MYTH 23
THAT THE SOVIET LAUNCH OF SPUTNIK CAUSED THE REVAMPING OF AMERICAN SCIENCE EDUCATION
John L. Rudolph
The Soviets’ history-making accomplishment—launching a satellite into orbit—created both paranoia and concern that the Soviets had beaten Americans into space. That concern sparked a much-needed revolution in scientific education in the U.S.
—National Public Radio, September 30, 2007
Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.
—President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 25, 2011
The launch of Sputnik has long been viewed as a singular, catalyzing event in the history of twentieth-century United States of America. In a 2001 book on the subject, freelance nonfiction author Paul Dickson (b. 1939) called it the “Shock of the Century,” which is perhaps a fitting appraisal based on the all-caps headlines that greeted readers opening their newspapers across the country on October 5, 1957, the morning after the launch. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) called the public reaction at the time a “wave of near-hysteria.” The orbiting satellite, without question, generated considerable distress nationwide and woke America from its self-satisfied national slumber in the decade of prosperity following World War II. A central element of that awakening was the realization that the country’s educational system had slid into mediocrity and was no longer able to keep pace with the challenge posed by Soviet educational training. Sputnik’s signals, transmitted at regular intervals overhead, highlighted the flaws in American science education. The Russian satellite, so the story goes, set the country to work fundamentally retooling science teaching in the United States with the aim of ratcheting up disciplinary rigor and scholarly achievement.1
Since then, the event has become a cultural touchstone of sorts, marking a time in the popular imagination when an unexpected external threat successfully prodded the country to action. Leaders have pointed to the historical episode time and again to warn against national complacency and spur a collective aspiration for excellence, particularly of the educational variety. When President Barack Obama (b. 1961) recounted the story of Sputnik in his 2011 State of the Union speech, he was attempting to rekindle a sense of urgency to launch a new period of science education reform. This time the challenge was coming from the economic sphere of China and India, where advances in science and technology education threatened to move those countries past the United States in the global economic race. With reference to that spark from the past, the president sought to ignite a new wave of innovation and emphasis. But how apt is that metaphor? Did the postwar reforms in science education begin in a flash of activity following Sputnik? The historical record on this suggests that they did not.
The retooling of science teaching was well under way prior to the hysteria of Sputnik. The most concrete efforts were the National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored curriculum projects of the 1950s in the common high school subjects of physics, chemistry, and biology. The first of these was the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC), a high school physics project organized by Jerrold Zacharias (1905–1986) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. PSSC got its start with a grant from the NSF in 1956. But the roots of the project went back to meetings of the Science Advisory Committee in the Office of Defense Mobilization in the administration of President Harry Truman (1884–1972). SAC-ODM, as the group was called, had been established in 1951 (with Zacharias as a member) to advise the government on scientific issues related to national defense. Although the first meetings focused primarily on mundane technical matters, national security officials, lamenting the shortage of scientific manpower, attended them on occasion. With the Korean War in full swing and the government investing millions of dollars in scientific research and development, these officials worried aloud about the country’s manpower resources. As Zacharias recalled, “the military would come in and complain that the Russians were getting ahead of us, that we had to do something … getting more engineers, more scientists.” This prompted him to take on the challenge of remaking high school physics, and in the summer of 1956 he pitched his idea for a new physics curriculum to the education director at the NSF—well over a year before Sputnik crossed American skies.2
The Colorado-based Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), established with funds from the NSF in December 1958, was the second of the science-reform projects. By itself, the timing of BSCS might suggest that Sputnik was perhaps responsible for reforming high school biology, if not high school physics. But BSCS, too, had a history that started well before October 4, 1957. As early as 1952, university biologists had begun talking about reorganizing biology teaching in colleges and high schools in meetings of the American Institute of Biological Sciences; in 1954, these same individuals, working under the direction of the National Academy of Science’s Division of Biology and Agriculture, set up a committee to begin exploring the reform of biology education. Over three years the committee, supported by funds from both the NSF and the Rockefeller Foundation, worked on developing curricular materials and resources for high school biology classrooms. These were vetted and revised with the assistance of high school and college biology teachers during a summer workshop at Michigan State University in 1957 and were published the following year.3
