, exclusion, segregation); and they share, too, the work of struggle and resistance undertaken by individuals and groups to realize the promise of education. Understanding these different histories is critical to addressing inequity in the present and into the future. In the next section, we narrow our analyses to focus on STEM education; the history of STEM education within the broader history of the U.S. public education system is important to understand in efforts to reckon with and address contemporary inequities in STEM.

BRIEF HISTORY OF STEM EDUCATION

The history of STEM education, nested within this broader history of U.S. public education, reflects both the promise and problem of the system as a whole. As with education as a whole, the disciplines that comprise STEM have long been understood to offer myriad opportunities to better oneself, one’s community, and society at large. Careers related to the STEM disciplines have served as important vehicles for upward economic and social mobility. However, STEM education is also an integral part of the larger system where, as described above, education in general has intentionally been used to advance economic and political goals and maintain social structures that, for the most part, align with the interests of wealthy white men.

As in the U.S. education system writ large, the abundant promise of STEM education has historically not been extended to all people equally, with opportunities for advancement deliberately and systematically withheld from certain groups, including Indigenous peoples, people of color, and women, regardless of their contributions, efforts, and talents. STEM education has been leveraged as a tool for supporting many of the nation’s economic and political goals in ways that have had both positive and negative impacts on people’s lives. As discussed in the first chapter of this report, STEM education has led to the creation of a robust workforce that provides stable incomes for a large population of Americans, as well as

creating the space for important, life-improving innovations. At the same time, approaches and advances in STEM in U.S. education have also been used—sometimes aggressively—to advance economic and political goals and maintain the social and political status quo that, for the most part, aligns with the interests of wealthy white men (Morales-Doyle & Gutstein, 2019; Vakil & Ayers, 2019). As we show in the following sections, this tension is embedded throughout the history of STEM education in the United States with ramifications for the state of STEM education today.

It is important to note, as discussed in Chapter 1, that the acronym “STEM,” and the policy idea it has come to represent, was not used until around 2000. Instead, the individual disciplines of science, mathematics, engineering, technology, and computer science were considered separately, with science and mathematics receiving the main focus in the context of K–12 education. For this reason, in the sections below, we attend to the trajectories of the individual disciplines that constitute STEM.

Early History of Mathematics and Science in the Formal Curriculum

Mathematics has had a place in American education since the colonial period. However, the focus was mainly on arithmetic for the purpose of business and commerce and it was not intended for young children. Also, as reflected in the history of education more broadly, women and non-white men often did not have access to opportunities to learn mathematics at all. Similarly, until the mid-to-late 19th century, science education was unstructured and not part of the formal curriculum with limited access to the large majority of children and youth.

At the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th, with expansion of the common school movement, enrollment in high school increased and a framework for the goals of secondary education was developed by the Committee of Ten in 1893. This framework called for expansion of mathematics to include geometry and algebra. Arithmetic was incorporated into the elementary school curriculum in order to prepare students for these later courses. The emphasis in elementary mathematics was on rote memorization and speed and accuracy with algorithms. The framework also called for all secondary students to take science courses and to participate in laboratory work. In response, there was an effort to specify and standardize the experiments students were expected to conduct.

During the first decades of the 20th century, with the expansion of schooling, there were efforts to standardize the curriculum with increased attention to pedagogy. In both mathematics and science, there were debates about whether teaching should emphasize memorization, speed of calculation, and performance of prescribed experiments, or conceptual

understanding and problem solving. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, most instruction in both mathematics and science emphasized the former. However, with the turn of the century there was a growing push for a different approach. In 1913, the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE) articulated a new direction for general education that emphasized individual fulfillment and individual contribution to society. This direction called for shifts in the approach to instruction. For example, in science education, there was a shift to organizing curricula around questions or problems and away from the formal, prescribed laboratory-based approach advocated by the Committee of Ten. Policymakers hoped this new approach would result in coherent understandings of scientific principles, illuminate the application of science, and connect more directly to students’ life experiences, thus translating into a lifelong ability to solve social problems, which ideally led to better citizens and ultimately, a stronger democracy. These tensions about pedagogical approach and purpose of science and mathematics education are still apparent today.

