We must, therefore, look primarily at the EHR budget for funding that addresses pre-college education. This is where professional educators and scientists are engaged in educational issues. One might think that a substantial fraction of the $816M in EHR would focus on improving pre-collage classroom practice, but that is not the case because there are so many other demands on this money.

There are many programs in EHR that do not improve pre-college classroom learning. $100M of the proposed 07 EHR budget goes to the EPSCoR program to fund states that get below average Federal research funding. Half the states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands participate in EPSCoR, which awards science research projects. None of this money goes for educational purposes, except for the graduate students who participate in the funded research. EPSCoR is included in EHR because it falls under the “human resource development” category, but placing it there misleads Congress and the public about the educational value of this money. As the subsequent analysis shows, this level of funding would go a long way to improving STEM education.

Graduate education gets $161M of the 07 budget, primarily for graduate fellowships. Some of this is supposed to help pre-college education through the GK12 fellowships. While this program may help some science graduate students learn about education, they are of little value to schools.

Of the proposed 07 EHR budget $197M goes to undergraduate education. One of the programs in this division, the ATE program, although focused on two-year colleges, does have some impact on pre-college education in vocational areas, but this impact is small and difficult to sort out, so will be ignored in this analysis.

Another $144M goes to human resource development, which does not address pre-college education. Most of this funding goes to minority serving colleges and universities.

This leaves $215M of the EHR budget in the Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (RoL) program, a new organization that includes two previous groups, focused on learners in and out of school at the pre-college level. This is 26% of the EHR budget and less than 3.6% of the NSF budget.

It is difficult to estimate how much of the RoL funding addresses the central problems in pre-college education: the curriculum and professional development of teachers. Most of the funding is directed to informal education, research on learning, centers that support graduate students, studies, and awards. Many of the funded projects are valuable and high quality, but they are not necessary to improve precollege STEM education.

One way to estimate RoL funding that impacts classroom practice is to look at the current solicitations. The only programs within RoL that address curriculum and professional development are IMD, ITEST, and TPC, which state in their current solicitations that they will award up to  $7M, $20M, and $15M respectively, subject to the availability of funds. This gives a total of up to $42M in awards in FY2006, which is just under 5.2% of the NSF EHR budget and 0.7% of the overall NSF budget.

IMD is the only NSF program to develop new learning materials and plans to spend only $7M in FY2006, which is less than 1% of the EHR budget (0.86%) and about 1/9th of one percent of the total NSF budget. This strikingly low number is consistent with NSF policy, which appears to take the position that new materials are not needed. For instance, in its 2007 request for funding for EHR the NSF said only the following about curriculum development: “K-12 programs focus on funding research on the development of effective S&E instructional materials…” In short, the NSF plans to study the how to develop materials, but does not have the actual development of new materials as a priority.

Seven million dollars is a tiny amount in comparison to the need. For instance, that was the size of the initial award to TERC that resulted in the mathematics Investigations materials for grades 2-6. These materials have been widely praised, are used extensively, and appear to improve student learning (see http://investigations.terc.edu/). An example of the importance of this funding can be seen in Boston where Investigations has been implemented, supported by teacher professional development, and appears to have been responsible for significant gains in elementary math performance citywide.

Educational reform in K12 requires new materials that are supported by professional development for teachers that are closely tied to the content and approach in the materials. It appears that the NSF is currently spending only about $7M for materials and $35M for professional development and there is no direct link between the two. This is inadequate.

An Existence Proof for Reform

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education could be reformed by simply reallocating the current NSF education budget. No huge infusion of new funding is required, just the leadership to change from current policies that are not achieving the desired goal. No huge research effort is needed to find new ways to teach and learn; we already know all that is required to make major improvements. Innovation, not fundamental new knowledge, is needed at each step to integrate ideas from researchers from mathematics, science, and engineering and to incorporate changes in the disciplines and new insights about cognition.

To make this point, I have sketched below a five-year effort to reform secondary STEM education that would require $25M per year for development and, in its later years, $70M per year for professional development. The proposed plan is offered as and existence proof—that is, without claiming that this is the best plan, it provides one feasible plan for a significant part of K12 education. Its importance is less its details than its feasibility; it shows that something very important could be done with available resources.
The proposed plan would develop new curriculum material in math and science for grades 7-12. The materials would have the following characteristics:

• Courses for each grade. There would be course materials for mathematics and science for all students in each of five grades 6-11, and four advanced courses would be generated for grade 12 science students. Engineering topics would be woven into each course.
  
  
• Research-based. The design would incorporate insights from research and best practice. Learning would be contextualized, inquiry-based, hands-on, and adapted to student capacities and understandings.
  
  
• Integrated. Mathematics and science would be tightly integrated and the math/science/engineering topics would be integrated across grades. Grades 9-11 would feature a physics-chemistry-biology sequence.
  
