I am grateful to the Panel for this opportunity to express my views on a
content area in our schools that is getting short shrift. My background
includes five years of public high school teaching and thirteen years of
college teaching, specifically introductory service courses in physics
and astronomy at a liberal arts college, the College of Charleston. My
students there major in many fields, including visual arts, business,
premed, humanities, languages, and even science. Regardless of major, a
significant portion of these students cannot use a ruler and cannot use
a protractor. They lack a decent feel for the size of common units of
measurements. Yet, these students enter our College with math and verbal
SAT scores averaging about 1250.

Our school children are not being sufficiently and correctly trained on
measurements. They do not receive enough practice in making and using
measurements. Measurement is now taught as an academic topic within
mathematics courses, but seldom employed there or in other courses as a
common, practical tool. Measurement is not a math or science topic; it
is a language that transcends discipline boundaries.

No longer do most students take a course such as shop or home economics
that routinely puts measurements to use. Conversely, due to the pressure
of increasing competition, the price paid for imprecise understanding of
measurement in our nation\'s businesses can be severe. Profit margins
depend on precision in accounting for materials as well as facility in
the use of measurement by its workers. Global competition and increased
dependence on economy of scale demand greater precision and thus greater
measurement skill. We are moving from a "2 mm fit" to a 6 sigma economy.

Our mathematics curriculum has become a kilometer wide and a millimeter
deep. An example of that is the teaching of measurement units. Some
three decades ago, our schools started in earnest to teach all students
to use the metric system, anticipating that in several years our country
would be metricated. Unfortunately, political maneuvering by a few small
groups led to the halting of public metrication leadership by our
government.

Long ago, in 1893 our government threw away its national yard, pound,
gallon, and bushel standards and defined those units in terms of metric
units. In 1988, 95 years later, Congress declared the metric system to
be [the preferred system of measurement]{.underline} in the U.S., and
directed the federal government to finish metricating itself --- while
casting the public adrift to fend for itself.

I draw here from my experience in consulting for industry on the
metrication of their businesses. Driven by competition and contract
demands at home and abroad, industry has continued unevenly toward
metrication. Industry is also hampered by the quality and type of
measurement training that our students are receiving. States, such as
South Carolina, are forced to provide supplemental measurement and
metric training past high school to attract modern factories.

Lacking a strong signal from the federal government\'s various agencies,
schools continue to teach [both]{.underline} the metric system and the
increasingly obsolescent set of units rarely used outside the United
States. The time spent on teaching measurement gets diluted by this
two-pronged approach. Time is wasted on trying to teach conversion
between these units when it would be better spent developing measurement
skills and developing a good feel for metric units by using them in all
school curricula. The best foreign language classes teach conversation
comprehension before they teach translation and we should do the same
when teaching measurements.

Students are quickly confused by this two-pronged approach. I have seen
students pick up a dual-scale ruler and use the inch scale as if it were
a metric scale, for example by counting 13 tick marks past the "4" mark
and calling the measurement 4.13 cm. This was not an isolated instance.
Ironically, with this dual unit training, our students understand and
use the simpler metric system better than they do our old, complicated
units, but even there they do not measure up.

When we first started toward national metrication thirty years ago, 75 %
of the world\'s people were metricated. Today 96 % are metricated and
the remaining 4 % --- we in the U.S. --- are undergoing *de facto*
metrication in the work force as I speak. Olympic Games are now
broadcast in the U.S. in metric units, without "translation". The new
shingles put on my house a month ago were metrically designed, sized,
and built by an American company; our regional GAF plant had
discontinued its non-metric line. My new American-made stove and the
thermostat put in my house last weekend can be set and used in degrees
Celsius --- and I do. Forty-six states now allow metric-only labeling on
the retail goods under state-level jurisdiction.

The U.S. Department of Education needs to exercise leadership and send a
strong message to the states that they should [focus time and
effort]{.underline} by teaching [only]{.underline} the metric system.
Any skills in using other units in their last, vestigial years can be
picked up at home or --- once students firmly understand measurement ---
as a special topic, much as we teach the quaint constructions of
Shakespearian English. The U.S. Department of Education, the National
Academies, and other federal entities need to send a strong message to
oversight organizations for math, English composition, social studies,
art, and foreign languages to get on board and train our students to
make and properly use metric measurements. We need to prepare our
students for the world as it is now and as it will be when they graduate
--- not the world that once existed when their parents graduated.

Thank you for letting me speak.