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The science role models most students know best are their teachers. But science teachers who are both passionate and prepared are scarce. U.S. high school students have just a 40% chance of studying chemistry with a teacher who majored in the subject, according to a 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences. By contrast, they have a 70% likelihood of studying English with an English major. Often, educators at the elementary level never liked science in the first place. That's in part because science enthusiasts, who start at about $32,000 in a public school teaching job, are lured to careers in the business world. "Corporate America is eating its feed corn," says Wheeler. Women who excel in science today, he says, have career options that weren't open to them in the Sputnik era, a victory for equality but a loss for schools. "Teachers are so frightened of these subjects that they transmit the fear to the children," says former Merck CEO P. Roy Vagelos. "These kids are afraid of science."
A teacher must feel confident in the subject to veer from the rote learning that turns so many students off. At Frick Middle School in Oakland, Calif., science teacher Caleb Cheung turned seventh-graders into inquisitive crime-scene investigators when he introduced a unit last fall on cells and microscopes. Students arrived in class to find an empty birdcage and a ransom note--someone had apparently kidnapped Cheung's pet doves, Herbert and Angel. For the next six weeks, the young detectives analyzed fingerprints, interviewed witnesses and compared hair and fabric samples under microscopes to find the perpetrator.
In Cheung's school district, as in many others across the country, science instruction has been losing out in some grades to math and language arts, the subjects that are currently tested under the federal No Child Left Behind law. U.S. elementary school kids spend an average of just 16 minutes a day on science, and that's dwindling to zero in many schools. "Teachers have reported to us that their principals have walked into their classrooms and said, 'Stop teaching science,'" says Wheeler. Even teachers who are eager and equipped often face daunting curricular goals--U.S. science texts usually cover many more topics than international ones do. "Compared to the rest of the world, we're a mile wide and an inch deep," says Wheeler.