“AMERICA is in trouble,” says Vernon Ehlers, a Republican representative from Michigan. The problem, thinks Ehlers, lies in the nation’s classrooms: “China and India recognised 20 years ago that the future belonged to nations that educated their children in math and science.”
Now a $33 billion remedy is to be administered over the next three years. On 9 August, President George W. Bush signed legislation to recruit thousands of new teachers, update the science and maths skills of those already in classrooms and help science-orientated kids to launch research careers. It also calls for significant increases to the National Science Foundation’s $4.7 billion annual research budget, although…
