Recent caucus events highlight importance of STEM ed

On Thursday, the House Diversity and Innovation Caucus held its inaugural event, launching the caucus with a luncheon highlighting the vast underrepresentation of women and racial and ethnic minorities in STEM fields and STEM education programs. At the launch, Congressman Silvestre Reyes, a founding and influential member of the caucus, announced that more than 60 members of congress had joined and pledged their support for programs to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. He pointed out that according to the U.S. Census, 39 percent of the population under the age of 18 is a racial or ethnic minority. Yet, in 2000, only 4.4 percent of the science and engineering jobs were held by African Americans and only 3.4 percent by Hispanics. Women constitute half of the post-secondary students in the nation, but represent little more than one quarter of our science and engineering workforce. Also present at the launch event, organized by the Society of Women Engineers, was Congresswoman Edith Johnson, who passed her first STEM diversity legislation in 1974. She stressed the need to change the culture in underrepresented groups to make STEM jobs more attractive. Rep. Michael Honda followed by encouraging policymakers to disaggregate data to help in forming productive programs. Women constitute a strong majority of African American undergraduate students, but a clear minority of post-graduate students in STEM fields, he pointed out. Programs designed to increase diversity need to be attuned to these facts to be effective.

The goals of the new Diversity and Innovation Caucus are:

• Generate policy ideas for increasing the participation of groups under-represented in the STEM fields;
• Articulate the importance of pro-STEM and pro-innovation policies for groups under-represented in STEM;
• Communicate the importance of promoting diversity in STEM for the achievement of America's innovation and competitiveness goals; and
• Work with Congressional Leadership and relevant committees to ensure that innovation and competitiveness policy is shaped in such a way that it takes advantage of the potential offered by minority communities and by women, groups that are both under-represented in the STEM fields.
  

In a separate event last week, the Senate STEM Education Caucus hosted the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education for a briefing entitled "Preparing STEM Teachers: The Key to Global Competitiveness." The well-attended morning briefing featured a panel of education policy experts, business leaders and exemplary STEM teachers. The panelists presented thoughts on how the congress could legislate improvements in teacher effectiveness. In particular, Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond highlighted a recent report by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future and focused on the need to retain STEM teachers once they're recruited to the field. She suggested service scholarships (as opposed to post-hoc forgivable loans) to cover the cost of high-quality pre-service programs for those who agree to teach in a high-need field or location for at least four years; higher-quality pre-service programs, which have been shown to lead to greater teacher retention; and expanded in-service professional development and mentoring and improved working conditions, all of which have also been shown to encourage greater retention. The panelists presentations are available online, here.