Quantum Science Is Missing From High School Classrooms, and the U.S. Edge May Be at Risk

In 2008, at a teacher development workshop in Canada, a physics teacher heard the term quantum information science for the first time. She knew quantum science as the study of nature's smallest objects, and information science as the study of computers and the internet. What she did not know was that the two had been joined into a new field, often shortened to QIS, that draws on physical science, math, computer science and engineering. She is now arguing, in an opinion essay for The Conversation, that the United States could lose its technological edge if it does not teach the subject, starting in high school.

The field, she writes, sits behind a long list of everyday technology: cellphones, satellites, MRI machines, lasers, cybersecurity and solar technology. She was a physics teacher and had not known this, so she concluded that other teachers did not either, and that K-12 students were almost certainly not learning it. She resolved to teach the concepts in her own classroom and to the teachers she mentors, and then ran into barriers. Few materials exist that high school students can follow. Money and opportunities for teacher professional development in the area are limited. And no state or federal QIS standards exist for schools to follow.

In 2020, with colleagues, she organized a project called Quantum for All to support high school teachers. The National Science Foundation has given it nearly $1 million. Its aim is to make students quantum smart by training K-12 educators to teach QIS.

She offers two arguments for the investment. The first is jobs. The quantum information technology market is projected to be worth $44 billion by 2028, yet one study estimates open positions outnumber qualified applicants by about three to one. Salaries can start around $100,000 for quantum engineers, developers and scientists, and quantum physicists can earn up to $170,000. Students without a foundation in the field may never pursue those careers.

The second is national security. She notes that major U.S. scientific leaps have often followed political investment in efforts deemed critical to security. The space race cost $257 billion over 13 years, and the atomic bomb about $30 billion to $50 billion over four years, both in today's dollars. In 2016, China launched the world's first quantum satellite, and the U.S. government took notice. American military leaders worried China might be close to building "hack proof" communications tools more sophisticated than American designs. The Center for New American Security, a Washington think tank, warned that China's quantum research focus could help it surpass the U.S. as an economic and military superpower.

Congress responded in 2018 with the National Quantum Initiative Act, which aimed to accelerate quantum research and develop a QIS workforce pipeline. The author says it gave no details on how that workforce would be built. In 2020 the National Quantum Network was launched to coordinate K-12 efforts, expand learning tools and help students picture themselves in a quantum career.

The natural place to teach the material would be high school physics, but between 16% and 39% of high school students attend schools where physics is not offered each year. Her team is therefore studying a different training model. Traditional professional development, she says, teaches the teacher rather than preparing the teacher to teach. In her model, fellow science teachers deliver the content, and teachers learn for one week and then teach students at a camp the next, while the material is fresh. Research, she says, shows this beats summer workshops that delay classroom practice. It also lets teachers build confidence with peers. The lessons can be embedded in existing STEM curricula or stand alone.

Sample lessons include levitation, which introduces superconductors and quantum levitation, concepts used in Maglev trains that float on magnets rather than wheels. Others cover cryptography, the coding of information so only the intended receiver can read it, and cybersecurity, the practices that keep information safe in devices and networks.

The team is collecting teacher feedback on lesson effectiveness and student engagement to guide where QIS goes next. If the model works, she says, it could expand nationwide. It may be expensive, given the time teachers need, but she argues that the cost of unprepared students, and of ceding ground to China, could be higher.