Final Chance for More STEM Ed. Money in '08?

"Dear Speaker Pelosi, Republican Leader Boehner, Chairman Obey, and Ranking Member Lewis:

We are writing in support of including funding in the FY2008 supplemental appropriations bill for federal research and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education that will help stimulate good jobs and economic growth and protect U.S. competitiveness..."

-Letter from 31 Congress members to House leadership, April 17, 2008

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Unsatisfied with the level of STEM-related funding in this year's budget (FY08), 31 members of Congress sent a letter to the House leadership last week requesting additional funding in the upcoming supplemental appropriations bill ("supplemental" because it provides funding in addition to the regular appropriations process). Will the letter work? The jury is still out, for a couple of reasons. First, the President is threatening to veto any supplemental bill that exceeds his $108.1 billion request. Secondly, the Administration is asking Congress to limit the supplemental to war funding, and to hold off on any domestic spending requests until the FY09 appropriations season.

However, that FY09 appropriations season, which would normally begin with Congress sending its spending requests to the President by October, is not looking very promising. As we have noted previously, the Democratic leadership is clearly expecting the President to follow his general approach from last year, and veto any spending bills that exceed his request. The Democratic leadership has responded by claiming that they would wait until the next Administration comes into the White House to deal with the budget if need be. If that is the case, this supplemental appropriations bill may be the last chance for new funding until the next President takes office.

In the above letter, it summarizes the signatories' overall request as follows:

"We empathize with the desire of many of our colleagues and the Administration to keep the supplemental bill focused on spending for the military. However, should the House choose to include additional funding, the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation sorely need an infusion of funds in FY2008 to prevent the permanent loss of hundreds of the nation's best scientists and engineers; leverage past U.S. investments in one-of-a-kind research facilities; restart research critical to American innovation and competitiveness; continue to educate the next generation of scientific talent; and restore our international credibility and commitment to the international fusion experiment, ITER."

The authors then proceed to explain the basic details of their requests for research and STEM education funding. In the section on STEM education, they first note the need for graduate and undergraduate grants and fellowships; they then offer the following description of the need for increased funding for the various STEM teacher programs at NSF:

"In addition, one of the most critical needs within NSF is additional funding for teacher training through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program and the Math and Science Partnership program. Last year, Congress revamped the Noyce program and significantly boosted authorization levels for MSP to ensure that existing and new K-12 STEM teachers across the country have strong content knowledge and effective teaching skills."

That line is then followed by a note that the funding would "send a message to young Americans pursuing--or thinking of pursuing--degrees and careers in science, math, and technology that their nation recognizes how invaluable their knowledge and expertise are to the future security and competitiveness of our nation."

The letter then highlights a similar request that was sent last week to the President with 244 signatories, including the Triangle Coalition and various other businesses, education groups, and trade associations. Finally, the letter comes to a close with the following statement: "[W]e would not be making this request if we did not believe the situation at our nation's laboratories and research universities and the need to improve STEM education warranted immediate attention and supplemental resources." Both the letter from Congress and the letter sent from outside groups to the President are available here, both of which include the full list of signatories for each.

65,000 More H-1B Visas

Last month, Bill Gates came to the Hill to offer his testimony on STEM education and related business issues, such as H-1B Visa limits. His testimony, which we discussed in detail here, was before the House Science and Technology Committee. The day after he testified, committee member Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) proposed the “Innovation Employment Act" (HR 5630), a bill to double the H-1B Visa cap to 130,000 per year. The timing was likely intentional (and understandable) for Rep. Giffords, since Mr. Gates made a consistent case for such an increase during the hearing.

While Giffords’ bill would not require proposals that we have previously written about, such as an increased H-1B Visa fee to fund college scholarships in STEM-related fields, it would make some changes for foreign graduate students in STEM fields. Currently, there is an annual 20,000-person limit on the number of foreign graduate students, in any field, who can remain in the US to work under an H-1B Visa. Rep. Giffords’ bill would remove this cap for those foreign graduate students in STEM fields who receive their graduate degrees from US institutions. However, the 20,000-person annual cap would remain for foreign graduate students who do not receive their graduate degrees in the US.

The Innovation Employment Act was referred to the House Judiciary Committee soon after it was introduced. You can read more about the bill in this PC World article on the subject. Keep track of the bill status, and that of other STEM education-related bills, using our comprehensive "STEM Ed. Bill Database."

Update: A related bill, S 2868, was introduced April 16 that deals with the visa lottery system. As stated in the press release by the sponsor, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), it would establish a "new lottery program that prioritizes visas to applicants with an advance degree in science, technology, engineering or mathematics."

