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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.

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: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.