Education and Responsibility

I’ve been accused by some of writing posts that are too long - but screw it. This is important. The topic today is education, specifically in the math and sciences. This is an issue that has really irked me for a long time on a personal level, and is something about which I feel very passionately but hadn’t really found my voice. Reading Thomas Friedman’s book The World Is Flat several months back stirred up a lot of feelings long buried under the years of applying advanced math in the financial markets. These feelings were further jarred loose when one of my best friends (himself a very successful hedge fund manager) told me of a new institute (called IDEA) being endowed at the University of Michigan specifically geared towards enhancing teaching and learning methods in math and science education for K-21 students. The goal is to get these people engaged, excited and interested in pursuing college and post-graduate work in these critical areas, and sharing their ideas and passion with K-12 students, who can then pursue advanced degrees in these fields and begin a virtuous cycle of education and advancement. Finally, I opened Saturday’s Wall Street Journal to discover an article on math camps, which I found both interesting and depressing at the same time. So this is the back-drop for this almost certainly too-long post. Abort here if necessary.

Why get so emotional about this issue? Well, I was the kid who always loved numbers, planets and stuff like that. I memorized the 1977 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. It was fun and made for great party conversation (“HOW MUCH did that guy weigh?”). I always added up the check and figured out the tip when my family went out to dinner. I memorized the prices of every item in catalogs. I liked when they had sales so I could calculate the percentage discounts. I also loved astronomy and the physics of the universe. Planets were really cool, as were supernovas, quasars, and nebulae. I could go on but you get the point. Quite simply, my passion for math and science was evident from an early age.

And it was, without question, squashed to smithereens during my school years to the point where I absoutely hated it. Not the material, the classes. I was basically raised in nice upper-middle class suburbs and went to “top” public schools. I must tell you that in all my years of primary and secondary education I had precisely ONE teacher in either math or science who truly cared. Yes, one (and for those who are playing, he was my AP Chemistry teacher at New Trier High School named Mr. Koonz - also affectionately known as “Booby”).

Given my less-than-favorable math and science experience in school, the juxtaposition between a teacher and a great teacher was quite stark. It’s kind of like asking a senior software architect the difference between an engineer and a great engineer. They won’t say the great one is twice as good as the other - they’ll say they are 10 times or perhaps 100 times better. There is a non-linear nature to these problems, and it shows up in spades in teaching. I saw the great but mostly had a lot of the good and not-so-good - and it is clear that we must have great to compete. No discussion. Period. It wasn’t until I emerged after graduate school and entered the world of derivatives that my passion for math was re-kindled. I learned at the side of Rufus Cole, a fantastic mentor and derivatives professional at Citibank who essentially taught me the math of the markets. And once I got it, boy, did I love it. My hope is that others are able to discover and nuture their math passion about 20 years earlier than me.

Think what you may about Thomas Friedman, but he presents a raft of powerful statistics and puts forth several compelling arguments in his book concerning the dire state of primary and secondary school math and science education in the U.S. Rather than re-stating the statistics, I’d rather give you a snippet of his prose out of The World Is Flat that I wish I had written myself:

The sky is not falling today, but it might be in fifteen or twenty years if we don’t change our ways, and all signs are that we are not changing, especially in our public schools. Help is not on the way. The American education system from Kindergarten through twelfth grade is just not stimulating enough young people to want to go into math, science and engineering.

This is powerful stuff. And for those (like me) who have some experience dealing with the brains and depth of talent pool of top computer science and engineering resources in places like China and the Ukraine, you can feel the truth in his statements. Please note that my comment doesn’t even address the massive cost differential between on- and off-shore resources of like quality. And it was his words, coupled with my own personal experiences as an eager but frustrated student and later as an entrepreneur, that made me feel like I needed to do something about this problem. No sooner had this happened than I heard from my hedge fund buddy and fellow Michigan grad about the IDEA program. Let me post a few excerpts from a draft of a white paper the faculty chairs of IDEA have developed:

THE VISION
The IDEA Institute is a proposed collaboration between the School of Education and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA). It will enable the Math and Science factulty & students from LSA to collaborate with faculty & students working in Science and Math education from the School of Education (SOE) on the pressing problems of K-21 teaching and learning.

The Institute will focus on the following:

• Develop and expand training in science and science education for graduate and post-doctoral students that will build the constituency for the multi-generational learning communities that are needed to drive innovation (faculty, post-doctoral and graduate students both in the sciences and science education).

• Fund projects using these talents that will design, test, evaluate, and roll out innovation in science teaching for our own undergraduates in both LSA and SOE, particularly those who wish to pursue K-12 teaching and future faculty careers.

• Liaison and collaborate with the Science Learning Center, the Math Learning Center, and the Undergraduate Science Building to share their knowledge and connect their activities to new programs.

THE VALUE
The IDEA Institute is a single mechanism that will create a way for faculty to improve science education and simultaneously cultivate a new generation of faculty members and pre-college teachers who will be able to design and carry out instruction in unprecedented ways. In addition, this work will contribute to an education research base about college-level teaching and learning. After an initial pilot with its start-up departments, the scope of the IDEA Institute will span all of the departments of science, technology and mathematics, and cover the K-21 continuum.

Now this is what I am talking about, people crossing traditional barriers to address a problem to achieve a greater good. Cutting through bureaucracy and traditional mores is very hard in large organizations, and universities are certainly not exempt. However, even in light of these barriers, the IDEA program is becoming a reality. I am going to put money and time behind this because I believe deeply in its mission and its chances for success. Further, I do believe that we are facing a true economic crisis the proportions of which are hard to conceive of today, and that initiatives such as IDEA can work to address some of the root problems that impacted my (sub-par) math and science education and can help tap into and nurture the math and science potential in kids everywhere.

Finally, what of Saturday’s WSJ article? Here is an excerpt that highlights the key issue I see:

Math camps are multiplying in part because families are seeking an edge in competitive college admissions and worry about the quality of U.S. math instruction. Last summer, parents paid $280 million to send 120,000 children to academic summer camps, with math among the most popular subjects, according to Eduventures, a Boston research firm, which estimates enrollment is climbing 10% a year. Sylvan Learning Centers, the big tutoring company, says participation in summer math programs, including day camp, jumped 23% last year — twice the rate of other subjects.

Clearly a market has emerged to meet an unmet need, that of the exceptional or passionate math student, often between the ages of 10-14. But why is this? Presumably because either the math education in our schools stink or they simply don’t cater to the exceptional and/or passionate math students. I’m sorry, but this just shouldn’t be. It is my hope and belief the programs like IDEA can help to address this clear gap in the marketplace, and that it is our responsibility to take some ownership over this critical issue and do something before it’s too late.