STILLWATER, Okla. — Oklahoma is poised to see significant job growth in high-tech industries, yet lawmakers and educators are struggling to ensure the state has the workforce to support that growth and compete for those jobs in the future.

The National Science Board released its 2012 report on science and engineering indicators last week. The report looks at the relative health of STEM education and industries — an acronym that is shorthand for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

A set of trends occurred in that report: Oklahoma competed well against other states in certain areas, such as the percent of high-technology businesses across the state and the number of newly created high-technology businesses, but Oklahoma regularly scored in the bottom half or quarter of all states in math and science proficiency for fourth and eighth graders as well as various primary and higher education funding measurements.

Oklahoma has recently lured a number of high-paying, high-tech jobs largely in the aerospace and energy industries. Locally, the Stillwater Chamber of Commerce said last week it will target several high-tech “industry clusters.” The idea behind that initiative is to try and create growth in industries that Stillwater benefits from because of Oklahoma State University research and existing private companies — specifically those in sensor research, energy and unmanned systems or vehicles.

Some in those high-tech fields have expressed concerns, however, over whether Oklahoma will have the domestic workforce to keep up with the demand from that growth.



‘Subtle bigotry of low expectations’

Sen. Jim Halligan has heard some of those concerns firsthand. The Stillwater Republican serves on the Senate Education Committee and is the chairman of the Appropriation Subcommittee on Education, and Halligan was the president of OSU and CEO of the OSU System prior to his time in the Legislature.

Representatives from the aerospace company NORDAM, which is based in Tulsa, gave a presentation to a legislative committee recently in which they expressed interest in expanding operations in Oklahoma, Mexico or Singapore, he said.

“The reason NORDAM was before the legislative committee was to say (Oklahoma needs) more engineers and more technical people to compete with other locales,” Halligan said. “They really want to expand in Oklahoma, but they need access to more skilled workers.”

Halligan has long advocated requiring four years of math for high school students, instead of the existing requirements that end at three years, and he has filed another bill to raise the required math Oklahoma students take in an effort to better prepare them for STEM careers. Halligan also regularly describes the state’s low performance in math and science as the result of “the subtle bigotry of low expectations.”

“To me, what that means is we don’t challenge our young people sufficiently to prepare them in these areas of STEM,” he said. “We need to prepare them for the future and not the past.”

The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs last November released data that compared how the average math student from Oklahoma school districts would do if they relocated to either Canada or Singapore. The average student from every school district except Deer Creek Public Schools would drop below the 50th percentile in Canada. No school district cracked the top half in Singapore.

According to the date, the average Stillwater math student would be in the 34th percentile in Canada and the 25th percentile in Singapore.

“The key thing, in my judgment, is to realize that we really can do better,” Halligan said. “Our children haven’t gotten smarter or less intelligent over a period of time.”

The academic scores he saw for Canada were remarkably similar to those in Oklahoma, he said, except in those STEM categories. It is important to keep track of data like this, Halligan said, because Oklahoma will have to compete with Canada and Singapore for those high-tech jobs.  

Oklahoma has a real chance, he said, particularly in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, to expand the economic base from being primarily dependent on the success of oil and natural gas, but it will require some strategic investments in education. Texas has seen a transition over several decades from being solely reliant on oil and gas to having an increasingly diverse economy with a growing tech sector in Dallas. One of the things Halligan said separating Texas was its major investments in top state universities such as Texas A&M and the University of Texas. Lawmakers need to be careful of bills that could potentially undercut higher education funding, he said, particularly in the STEM areas.

State lawmakers have introduced a bill for the 2012 session that would take tuition control away from college regents and give it to the Legislature, something Halligan said he opposes.

“In order to be able to compete in this area, our universities will have to be able to pay competitive salaries,” he said. “What we need to be able to do is attract very good STEM faculty for high quality programs that will produce high quality graduates.”

According to the report from the National Science Board, Oklahoma reduced its per-student funding at its major public research universities by 16 percent from 2002 and 2010. After being adjusted for inflation, that means per-student state funding dropped from $8,448 to $7,093. Oklahoma has gone through difficult financial times recently, Halligan said, and the state should be very cautious about eliminating the state income tax, which could undercut agency funding.

“I’m hopeful our (education) budgets will be flat at the worst,” Halligan said. “We’ve had a very challenging fiscal time in Oklahoma … but there are some strategic investments, such as education, we have to make in order to have a bright future.”



Looking for answers

Julie Thomas oversees the Center for Research on STEM Teaching and Learning at OSU’s College of Education. The center focuses on research that rethinks teaching strategies for STEM education at the college and primary school levels.

The research ranges from looking for ways to encourage interest in underrepresented fields such as geoscience all the way to colleges seeking to understand how elementary education can impact students’ level of interest in pursuing science, math or engineering careers. The College of Education has also recently added a master’s degree and Ph.D. program in science and mathematics education.

The efforts also include multi-institution initiatives such as a grant proposal that partners OSU with the University of Oklahoma and some public school districts, called the Oklahoma Math Teacher Education Partnership. While it is still in the proposal stage, it is designed to improve the preparation of secondary math teachers.

Thomas is also doing research in rural Oklahoma elementary schools to study how instruction in grades three through five affects STEM career trajectory.

“Research shows that by middle school, children have made lasting decisions about math and science,” she said.

One of the biggest hurdles facing educators, Thomas said, is that young students aren’t really sure what a scientist or engineer does.

“We’re looking for strategies to help teachers better connect — not just a love of learning in science and math — but also help teachers understand science and math and know career possibilities,” she said.

Another piece of the puzzle, Thomas said, is finding ways to communicate with parents who don’t know how to introduce STEM role models or how to encourage their kids to think about those possibilities.

“Parents have a huge impact on how kids think about careers.” she said.

Thomas said that children have so many more career possibilities — particularly in the area of math and science — than their parents did, and that can be overwhelming or confusing for kids.

Locally, the center has been involved in an engineering education partnership with Stillwater Middle School. That program involves using OSU faculty and undergraduate students to design engineering experiments that have middle school students build things using math and science.

“We’ve explored a variety of ways to introduce (math and science) and help them understand what engineers do,” Thomas said. “It’s been enormous fun, and we’ve learned a lot about how these middle school kids think about themselves.”

These kinds of projects try to connect research the university does with classroom instruction, she said, because it will take that much collaboration to solve STEM education problems.

She has also written proposals that look for ways to close a potential future gap in educated workers in the aerospace industry, Thomas said. There is a large group of former-military employees who came to Oklahoma to work in aerospace jobs, she said, but a number of those workers are due to retire at approximately the same time.

“There’s a concern that we’re not developing a work force to fill that void,” Thomas said.

One major hurdle for STEM educators is sociological. Statistically, far more male students become interested in math and science careers than female, thus threatening to cut the potential workforce in half.

Surveys from elementary students show that, while girls believe they are just as capable at math or science as their counterparts, boys usually don’t believe the same, she said. That difference in belief can cause discouraging peer pressure, Thomas said.

“If we convince the girls and don’t convince the boys, is that going to last?” she said. “There is no biological difference. It really is a sociological message that girls pick up. What I’m interesting in doing is helping teachers understand the unintentional ways we send different messages to boys than girls.”

It is important to remember teachers are doing their best to educate students in math and science, she said, and Thomas’ personal inspiration is to find ways to help them.

“I just want our kids to be competitive. That’s what drives me as a teacher and a researcher,” she said. “I want to understand how to do a better job (in STEM education) and share that with classroom teachers.”