Republicans really are the shame of this nation. I mean, democrats aren't much to look at either, but it always seems that the worst ideas that would only regress our country even further would come from a Republican. Read the e-mail and please consider the national effects of the removal of something as valuable as the National Census.
... particularly the American Community Survey.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
I don't now about you folks, but I use data from the Census Bureau and the ACS all the time in my classes. So, this is a concern.
And for us science educators, there is this ...
“This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation. (I have comments about the irony of this statement, but they are not appropriate for this list.)
“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”
Ach! Another reason for MORE and BETTER science education.
At least the author of the article pointed out that its randomness is what MAKES it scientific.
It is also mandatory (such as it is), so that most of the people selected in the scientific random sampling process return their surveys without additional follow-up (at additional cost), so it is much more cost-effective than the regular census, in which EVERY person has to be counted.
Despite the deep irony deficiency evident in this congressman's statements, the greater concern is that somehow we are not getting the point across of what makes science scientific.
One colleague called this the "Baconian vestige" --- the inductive model in which we collect every scrap of evidence and then try to find a pattern that gives us an idea of causes and processes that produce this array of data. A lot of people still think that this is how all science works; and this most certainly is the folk model of science.
By contrast, the hypotheticodeductive model relies on gathering enough data to generate a hypothesis that makes predictions or produces testable questions that can lead us to a deeper understanding more quickly than waiting until every possible scrap of data is in. It is what allowed the Human Genome Project to complete the sequencing several years ahead of time.
To be scientific, of course, both must rely on known or expected naturalistic cause-and-effect relationships among the variables. And without an explanatory framework that can be tested against the natural world, we just don't have science. Of course, I am preaching to the choir here.
So, sing, Choir! Do you see the new frameworks as getting at this problem? Will the new emphasis on the process of science and the explanatory foundations solve this problem? Will your state exams reflect this emphasis, or will they still be content-based, forcing you to "cover" very specific details that produce a superficial understanding of scientific fields?
There are 2 things that my first-year university students do VERY badly (1) Scientific citation and use of scientific literature; and (2) use the process of science to locate, present, and apply appropriate resources to solving scientific problems (and, unfortunately, a lot of what they remember from high school is not what their teachers intended: for example, dominant alleles are "stronger").
And I know that only a small proportion of high school students is going to make it into my classroom (even with 1300 students a year!). And if those high-schoolers do not get into a classroom like mine, but end up Poli-Sci majors, go on to law school, and then get into Congress ---- Yikes! We get a quote like this one.
Of course, it is easier to deny science if you don't know any.
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