Common to these reform projects (including the first of the chemistry projects, which can be traced back to the summer of 1957 as well) was the supportive financial hand of the NSF; thus, it may be instructive to examine its activities in relation to the Sputnik moment. During this time, the NSF itself was a fairly young institution, having been created in 1950. Under its first director, Alan Waterman (1892–1967), the NSF was just feeling its way in the early years. Although Congress had been willing to establish the foundation, it was reluctant to provide much in the way of resources. Using taxpayer dollars for “pure research” that might not have any practical payoff (which was the NSF’s primary mission) was never an easy sell on Capitol Hill. Thus, to stay in the good graces of Congress, Waterman avoided ventures that might invite scrutiny or controversy. This was especially true when it came to education, a topic rife with controversy in the early 1950s.4
Politicians, educators, and administration officials frequently clashed over a range of school issues. At the heart of these was the question of what role the federal government should assume in an enterprise long controlled by local districts. Many local officials and teacher groups called for federal money to ease the crushing burden of skyrocketing enrollments brought on by the baby boom, which created a need for thousands of new buildings and more teachers to staff them. But providing relief was no easy matter. Federal involvement in local school affairs was complicated by segregation practices in the South and the equally pressing needs of parochial schools. Federal dollars would likely come with strings attached, and those strings, many believed, had the potential to pull apart many long-standing local customs. Issues of religion and race in particular had repeatedly stalled congressional efforts to provide aid.5
Nevertheless, Congress had devoted a small but explicit part of the NSF’s mission to promote education in the sciences. Given the political minefield that lay before it, the NSF limited its education offerings to colleges, steering clear of direct involvement with the lower schools. At the college level, the NSF funneled the lion’s share of its educational resources to graduate fellowships for scientists in training. Officials in the education division, however, recognized the need to promote better teaching at the beginning of the pipeline. In the summer of 1952, NSF officials began planning a small summer-institute program that would bring high school science teachers up to date in the latest disciplinary content in their fields. The idea was to target practicing teachers directly—during their summers off—in order to avoid becoming entangled in school-funding or curriculum issues. These summer institutes were modeled after a series of summer teacher-training programs offered as early as 1945 by General Electric, which had been a leader in seeking to improve science teaching. These efforts reflected the scientific manpower concerns voiced perennially throughout the later 1940s and 1950s.6
The NSF’s deliberately cautious approach to reforming science education, however, was cast aside rather dramatically in 1956, when Congress suddenly increased its education budget to over $10 million in one year—an eightfold increase from the previous year. The funds were allocated in an effort to push the agency to support more radical reform. But it wasn’t the launch of Sputnik that prompted this extraordinary surge in funding. It was, rather, the publication in the previous year of a somewhat modest report on the Soviet educational system prepared by a young doctoral student at Harvard University’s Russian Research Center, Nicholas DeWitt (1923–1995).7
DeWitt’s report, Soviet Professional Manpower: Its Education, Training, and Supply, was the culmination of research into this topic that DeWitt had begun as early as the spring of 1952. When it came out in the summer of 1955, it quickly caught the attention of Texas representative Albert Thomas (1898–1966), who chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Independent Offices (the committee that controlled the NSF’s budget). The subcommittee members, like many other U.S. politicians, had long been skeptical of federal involvement in education. However, DeWitt’s report, perhaps combined with the fact that the Soviet Union had successfully detonated a deliverable hydrogen bomb in November 1955, seemed to turn the tide. At the House subcommittee hearings in January 1956, Thomas acknowledged the source of his conversion: “This little book, Soviet Professional Manpower, I read word for word … and after reading it I completely reversed my thinking.” Russia’s focus on high school science teaching, he exclaimed, “is the most alarming thing that I can imagine.… Lord help us if they ever reach the point where they are ahead of us.” Following these hearings, the NSF found itself with $10.9 million to spend on nonfellowship education programs. The next year Sputnik arrived, which was followed by the National Defense Education Act in 1958.8
One might argue that these federal-agency and scientist-led efforts to remake American science education existed behind the scenes and were only brought to light and embraced by the public with the shock of the Sputnik launch. But even this overstates the influence of the Russian satellite. There was nothing “behind the scenes” about the drumbeat of criticism the schools endured after the Second World War. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw repeated, scathing critiques of public education, which came out alongside annual media reports of teaching shortages, overflowing school buildings, and inadequate facilities. Every year, it seemed, the crisis got worse. High-profile proposals for reforming science teaching appeared as early as 1945, when the Harvard Red Book report, General Education in a Free Society, was released; curricular reforms were pushed again at the White House Conference on Education ten years later. By the fall of 1957, the fire for changes in science education was already burning steadily; reform was inevitable. Sputnik’s appearance in American skies certainly added fuel to that fire, but contrary to myth, it wasn’t the spark that started it.9