Obama To Announce $240M In New Pledges For STEM Education

An anonymous reader sends word that President Obama is expected to announce more that $240 million in pledges to boost STEM educations at the White House Science Fair today. "President Barack Obama is highlighting private-sector efforts to encourage more students from underrepresented groups to pursue education in science, technology, engineering and math. At the White House Science Fair on Monday, Obama will announce more than $240 million in pledges to boost the study of those fields, known as STEM. This year's fair is focused on diversity. Obama will say the new commitments have brought total financial and material support for these programs to $1 billion. The pledges the president is announcing include a $150 million philanthropic effort to encourage promising early-career scientists to stay on track and a $90 million campaign to expand STEM opportunities to underrepresented youth, such as minorities and girls."

Comments

It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[jellomizer]

I am all for greater education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. However when they put it in a group called STEM, that makes me nervous.
Just like in the 1990's when they decided to teach kids how to use computers. They had a watered down process. In the 1980s while I was in elementary school, when they taught how to use computer they showed the class how to program, in the 1990's when they really pushed computer education, the focus was on how to use Windows, Word, and Excel. When you make it a requirement, it means the class needs to be watered down, so the average student can get an A+ in the class, otherwise, they would be making a class that could hurt their GPA. Where before, it was an elective class, where the student can take the class if they knew they could do in it.

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[hey!]

Endless educational financing is already available.

In what universe would that be?

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[bluefoxlucid]

This does very little to put us on a footing for a post-scarcity society. And we are assuredly on that path right now

No we're not. We have to solve the energy crisis first. That requires a dyson sphere, which will provide 13,000 trillion times the energy we use today.

Molybdenum and Cesium are so rare we make them using inefficient, energy-heavy nuclear fusion. We have the ability to literally turn lead into gold, or dog shit into gold, or gold into platinum, or piss into Strontium-90; it's really fucking expensive, more expensive than just mining a brick of gold, so we don't. It's expensive because of the massive amount of energy required.

With thousands of trillions of times the energy available, we could turn anything into anything else. Automation would be a drop in the bucket: those machines are powered by a minimal amount of energy, but they'd be built with material we made dumping in billion of times as much energy to just turn sand into steel. We'd mine asteroids by turning base materials into fuel oils and hydrogen gas, then converting garbage silica rock and other bullshit that's not nickel-iron into nickel-iron, or oil, or gold, or palladium; we wouldn't need to find a high-ore-content rock to bring down.

That's post-scarcity. So much automated, so much that can just be done by magic, we don't need people doing anything. We'd have multi-level structures running hydroponic gardens for farms, rather than large swaths of arable land; it would take immense amounts of energy and material, but all that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the full power of the sun itself.

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[TwoEyedJack]

I went to a major private university, got an undergraduate in physics, minor in math, and almost got a minor in chemistry too (lacked one class but it was time to graduate). The college of math and science awarded average grades resulting in a GPA a full point lower than the university at large. I never understood how the university could basically state that the students in the college of math and science were a full GPA point stupider than the early childhood education majors.

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[Solandri]

Endless educational financing is already available.

In what universe would that be?

This one. The U.S. tops the world in education spending per student (p. 4, chart B1.1).

The idea that we're not spending enough on education is a myth, manufactured by those who are sucking up the largest chunk of education dollars. If you ever take the time to dig through a school district's budget, you'll find that the biggest single item is administrative overhead. Basically school payroll is top-heavy with too many administrators and managers.

Every time a budget cut is threatened, they make sure the cuts land squarely on classrooms and teachers, creating an artificial financial crisis. That riles up the teachers' unions and PTAs who broadcast the message that we're not spending enough on education. We really are spending more than enough, but from their perspective we aren't because the administrators aren't passing the money through to them. When the tactic works and public pressure forces legislators to increase school budgets, the administrators divert the bulk of it to fattening up their pay (or hiring more administrators), throwing a few token bones to teachers and classrooms (e.g. an iPad for every child in Los Angeles, which was probably a kickback scheme for the administrators who selected which companies got the contract).

