Group Brings Scientists and Educators Together To Plot Reforms

By Peter West

PASADENA, CALIF.--Alan Lazarus remembers his first attempt at bringing his scientific expertise to bear in a public-school classroom.

In an effort to share with elementary-school teachers the knowledge he had accumulated in a lifetime as a working scientist, Mr. Lazarus, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, brought a simple kit of gears, pulleys, and levers to a local school to demonstrate some rudimentary principles of physics.

But the lesson, he said, "just...