The Legacy of Sputnik: Curriculum Development and International Competitiveness

The launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, by the Soviet Union precipitated a pivotal shift in U.S. education away from the CRSE’s emphasis on the individual as citizen and toward an understanding of education, and particularly science education, as an integral part of national security. The Russian launch was viewed as evidence that rigor in U.S. schools was sub-par (Ravitch, 2001), and schools were blamed for “endangering the nation’s security by falling behind the Russians in science, mathematics, and engineering” (Ravitch, 2001, p. 43). The launch of Sputnik offered a political opportunity to expand and coordinate federal involvement in public schooling. Furthermore, blaming public schooling for the country’s security shortcomings allowed U.S. leaders to push national initiatives to address defense needs through science, engineering, and mathematics education, at once giving education in these disciplines a more prominent place in the federal agenda (Jolly, 2009) and further cementing the shared cultural understanding that the public education system is a viable means of addressing societal problems. Carl Elliott, a co-author of the federal legislation that would provide money to schools for science and mathematics education, described students as an “underdeveloped resource” (Elliott, 1958, p. 143) in the ongoing effort to beat the Soviets (DeBoer, 1991). Ultimately, the influx of federal money that resulted from this linking of science education and national security came largely via the National Defense Education Act (1958; NDEA) and, in subsequent years, the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In the wake of the Sputnik event, many of the federal investments mentioned above were specifically earmarked for rigorous curriculum development: for the first time in U.S. history, teams of researchers and master teachers were funded to develop, field test, and iterate on high-quality science curriculum (Atkin & Black, 2003). The curriculum development methodology delineated in this post-Sputnik moment would persist through today. At the same time, many stakeholders began to recognize that strong curriculum was useless without high-quality educators. In 1957, the American Association for the Advancement of Science would issue a resolution calling for specialized training specifically for science teachers that would allow for a more robust relationship between pedagogy and subject matter. NDEA and NSF funding streams were dedicated to the creation of summer professional development opportunities for teachers, much of it aligned to the newly created curricular approaches named above (Wissehr et al., 2011). As noted by Wissehr et al. (2020), “Schools could obtain equipment needed to implement the new curriculums at reduced rates through NDEA grants, often with schools paying only 5% of the costs, with the government picking up the other 95 percent. Textbook companies, sensing a lucrative market, partnered with suppliers to develop materials and programs to meet the new demands from school districts. These new programs became big business.” A marketplace for tools for assessing learning aligned to these instructional materials would follow shortly thereafter, instantiating the public/private commercial enterprise that exists to this day.

By the early 1970s the press for development of new curricula in mathematics and science slowed down as the urgency around the need to build a scientific and engineering workforce waned and other national policy issues moved to the forefront. NSF’s role in pushing new curricula into schools was questioned, especially in light of controversy around a junior high school anthropology curriculum, “Man: A Course of Study.” In addition, there was a growing pushback around the pedagogical approaches embodied in the new curricula leading to a call for “back to basics.” With this convergence of factors, federal investment in curriculum development shrank and there was a swing away from pedagogical approaches that emphasized use of real-world contexts and problems as a means of engaging students and back toward textbooks and more traditional approaches.

Standards-Based Reform

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, concerns about the growing economic power of European countries and East Asia, Japan in particular, led to renewed attention to the role of science and mathematics education in maintaining the international competitiveness of the United States. In international assessments of student achievement, American students performed

worse in mathematics and science than students in Japan and several European countries, many of which had national education standards.

Partly in response to these concerns, in 1983 a commission appointed by President Ronald Reagan to assess the quality of U.S. schools released the landmark report A Nation at Risk. Sounding the alarm about the declining state of education, the report offered several proposed recommendations for pushing U.S. schools closer to “excellence.” The report also pointed to the need to expand educational opportunity, asserting, “All, regardless of race or class or economic status, are entitled to a fair chance and to the tools for developing their individual powers of mind and spirit to the utmost. […] America’s position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer” (The National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). There were specific recommendations describing desired outcomes in mathematics, science, and computer science as well as calls for rigorous and measurable standards across school subjects and administration of standardized achievement tests at transition points in schooling.

The release of the report spurred a new wave of federal, state, and local investments in education, ultimately leading to a kind of education reform effort known as standards-based reform. Beginning with the release of the 1991 federal education plan known as America 2000, federal efforts began to sharpen around the development of curricular standards in core academic subjects. The Goals 2000: Educate America Act (1994) provided incentives for states to adopt voluntary academic standards and called for strengthening of mathematics and science education, especially in the early grades. Policy debates around the utility and feasibility of national curricular standards would continue throughout the entirety of the 1990s, with the majority of states taking up the mantle and creating their own standards tailored to their unique contexts. In addition, professional societies in mathematics, science, engineering, and computer science began to develop standards outlining what students should know and be able to do in these disciplines to provide guidance to states.

Standards for Mathematics Education

In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) released the final version of a set of curricular standards in mathematics comprised of general standards for grade bands K–4, 5–8, and 9–12. Building on NCTM-issued direction released earlier in the decade, the standards called for “discovery” approaches to mathematics instruction that prioritized “mental computation” and use of appropriate technology, while moving away from “complex pencil and paper computations,” and “rote memorization of math processes,” among other directions. By 1997,

forty-one states had adopted curricular standards aligned to the NCTM standards, but backlash was swift: critics of the standards, largely represented by parent advocacy groups, opposed instruction in math that veered away from procedural skills. This led to heated, national debate about mathematics curricula and pedagogy.

In 2001, the National Academies (then known as the National Research Council) released a report entitled Adding It Up, which attempted to bridge the conceptual divide raging around math standards. At the same time, however, the passage of the NCLB called on states to demonstrate adequate yearly progress in student achievement in mathematics and literacy on state-level assessments (for more information on NCLB, see later in this chapter). The unintended consequence of this federal-level policy was that in order to avoid being penalized for poor performance, many states quickly cobbled together less stringent sets of standards and assessments that showed higher levels of performance than more rigorous, national-level standardized assessments. This phenomenon began to be known colloquially by many at the time as “the race to the bottom,” prompting concern that students across the country were receiving substandard mathematics education.