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[An Ominous Coward]

The US might spend more on education per student than other nations. But how much of that per student spending is actually spent *on* students? And how much is going to pad administrators' salaries, benefits, and offices?

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[Bengie]

Learning to code, isn't about knowing the silly commands, but training your mind into solving problems by breaking them down into elementary instructions.

I've never met a person who learned to think this way, only people who have always thought this way.Most people will at most learn is the concept, but will rarely actually learn how to think that way. Like any artist, programmers see the world differently. Learning to imitate great painters doesn't make you an artist. A photocopier can do that.

I'm not saying people can't learn to think this way, I'm saying that anyone can be an Olympian, but many do not have the determination that it takes. If you're born with the innate curiosity to want to solve problems, you will devote yourself to breaking down problems, and you will do this all the time for nearly everything, giving you massive amounts of experience from an early age. Then you will get everyone else that gets dropped into a required class and have no real interest. They may have the potential, but unless they start practicing all the time, they will gain almost nothing. When confronted with a problem, people will use what they are most familiar, and unless they exercise their ability to breakdown problems to the point of at least par usefulness to what they've been doing all of their life, they will revert to their own way.

Compared to someone who has been doing this their whole life, everyone else thinks like they grew up in a sensory deprivation tank.

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[cayenne8]

Why not do away with English class after the students have gotten to the point that they can write a good paper and require that students write more papers for other classes like science.

The trouble is...in HS and below, we pretty much no longer fail or hold kids back if they don't learn their subjects. There is a reason so many colleges have so many remedial classes for incoming freshmen...English being one of them.

The lack of skills of many incoming Freshmen is atrocious.

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Endless educational financing is already available.

In what universe would that be?

This one. The U.S. tops the world in education spending per student (p. 4, chart B1.1).

The idea that we're not spending enough on education is a myth, manufactured by those who are sucking up the largest chunk of education dollars. If you ever take the time to dig through a school district's budget, you'll find that the biggest single item is administrative overhead. Basically school payroll is top-heavy with too many administrators and managers.

Every time a budget cut is threatened, they make sure the cuts land squarely on classrooms and teachers, creating an artificial financial crisis. That riles up the teachers' unions and PTAs who broadcast the message that we're not spending enough on education. We really are spending more than enough, but from their perspective we aren't because the administrators aren't passing the money through to them. When the tactic works and public pressure forces legislators to increase school budgets, the administrators divert the bulk of it to fattening up their pay (or hiring more administrators), throwing a few token bones to teachers and classrooms (e.g. an iPad for every child in Los Angeles, which was probably a kickback scheme for the administrators who selected which companies got the contract).

And that very graph you cite is for primary through tertiary [higher] education, not primary through secondary.
To quote from the paper "On average, OECD countries spend nearly twice as much per student at the tertiary level as
at the primary level."

You can't talk about the figures from that paper and talk about school districts in the next paragraph.

I looked up Texas spending per student for public education (primary and secondary) and it was $6000 per student last year, on the level of Czech Republic (for primary through tertiary)

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[hey!]

15,000 per student is not "endless resources". To put it in perspective, it's less than half of what is spent on a student at an elite prep school, which I think is a more reasonable model for what cost-is-no-object education would look like.

But let's agree for the moment that not every student needs to have class sizes of four or five with a PhD instructors. I'd be very happy if every a typical student in Baltimore has $15,000 spent on him. But one thing you apparently didn't learn is the difference between "average" and "median". I pulled one of the elementary school budgets for Baltimore, and found that it was spending about 20% of its total budget on special needs personnel -- speech pathologists, psychologists, special ed instructors. Note that this doesn't include the fraction of regular teacher time taken up by this. So it's not unreasonable to assume that per-pupil spending if you discount the mainstreamed special needs kids would look more like $11,000.

