Innovators at work and in the classroom
Command Performance
An Aerospace Warrior Has a New Mission:
Teaching STEM to Tots Via the Arts
By Mary Lord
Retired Air Force general and presidential adviser Lester Lyles began his 35-year tour of duty as a propulsion and structures engineer for space-launch vehicles at the apex of the Apollo program. He rose to oversee F-16 avionics, post-Challenger space-launch systems, and the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Office, play golf with members of Congress, and command the $42 billion enterprise at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base responsible for all the service’s research, development, science, and technology.
Since stepping down from the Air Force Materiel Command in 2003, Lyles has served on a number of boards – including the Virginia-based Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts. Which helps explain why the former four-star recently folded his frame into a Washington, D.C., public-school chair on his latest national security mission: teaching preschoolers STEM through music, drama, movement, and painting.
“Everyone is missing early childhood,” Lyles told Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other VIPs gathered in the art room of Brightwood Education Campus, a Wolf Trap STEM/Arts partner where four-year-olds learn estimation by stretching fingers to the sky like dancers and count syllables on a drum. “That’s where you infuse the idea that science, technology, and math are fun, not something to be afraid of.”
Lyles himself never feared STEM as a child. With “a natural interest in understanding how things worked,” he was inspired to pursue engineering by the space race. Neither parent was in a technical field; his mother taught school for a while and his father – “my biggest supporter for having a good education” – never made it past 8th grade.
The early 1960s were a time of big dreams for a District of Columbia native who attended Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Lyles participated in officer training at Howard University, earning his commission and a B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1968, and obtained a master’s in mechanical and nuclear engineering from New Mexico State University. His résumé includes membership on the President’s Commission on U.S. Space Policy – he declined to be drafted as NASA administrator in 2009 – and election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011.
At Wright-Pat, Lyles recognized that to maintain a robust R&D base, enlisting and retaining good people was vital. That meant expanding educational opportunities and offering bonuses. Serving on the Defense Science Board as well as the boards of such high-tech corporations as General Dynamics has kept Lyles’ focus on the future STEM workforce. The National Academies’ pivotal 2007 study, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, galvanized his concern for America’s competitiveness.
Though his interest in early childhood education is relatively new, Lyles, a married father of four, had “been aware of the declining prominence of the United States in STEM curriculums and STEM excellence for several years.” Chairing the education committee of the Wolf Trap Foundation’s board, he witnessed preschool students eagerly learning STEM from teachers paired with performing artists. The approach proved promising enough to receive a $1.15 million, four-year development and dissemination grant from the Department of Education.
Since then, Lyles has spoken around the country about the need for “art, reading – anything to help stimulate an interest in STEM,” as he told a Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition audience in 2011. Kids don’t have to become scientists, technicians, or engineers, but they must become STEM literate or “they’ll be serving fries at McDonald’s,” he warned. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but we may not want it to be the centerpiece of our economy.”
Lyles currently is campaigning to muster support for Wolf Trap’s Early Childhood STEM Learning Through the Arts initiative, promoting it to the NAE, aerospace and defense associations, and the nation’s top education brass. “Receptivity and interest in the program is very high,” he reports, with “more to come” as awareness grows. Wolf Trap partners like Brightwood pre-K teacher Kalpana Kumar Sharma could help him win more hearts and minds. “It’s just like magic,” she told Duncan and the other visitors, explaining how her pupils absorb such abstract engineering concepts as inclined planes or patterns through movement and art. Across the room, a hometown hero nodded approval.
Mary Lord, deputy editor of Prism, is a member of the District of Columbia State Board of Education.
Image Courtesy of © Dayton Business Journal/Francis Igot