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I believe that one of the responsibilities that professors have
is to, obviously, educate students. What we have seen in the last few years has been that students appear,
at least many of us believe that students appear not to come to universities or colleges as well prepared as they used to be.
This is in a background of many initiatives, the major one in the last few years being No Child Left Behind legislation.
That legislation did a couple of things.
First of all, it focused primarily on reading, writing and mathmatics.
Second of all, it instituted some levels of accountability for schools and school districts.
Unfortunately, what we have seen in our research - this is another type of research that we are involved in -
is that if you look at a state like California, which is incredibly diverse,
and really reflects probably what most of the nation is seeing,
is that most of these initiatives haven't worked.
There were a lot of good intentions, I think no one would argue that we need accountability.
But in the meantime, what we've lost in many of our public schools are arts, and history, and geography
and yes, even science.
It is, I believe, the mission of a research university
to inform the public about what is going on.
And this was research based study.
Now we can take that actual data, we hope, give it back to the public,
and hopefully be involved in the next round of discussions about how to better educate our children in the future.