I also note that you chose two of the highest cost places in the country to run a school as representative of the whole. Really, it's expensive to educate kids in NYC? Who'd a thunk it? As long as we're cherry picking, let me in the same spirit of fairness reach into the bag of scrabble tiles and "randomly" pick -- Mississippi. Mississippi spends close to the bottom of states on a per pupil basis, and is at the very bottom of the nation in student achievement.

Let's pick another state at "random" -- oh, look I got Massachusetts. Massachusetts perennially tops the list of states by student achievement by nearly every conceivable measure. But at $14k it's in the top quintile for per student spending . To a certain mentality Mississippi is getting a better deal because it gets away with spending only $7.9k/student. Specifically that's the mentality that isn't alarmed by the fact that almost 2/3 of Mississippi's eighth graders fail to meet minimum standards of proficiency and reading and math.

Here's a fun fact. The same percentage of Massachusetts eight graders score "advanced" by national standards for mathematics as Mississippi students score "proficient" -- 18%. How much would it be worth for the 18% advanced score to be *typical* of states rather than twice the national average? How much do you reckon it would be worth to pay on a per-student basis for the impact that would have on America's long-term economic prospects? Well compared to the national average, Massachusetts spend $3000/student more. That seems like a bargain to me.

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[Penguinisto]

15,000 per student is not "endless resources". To put it in perspective, it's less than half of what is spent on a student at an elite prep school, which I think is a more reasonable model for what cost-is-no-object education would look like.

But let's agree for the moment that not every student needs to have class sizes of four or five with a PhD instructors. I'd be very happy if every a typical student in Baltimore has $15,000 spent on him.

There's one big, fat problem with simply saying "OMG we spend $$$$$ on every student!"

Most schools spend that money nowadays on more than just teachers, facilities, and equipment. In fact, those three are usually the categories which get the scraps. The lion's share of the money goes towards administration, counselors, and most of all, to "specialists" - which is another term for a middle-management make-work position.

30 years ago, a typical large-ish high school (let's say ~2000 students) would have 40-60 general teachers, a vice principal, a principal, a couple of janitors, one or two facilities people, and maybe a small handful (around 10) other staff to handle attendance, records, counseling, etc. So you'd have a ratio of 60 teachers to maybe 25 staff for that school.

Nowadays, you still have 60 general teachers, but now you have 20 special education teachers atop that, about 5-10 ESL teachers, 5-10 special education "specialists", 7-10 counseling staff, 3-5 "curriculum specialists", about 3-4 middle managers that act as layers between the teachers and vice principal, 3-4 teacing specialists (for state testing standards, PSATs, etc) a full HR staff of 10-20, a union steward, a certification/CE specialist (for the teachers), an IT department of sorts with 1-2 people in it, etc etc etc... roughly as many (if not more) staff as you have teachers.

Oh, and did I mention that whoever runs the local school board in a larger town can rake in as much as a typical CEO, often more? For example, the Portland School District Manager in Portland, OR shovels in a salary of around $150k/year, and an additional $75k/yr in bonuses and benefits...

Long story short? Until they clean out the $#@%^! cruft, throwing more money at the problem will only mean more make-work jobs that do approximately nothing for the students, the teachers, equipment, or facilities.

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[hey!]

The US might spend more on education per student than other nations. But how much of that per student spending is actually spent *on* students? And how much is going to pad administrators' salaries, benefits, and offices?

That's easy to figure out. Pull the school system budgets for your town and read them. It's public record and it takes about twenty minutes to get a feel where the money is going. For example my town spends about $1.4 million in central administration salaries, including the IT department and curriculum support services. This is out of total system-wide salaries of $22.5 million. So about 6%. If you go by total expenses central administration takes up about 5.5% of the budget.

Now here's an exercise that'll make you better informed than 99.99% of the people who weigh in on this topic. Find another school system that gets better results than yours and do the same thing. How are they spending money differently from your town?

"Gee it seems like a lot of money to me," is meaningless drivel. What you want to do is compare your town to the best performing towns; or if we're talking about national policy what a typical school system does vs. what the best school systems do. I have no patience with people who parrot complaints about "administrative costs" they've heard on Fox but can't be bothered to find out how their own local tax money is being spent.

