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 Bill Destler is president of Rochester Institute of Technology, one of the country’s top career-oriented universities, with 15,500-students from all 50 states and more than 100 foreign countries.
Name: Dr. Bill Destler Title: President, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York Education: Ph.D., applied physics, Cornell University; B.S., applied physics, Stevens Institute of Technology Prior to his RIT post, Destler spent 30 years as an educator and administrator at the University of Maryland at College Park. While engineering school dean there, Destler created the Gemstone Program, a four-year undergraduate course of study in which student teams from all majors design, direct, and conduct research on the interdependence of science and technology with society. Destler described the strengths and weaknesses of incoming freshmen from the U.S. and abroad to HotChalk, and offered some suggestions for improving U.S. K-12 education. 
Q: What are the strengths and weaknesses of incoming freshmen?A: Their most important strength continues to be their creativity and innovation, their interest in doing things differently, their desire to walk a different path than the student next to them. I think that bodes well for the nation’s economic future. An example of that is when we gave entering freshmen design projects, we discovered that virtually every design was different. In many other countries, the designs might have been the same. I consider that a strength. But, we continue to lag behind other parts of the world in the math and science skills in students coming out of our K-12 system. Another area in which we lag is second- and third-language acquisition. There’s been a concern for many years now that somewhere around the fourth grade, our students part company with their European and Asian counterparts in math and science skills. We have yet to see any progress toward addressing that deficiency. Q: How have incoming freshmen changed?A: Overall over the last two decades, the math and writing skills of students coming out of our high schools have declined. We find we have to do remedial work on such things as writing skills. Q: What are the differences in foreign students?A: The international students, interestingly enough, compete very favorably with our domestic students, even though for many of them, English is a second language. Q: What’s behind this?A: The first thing is that we have increasing numbers of urban school districts that don’t graduate half of their high school students. And, of course, that means the students who do graduate are going to school in an environment where failure is more the norm than the exception, and that’s not an atmosphere that promotes academic excellence. The second thing is that we have an increasing number of our K-12 students coming from single-parent families, and that makes it difficult for families to provide a supportive at-home environment for our students. Q: What are your thoughts about improving the situation?A: One thing we could consider is to start training elementary school teachers who would be specialists in science and math education. Right now we have only general elementary education teachers. We could encourage some of our bright young people to enter the teaching profession by making it more financially viable. Q: What advice would you give K-12 students?A: They need to take their schoolwork seriously. They need to choose their friends from a diverse group, so that they will be exposed to the ideas of people of different backgrounds, races, and national origins. I would tell them to take every opportunity they can to improve their communication skills, both oral and written, since that in many ways will determine their success later on. Q: What overall message would you give concerning K-12 education?We have many dedicated and talented people working within the K-12 system. We need to find ways to support them, both socially and financially. We need to back them up when they have to make difficult decisions, such as to keep a kid after class or not to be allowed to play football after school. They don’t get community or parental support for a lot of decisions they have to make.  Sheila Riley is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist. She is also an experienced online editor and ESL curriculum developer, and teaches ESL at City College of San Francisco.
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