  
• Focused on core concepts. The treatment would make extensive us of computational models and tools to help students learn concepts and avoid getting lost in details and exceptions. Formalism, proofs, and computation would be minimized.
  
  
• Online, free replacement for texts. All materials, assessments, and teacher support would be available free online using the open source and open access models of electronic distribution. This would free schools to use $600M/yr in textbook money for the requisite technology and break the tyranny of state textbook adoption procedures.
  
  
• Tested, revised, and validated. An extensive formative and summative research effort would support revisions and measure student learning gains.
  

The primary development effort could be done for $1M for each of 14 courses, $5M for technology, $3M for research and assessment, and $3M for coordination. Except for the technology, which would be front-loaded, these levels would be maintained for five years while three versions of the materials are developed and tested in increasing numbers of schools.

Starting in year two of the materials development effort, a linked teacher professional development (TPD) effort needs to be launched that can eventually reach all 400K math and science teachers. This effort would also be research-based and, following one of the consistent findings in this area, would be tightly focused on the new materials and classroom practice with these materials.

It is not feasible to provide TPD for every secondary math and science teacher. Instead, a leadership model can be used in which 20K teacher-leaders are provided with extensive training and resources so they can each support, on average, 20 additional teachers. A rich combination of resources in the form of workshops, online courses, guides, and meetings can be provided for these leaders for $3K each per year, or a total that would reach $60M per year. Development, technology, online courses, and evaluation would cost another $10M per year.

Reform in grades K-6 has similar costs, but needs to use a different PDF model because of the larger number of elementary teachers, their turnover, and their multiple disciplinary responsibilities.

This sketch shows that a major STEM reform effort can be undertaken starting at $25M and building up to less than $100M per year. There can be disagreements about the desirability of, for instance, starting at the secondary level, making free materials available, relying on computers, and using a teacher-leader model. These important issues would be interesting to debate, but the point is ANY reform effort that developed exciting, innovative materials and provided opportunities for every teacher to have some professional development, would require about five years of funding that started in the $25M level and built up toward $100M. This level of funding is huge compared to current efforts, but still small compared to the current NSF education budget.

The Importance of Focus

The NSF Education Directorate was eliminated in 1980 and then, as a result of a storm of critical reports culminating in “A Nation at Risk,” was created anew in 1983 with a mission to address K12 education through curriculum and TPD. By starting fresh, the NSF education effort did not have multiple demands on its funding and it was able to concentrate its limited resources on a few large initiatives, such as the Investigations project, which eventually received $12M and became self-sufficient from royalties and fees. Investigations was one of three NSF projects that now dominate elementary mathematics education. A parallel effort was made in elementary science education, with similar results—a few projects that were funded in excess of $10M created exemplary materials that are the best available now. This initial NSF effort in elementary mathematics has been a huge success and we are currently enjoying the results of a successful investment from two decades ago.

An important feature of each of these large elementary projects is that they developed materials that extend over multiple grades. A multi-year curriculum that builds on previous skills and knowledge is far more valuable that a collection of excellent but disjointed material. Thus, the best approach to secondary reform would provide all the materials for multiple grades integrated across grades and STEM content. As the “existence proof” above indicates, this requires larger funding than the elementary projects had. Although the NSF did move from the successful elementary projects to middle and high school, the average funding per project became smaller rather than larger. Predictably, there has not been the same degree of success at the higher grades.

It is important to realize that the STEM education community has limited ability to absorb funding prudently. There are a limited number of professionals and organizations who can manage the creation and assessment of high-quality, innovative, large-scale efforts. The amounts indicated in the “existence proof” are probably the maximum that can be prudently spent nationwide. Large new allocations should not be advocated, because they would be wasteful.

The higher level of funding required for secondary reform creates a management challenge, because there is no single institution with the capacity to produce a comprehensive, integrated secondary math and science curriculum. Different parts of the work would need to be farmed out to groups with particular expertise, but some overall management award would be needed that would ensure that the resulting curriculum was consistent and progressive. Competing for the overall award would expensive and divisive, so the NSF would have to be creative to come up with a system that would engage the best available talent while being fair and economical.

Summary

A reallocation of the billion dollars that the NSF already spends on STEM education is all that is needed to make a significant impact on the most serious problem facing American science education. The reallocations would not be large. An effort starting at 0.4% of the NSF budget (3.1% of the EHR budget) and growing to four times that would start a reform effort that could revolutionize secondary STEM education.

Policy makers need to realize that it is not necessary or desirable to wait for major new funding to undertake STEM education reform. Major change is feasible within the current budget and simply awaits leadership that can re-order priorities and make more strategic use of available funding. The challenge to the NSF is to resist the many vested interests and provide the leadership needed to meet the Nations’ science education crisis.