In 2010, a coalition led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the Common Core State Standards in mathematics (2010b) and English language arts and literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects (2010a) in order to streamline curricular standards across the country. At the same time, the Obama administration announced the federal education program Race to the Top, which offered states financial incentive to adopt “internationallybenchmarked standards and assessments,” with extra money offered to those states that elected to adopt the Common Core state standards. Despite swift public backlash in the wake of adoption, Common Core standards are still used in 41 U.S. states.

Standards for Science Education

In science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science developed the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (1993), which were based on the 1989 report Science for All Americans, and which outlined the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students should develop in science across kindergarten through 12th grade. The National Academy of Sciences developed a parallel set of standards for K–12 science education, the National Science Education Standards that were released in 1996. This resulted in two different sets of K–12 science standards that states could use as a guide and led to wide variation in science standards across states (NRC, 1996).

In 2012, both to update the standards released in the 1990s and to resolve the issue of two separate sets of national standards, the National

Academies released A Framework for K–12 Science Education. This framework provided consensus recommendations on the science that K–12 students should know and understand which constituted a blueprint for development of standards. Following the release of the document in 2013, a consortium of representatives from 26 states, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Achieve, and the National Academies released the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) based on the direction of the Framework. The NGSS outline three distinct but interrelated dimensions of learning science—crosscutting concepts, science and engineering practices, and disciplinary core ideas—which combine to create performance expectations for students in science from grades K–12. Unlike the Common Core State Standards noted above, states opted into adoption of the NGSS voluntarily without any federal incentive. To date, standards based on the Framework have been adopted by 48 states.

Standards for Engineering and Computer Science

Standards have also been developed in engineering and computer science, though these subjects do not receive as much attention in the K–12 curriculum. The process of developing engineering and technology standards began with the Technology for All project launched by the International Technology Education Association in 1994, which culminated in the Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology in 2000. An update of these standards, Standards for Technological and Engineering Education: The Role of Technology and Engineering in STEM Education, was released in 2020.

In computer science, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) developed a set of standards based on a framework for K–12 computer science that was produced by the Association for Computing Machinery, Code.org, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the Cyber Innovation Center, and the National Math and Science Initiative in collaboration with states, districts, and the computer science education community. These CSTA standards, released in 2017, are designed to introduce the fundamental concepts of computer science to all students beginning at the elementary school level and to encourage schools to offer additional secondary-level computer science courses that will allow interested students to study facets of computer science in more depth.

Standards-based Reform and Equity

Nearly all of the standards documents developed since publication of A Nation at Risk echo the language of that report in emphasizing that

the standards are intended to set a rigorous set of learning goals for “all” students. However, the documents themselves do not address how, in the context of the inequities already present in the system, it will be feasible to ensure that students of all backgrounds have the educational opportunities they need to meet the standards. Some standards documents, such as the NCTM standards and the Framework for K–12 Science Education, refer to equity explicitly; however, any exploration of how the standards outlined might be implemented so as to advance equity is underdeveloped. Furthermore, some scholars critique standards in the STEM subjects because of the heavy emphasis on Western ways of knowing that leads to narrow conceptions of disciplinary knowledge and practice (Rodriguez, 2015; Warren et al., 2020). Without attention to the systemic changes necessary to ensure equity in implementation, the promise of standards-based reform to open opportunity to all students is unlikely to be realized.

CONCLUSIONS

This chapter has examined how the interrelated areas of history and modern policy impact how inequity is enacted in STEM contexts. Just as education generally in the United States has been inequitable from the outset, this review of the history and modern policies of STEM education has demonstrated how inequity is enacted in STEM contexts, whether intentionally or inadvertently. This chapter has sought to describe how STEM education has been deployed in pursuit of specific U.S. goals for education, often with the consequence of cementing inequity. As we describe in this chapter, STEM education has been leveraged in pursuit of supporting the dominant power structure’s various goals and interests over time. In the sketches of U.S. education history and the modern policy landscape, we can see how different communities have had different experience with education generally, and STEM education specifically, in the United States. By describing history through the lens of how different groups have engaged with the U.S. education system, and by describing how modern policy has impacted these groups, we demonstrate the role the system has in maintaining dominant power structure and systems. At the same time, this chapter has also highlighted how STEM education is also the site of tremendous resistance on the part of many different communities.

Conclusion 2-1: From its founding the American educational system has operated to maintain social stratification and access to power and privilege. Although STEM education has been one of many tools used in pursuing these goals, communities have continued to create educational spaces in STEM that cultivate the cultural, social, and emotional wellbeing of their children.

Conclusion 2-2: The pursuit of U.S. economic competitiveness and national security have had a primary influence on the history of STEM education; as a result policymakers and education leaders have historically prioritized policies and programs aimed at development of a STEM workforce.

REFERENCES

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