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[hey!]

Sorry, I can't argue in the hand waving style of "schools nowadays", I need actual data specific data about real places.

My town administration takes 5.5% of the total budget. In the best performing town in my region, it's about half that, but they pay their teachers 79% more and lay out over $17k/student.

My town's high school has 88 staff positions involved directly with student instruction (teachers, teaching aids, special subject tutors), 2 librarians, 3 janitors, three principals/asisstant principals, 4 guidance counselors, and 4 secretaries. That works out to about 85% of the positions involved in instruction. 74% of the head count is teachers in the traditional sense and 11% offload tasks that teachers would have to do otherwise or provide special content area expertise. So as far as my town is concerned your dystopian scenario is pure fantasy.

I totally agree, by the way: you could save a lot of money by not educating special needs students. From the budgets I've seen it takes up maybe as much as 1/3 of the per pupil expenditures. But is not educating those students something you're actually proposing? Or do you have an idea for doing it more efficiently.

Re:It has an acronym , so it will fail.

[hey!]

I'd be very interested to know which city and state you taught in, and whether you were regular faculty. But I think your approach to reasoning about this is misguided. Rather than taking your experiences in dysfunctional school and generalizing from that, you should be looking at how the top performing schools operate.

Special needs isn't just squirming kids. Despite having lackluster marks, our daughter was screened by the school system as gifted, which in my state is considered "special needs". The school brought in a cognitive psychologist to run an elaborate battery of tests, including a comprehensive neurological assessment. What they found was very specific, narrow deficit: slow processing speed. She was capable of solving complex math problems and generating sophisticated answers to open response questions, but even simple questions took her a long time to answer. So the action plan was to put her on a more challenging course load, but to give her longer time if necessary to complete tests. On top of that we paid for training with an educational psychologist who specializes in learning disabilities. Eighteen months later she no longer required any special accommodations and was near the top of her class.

In a nutshell, all that new-fangled bullshit worked. 30 years ago she'd have been tracked into an easy CP courseload based on her marks, but the school actually put the effort into finding out that what she really needed was to be tracked into honors and AP courses. And the school system manages to do this while spending about the national average per student -- $11,505.

jobs for all these new trainees to fill?

[dciman]

What we really need is jobs for all of these new trains to fill once they graduate. Talk to any recent PhD in the biomedical sciences, engineering, etc, and ask them what they think of the push for greater STEM education efforts. They'll tell you it's basically BS. We can't place the number of graduates we currently have into even remotely well paying, long term, jobs.

Now, we might need more STEM education and training for more technical, lower level, jobs. But of course that's never how these programs are billed. It's not as sexy of a sell to parents and students! Instead we push people to go to graduate school, get a MS or PhD. Then dump them into a market with slashed education funding, so there are few prospects in the university system. Combine that with a large number of foreign applicants for postdoc and technician positions that are willing to work for MUCH less in terms of wages and you've got a disaster. US citizens do have a slight advantage in that most of the NIH/NSF funded pre and postdoc training fellowships/grants are only open to citizens. But, those are so small in number and highly competitive that it doesn't have a large effect.

We need to face the fact that we're really training WAY too many PhDs and even masters graduates in most of the STEM fields right now. It's a vicious cycle though. Profs want lots of PhD students because they are very inexpensive labor. Likewise with postdocs... for their training and amount of work they are expected to do... they are paid much less than minimum wage. Moreover, most profs will kick out postdocs after 2-3 years because of pay raises that some institutions mandate. It's just easier to dump the experienced person and higher in a new 1st year that gets paid 10k less, pump and dump... factory style.

There have been a number of really excellent articles written about this problem over the last few years. Science and Nature have both dedicate page space to the topic. Some suggest forcing researchers funded by NIH/NSF monies to be required to higher long term technicians to their labs and reduce graduate student/postdoc usage. Such actions would start to limit new graduate number, while at the same time providing employment for scientists that aren't interested or can't get a faculty position in academia or don't want to work for industry. A lot of people also think it would help lab productivity, as you'd retain talent and skill sets that were honed over years of work.

