So the recently released results from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study-Repeat are profoundly disturbing. These results showed that American eighth-graders were outperformed in math and science by students in more than a dozen nations, including Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Belgium and the Netherlands. France and Germany did not participate in the test but given the track record of German students it is likely that they, too, would have outperformed their American counterparts.

The results are particularly disappointing, says Alvin P. Sanoff, because in recent years one blue ribbon commission after another has issued warnings about the perilous state of science and math education in the nation's schools, yet little has changed. Writing in Prism, the journal of the American Society for Engineering Education, Sanoff notes that engineering educators have long realized that they have a major stake in the quality of science and math teaching at the K-12 level.