Perspective: The Quiet Collapse of Science Education Is Happening in Tacoma Classrooms
- Nick Watkins
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
Step into my high school physics classroom this fall, and you’ll see students collecting data with force and motion sensors, sketching models on whiteboards, and engaging in discussions to explain how the world works. This is not usual for classrooms across the country. My hands-on, collaborative learning approach was shaped by a 10-week training course I completed through the American Modeling Teachers Association, funded by federal Title I dollars, in 2023.
But opportunities like that are vanishing.
Due to ongoing underfunding and the recent withholding of Title I funds by the Trump administration, teachers in Washington state districts like Franklin Pierce, Clover Park, and Tacoma are increasingly left to cover professional development, curriculum design, and lab equipment out of pocket. The consequences are quiet but profound.
What gets overlooked in K-12 demographic data is how Asian Americans are aggregated together, even though, when broken down by nationality, there are clear gaps in equitable outcomes. Title I schools disproportionately educate more Southeast Asian Americans, largely coming from Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian backgrounds, as opposed to East Asians. As a result, these groups have access to fewer educational opportunities and programs than their East Asian peers: they likely enter medical fields through technical schools as opposed to universities, and engineering fields through community colleges rather than engineering schools. I see this firsthand as the Asian Student Association advisor at my high school, and how there is a disconnect between what my students want to pursue and the additional hurdles they face in achieving their goals.
Impactful science education relies on adequate time for labs, functional spaces for conducting experiments safely, and quality materials. Without them, the learning experience is reduced to screens and simulations. What should be a lab-based exploration of the natural world becomes a digital substitution. That’s not innovation; it’s survival.
Even in Washington state, where the Next Generation Science Standards emphasize hands-on, inquiry-based learning, science remains one of the least supported and least assessed subjects. While the NSGS is a visionary framework, it takes time, training, and infrastructure to implement well. Too often, science teachers are expected to prepare students for a 21st-century world using 20th-century materials, if they’re lucky.
My students, like any other Washington state high schooler, are required to take at least two “laboratory” credits in high school to graduate. However, there is no requirement that these classes must be done in laboratories. There is no statewide science curriculum; my students are expected to know certain concepts, but parents have no expectations of how these concepts are taught, or roughly how much time should be spent on each topic before their teenagers should be able to grasp them. There is minimal accountability, either; in 2019, Washington state legislators repealed the previous requirement that students pass a science assessment to graduate from high school.
That means the quality of science instruction depends largely on a student’s zip code and the luck of the draw with staffing, and there are few consequences for school districts, administrators, and even politicians who fail our students. Even in my school, one student might launch bottle rockets in a physics unit, while another completes a worksheet on Newton’s Laws without ever touching a spring scale. This inequity is growing, made worse by teacher burnout, split classrooms, and rising class sizes.
There’s a deep irony here: while schools ban cell phones to minimize distraction, they simultaneously place students in front of screens for most of the day. With shrinking budgets, the shift toward using generative AI tools for learning, instead of through real humans and real equipment, will only accelerate. And without thoughtful guidance, these tools often introduce or reinforce misconceptions that are harder to unteach than to prevent. Even when we do receive new funding, the immediate question at the district level is: Which major publisher’s curriculum should we buy? Rarely is the conversation about updating science equipment or restocking lab supplies.
This is not just a K–12 issue. As college costs rise and federal research funding faces cuts, pathways into science are narrowing. Without early, meaningful investment in socioeconomically diverse classrooms like mine, where over two-thirds qualify for free school lunch (and even that is in jeopardy now), we risk losing an entire generation of scientists, engineers, and informed citizens before they ever begin.
Tacoma is a city that values resilience and innovation. But those qualities need to be instilled starting in our public schools. Contact your local and state leaders. Support your local schools with donations, supplies, and time. Attend a school board meeting, vote in school board elections (get to know the candidates who advanced in the August 5th Washington state nonpartisan primary), or even run for a seat in your district. Your voice and actions matter!
Because the future of science doesn’t start in a university lab, it starts in a high school classroom.