"underrepresented youth"

[NotDrWho]

Translation: Sorry poor white boy in Appalachia. Your scholarship is going to a rich girl in Grosse Pointe.

doesn't make sense

[Goldsmith]

There are billions poured into STEM, and encouraging early career scientists through programs at NSF, NIH, DARPA, etc. None of that is working (less than 50% of people trained in science stay in science). When I was still training students, the best of them generally ended up working in finance, not physics. An additional $250 million is not going to make a notable difference. We need a cultural and structural change in how we train and retain good scientists and engineers, not a meaningless bandaid.

Good only if the work is there

[ErichTheRed]

A lot of people will see this as just a handout or lip service, but realistically, what else is there to do? Automation is going to destroy pretty much every service and office job slowly but surely over the next 40 or 50 years. People coming out of school have to do something. The "default choices" used to be that if you didn't go to college or failed at college, you got a trades or service job, and if you graduated, you got some random corporate job. These are the typical jobs we in IT see our customers doing -- some random reporting job or moving numbers around in Excel and emailing the results around, or middle management. Now, automation will be coming for the corporate jobs, and trades are becoming less and less desirable to work in due to low wages and limited to no union protection. So, what's left?

I doubt everyone can be taught enough to be a good STEM worker, but maybe enough can to sustain the rest of the economy. Even having someone who understands enough logic to troubleshoot things pays off in other fields as well. If you focus on core stuff like that, rather than getting everyone to write "Hello, World!" in Python or Ruby, you may have something. Otherwise, I agree, it'll just be a box to check during your high school career and very few people will be interested in pursuing it further.

Re:Good only if the work is there

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

You speak as if people have much of a choice.

Witness scott walker. All he talks about is destroying unions, and workers rights. I'm in Chicago (area) where we have a Democrat (a Democrat in theory) talking about destroying unions. Right to work laws, that in some cases are designed to pull money from unions - the unions can organize, but in effect are starved of funding until they die.

We're working on eliminating near minimum wage jobs. A restaurant needs X waiters/waitstaff to wait on N tables. Lets get tablets to convert X waiters to Y (where Y X) servers. Google car, Uber Car, most driving jobs gone. Watson? a bunch of doctor and lawyer jobs gone. So, you spent 100,000 a year to be a doc or a lawyer, and now can't find work. How you gonna pay for loans? Hell, Watson isn't even fully out, and the lawyer thing is RIGHT NOW.

Tech change is happening on Moore's law time, but people don't work on Moore's law, we work on human generational scales, about 20 years or so. Remember that both the Luddites and the original saboteurs, Les Sabot, weren't protesting tech per se, but tech that destroyed jobs.

Re:Good only if the work is there

[sjames]

There is a choice, but our so-called leaders stand in the way. They have forgotten that the economy exists to serve the people (all of them), not the other way around. They treat the economy as if it was some sort of god.

Meanwhile in Appalachia...

[MikeRT]

The money will almost invariably not go to help Jim Bob in coal country or Tyrone in the hood get a shot at getting the foundation for a STEM career. Instead, it'll go to Sally Middle Class Smith to cajole her into pursuing a career she'll likely leave for marketing or raising kids.

Re:Meanwhile in Appalachia...

[myid]

I'm concerned that the money will be spent in Silicon Valley, because that's where the jobs are. The problem is that a large proportion of the people living in Silicon Valley were not born in the US, and will live in the US only temporarily. If we concentrate the training there, then we'll be training a lot of students who will return to their home countries after a few years.

I'd rather spend the money in areas, like Appalacia, in which a higher proportion of students are Americans.

Here's the problem...

