Giving Compass' Take:

• Tara Garcia Mathewson explains that physics classes are a critical building block for a range of STEM disciplines.

• How can funders work to increase the number and types of students exposed to physics classes? 

• Learn how to support STEM education. 

Students in Rosa Sarita’s physics class were working in groups, dragging weighted blocks of wood over different types of surfaces, measuring friction in newtons. These students, all ninth-graders at Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, New Jersey, were seeing that sandpaper creates more friction than a plain wooden surface and using an equation to find out exactly how much more.

Nationwide, ninth-graders don’t usually take physics. In fact, the majority of the nation’s seniors will graduate having never taken physics at all. And Sarita’s students, Spanish-speaking Latinos attending a high-poverty school, are an even unlikelier bunch to catch in a physics lab.

Physics is widely considered to be a building block for a range of STEM disciplines— science, technology, engineering and math — and taking the course in high school is strongly correlated with getting a degree in a STEM field. Educators, policymakers and the general public agree that education in STEM is important. STEM occupations, jobs data show, pay more, and employment in STEM fields has grown at a faster rate than overall job growth.

The majority of the nation’s seniors will graduate having never taken a physics class.

Yet high schools around the country, while encouraging students to go into STEM fields, aren’t fully preparing them to do so. Based on a survey of physics teachers, the American Institute of Physics estimated that just 39 percent of the class of 2013 took even a single physics class in high school. While this didn’t necessarily lock them out of STEM majors in college, it put them at a severe disadvantage.

Read more about the key role of physics classes by Tara Garcia Mathewson at The Hechinger Report.