National Standards and the SPEAK Act

As part of our effort to revisit some noteworthy STEM education-related bills of 2007, the following is an overview of the “Standards to Provide Educational Achievement for Kids (SPEAK) Act,” introduced in the beginning of 2007 by Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-MI) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT). We also discuss the related issue of national standards. The House and Senate versions, HR 325 and S 224, are identical, and are summed up well in the extended title shared by the two bills: “To create or adopt, and implement, rigorous and voluntary American education content standards in mathematics and science covering kindergarten through grade 12, to provide for the assessment of student proficiency benchmarked against such standards, and for other purposes.” Our overviews of the bill and the major issue of national standards proposed by the bill are broken into the following three sections:

-Recent Discussions of National Standards

-Major Provisions of the Ehlers-Dodd Bill

-Findings of the Ehlers-Dodd Bill in Regard to National Standards
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Recent Discussions of National Standards

Despite the fact that the Ehlers-Dodd bill was introduced in early 2007, its advocates are still working to keep the idea alive—particularly the overarching issue of national standards in the bill. Just last month, at a House hearing on the NSF budget, Rep. Ehlers discussed the bill, along with the overall idea of national standards, with National Science Board (NSB) Chairman, Dr. Steven Beering. An overview of Dr. Beering’s fairly positive assessment of the viability of national standards is available here, about halfway down our overview of that hearing. The NSB itself worked to bring the idea to the fore in their “National Action Plan for STEM Education,” released in the Fall of last year. Read our coverage of the release and the subsequent Congressional hearing for more details; most House members and witnesses at the hearing shared their support for the plan in general, and national standards specifically, although there were certainly those who disagreed with both. More recently, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a study titled “Nationalize the Schools (...A Little)!”, which advocates for, among other things, national standards. The Ehlers-Dodd bill, NSB’s National Action Plan, and the CAP report all advocate starting the process of nationalization with math and science standards (along with reading, in the case of CAP). (However, some such as the Business Roundtable note that starting with only these subjects could avoid “critical tradeoffs” regarding how much time is spent on other subjects in a given school day.)

Major Provisions of the Ehlers-Dodd Bill

In terms of the Ehlers-Dodd bill, the authors outlined some of the core reasons they are calling for national standards in the first section of the bill. We will list a number of these reasons immediately after a brief overview of the following main three provisions in the bill: creating voluntary national standards in math and science; providing incentives for states to adopt said standards; and adding science to national and state assessments.

Regarding the national standards provision of the bill, the standards would be: voluntary; only for math and science; and targeted at K-12. The standards would be formed and/or adopted by the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent bipartisan group that sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Further, the bill calls for the standards to be: aligned with post-secondary education and workforce needs; “internationally competitive and comparable to the best standards in the world”; and in agreement with NAEP’s “mathematics and science frameworks and achievement levels.” Notably, it also calls for the standards to take into account “scientifically rigorous studies that examine the relationship between the sequences of secondary school-level mathematics and science courses and student achievement.”

There are numerous stipulations written into the bill that call for collaboration with various interested parties, such as: states and other organizations who have already formed standards in math and/or science; research entities; the public; and other stakeholders. Similarly, the bill calls for these interested parties to be part of a review of the standards, once formed, on a ten year basis, at the minimum. This would be done, according to the bill, to ensure that the standards remain internationally competitive and aligned with workforce and higher education needs. The bill also includes requirements that the standards encompass the needs of limited English proficiency students and students who receive assistance under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Given that the standards would be voluntary, the second major provision in the bill seeks to create buy-in for the states by providing incentives for adoption. The main incentive would be a four-year competitive grant to states. Those states would also be granted extensions for the dates by which they would otherwise be required to meet the NCLB proficiency standards. However, the states would not only have to adopt the standards to qualify, they would also have to “align their teacher certification and professional development requirements” with the standards.

The last major provision of the bill would amend the NAEP Authorization Act to “require the Commissioner for Educational Statistics to add science to the mandatory biennial national and state academic achievement assessments of students in grades four, eight, and twelve in reading and mathematics.” A January 2007 press release on the bill by Sen. Dodd is available here, and includes comments from Rep. Ehlers.

Findings of the Ehlers-Dodd Bill in Regard to National Standards

Circling back to the "findings," as they are termed in the bill, regarding the formation of national standards, here is a verbatim list of several from the first part of the bill:

-"Recent international comparisons make clear that students in the United States have significant shortcomings in mathematics and science, yet a high level of scientific and mathematics literacy is essential to societal innovations and advancements."

-"With more than 50 different sets of academic content standards, 50 State academic assessments, and 50 definitions of proficiency [in NCLB], there is great variability in the measures, standards, and benchmarks for academic achievement in mathematics and science."

-"Variation in State standards and the accompanying measures of proficiency make it difficult for parents and teachers to meaningfully gauge how well their children are learning mathematics and science in comparison to their peers internationally or here at home."

-"The disparity in the rigor of standards across States yield test results that tell the public little about how schools are performing and progressing, as States with low standards or low proficiency scores may appear to be doing much better than States with more rigorous standards or higher requirements for proficiency."

-"As a result, the United States' highly mobile student-aged population moves through the Nation's schools gaining widely varying levels of knowledge, skills, and preparedness."

-"To compete, the people of the United States must compare themselves against international benchmarks."

-"Grounded in a real world analysis and international comparisons of what students need to succeed in work and college, rigorous and voluntary core American education content standards will keep the United States economically competitive and ensure that the children of the United States are given the same opportunity to learn to a high standard no matter where they reside."

As a note to readers, the fate of this and other bills can be monitored on our comprehensive "STEM Ed. Bill Database," available here, as well as in the upper left-hand side of this page under “Legislation Tracking Tools.” It includes links to our Legislative News coverage by bill, along with brief descriptions and links for over 40 STEM education-related bills in the 110th Congress.