[frank_adrian314159]

We're getting to a point where, due to both science and communication technologies, everyone's flaws and a fuckton of conflicting "facts" can easily be manufactured and disseminated. Power imbalances that could be hidden in the past are now obvious to anyone and a lot of people are asking "Why?" Why does the world have to be like this? Do we really have the shortage of things that economics talks about, or is it that distribution of these things is fucked up? Are the people who are in power actively encouraging and perpetuating dysfunctional behaviors in an attempt to gain more power? Does technology allow us to distribute government control more broadly and still maintain some semblance of a society? In short, all of the questions that we've allowed "professional pundits" and politicians to answer for us in the past.

Right now, economics focuses on "efficiency" more than any other factor.You've reached a post-"economic" age where businesses that hid their externalities in the past can no longer do so. If these costs of externalities are calculated and charged to the companies, many would no longer be profitable causing huge disruptions in the economy. How corporations should pay for these externalities foisted upon us is the seminal question of the age. We used to think that their tax load and benefit in providing employment was sufficient. But now people who run corporations say "we have to avoid taxes". They say "we have to outsource to be competitive. So they pay less, we pay more. Well, until people see the costs of the externalities well enough and feel the pain of their own payments to the corporate behemoth to understand out that the game is rigged. I dread that day, because those in charge seem to be doing everything in their power to steer towards it.

Money spent on research Money spent on STEM Ed

[ranton]

I agree that if we want more people to train for STEM jobs, we need to focus on jobs in that sector not in education. We already have an education system qualified enough to produce STEM graduates. We just don't have enough quality jobs for those graduates, so many of our best and brightest go into law, medicine, finance, etc. instead of STEM fields.

Take that $240 million, plus another $240 billion, and put it into research. Go to Mars, invent better batteries, create DNA specific medical treatments ... the sky really is the limit. By doing this we won't care about just creating new jobs because we will be creating new industries.

People smart enough to work in STEM are usually smart enough to go where the money is as well.

Re:Truth = modded down

[dpidcoe]

Do you consider this amount of money to be so completely unreasonable? To start the discussion, for sure we can agree that this amount is not infinite.

(Also, if you agree with HBI, why would you mod HBI up, and not reverse the mods of the AC?)

ok I'll bite. I won't call any parcitular sum reasonable or unreasonable (mostly because I'm not an analyist and every location is going to have different costs associated with it). That said, there are a lot of situations where school systems pay a very small amount (from memory, isn't utah like 6k per student?), but get significantly better results than places like california and new york that are in the 20k/student range.

Ancidotally, my experience with increased funding to any particular program just means there's increased waste. I was very involved with the computer science program at my commuinity college before transferring (we were trying to make it its own thing instead of tagging along behind the math department). We got a huge influx of funding from some program, but it basically just sat there while we tried to think of things to use it on. We had meetings about how to spend it (which got nowhere because there were all sorts of limitations as to what it could be spent on), we upgraded all the computers in the lab (which were promptly slowed down again after campus IT loaded them up with the required crapware and monitoring), we spent 10k on building a tiny supercomputing cluster (which was promptly unused because we didn't really have anything computationally intensive to run on it), and then we bought the computer club one of the new (at the time) nvidia tesla cards to do CUDA programming on (which never even got setup because campus policy wouldn't allow us in the same room as it without the professor present). Meanwhile, the CS professors continued todraw abnormally low salaries while the campus president voted herself raises (she was well into the high 200k range by the time enough people revolted and threw her out) and the rest of campus services (i.e. internet connectivity, which we relied on to allow students to ssh into the cluster) suffered horribly.

Re:Truth = modded down

[hey!]

You don't have to be an analyst to figure out that the cost of living in New York City is astronomically higher than it is in Utah. A one bedroom apartment in New York City costs an average $2700/month. That same apartment in Salt Lake City would cost $750. A dozen eggs in NYC cost $3.19; in Salt Lake City it's $2.03. If you want to join a gym in Salt Lake, that's about $29/month. In New York it's $86.

So you're drawing the wrong lesson here. Adjusted for its cost of living, Utah spends slightly less than middle-of-the-pack amounts per student and gets slightly better than middle-of-the-pack results. Clearly Utah deserves praise for financial efficiency, but their results could be better.